4 ms·

That's brilliant work, thanks! Imagine if IRS would produce something like this (open sourced) and we could file our returns like this.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago
The IRS can already calculate your taxes for you. In other countries you just have to confirm what the revenue department calculates as your liability and hit "submit". You have to do the calculations yourself because TurboTax et al., and accountants lobbied so taxes are complicated and must be completed by the filer (or their accountant).
- tmm1 4y ago
  From the abstract of NBER paper I mentioned [1]: > Each year Americans spend over two billion hours and $30 billion preparing individual tax returns, and these filing costs are regressive. To lower and redistribute the filing burden, some commentators have proposed having the IRS pre-populate tax returns for individuals. We evaluate this hypothetical policy using a large, nationally representative sample of returns filed for the tax year 2019. Our baseline results indicate that between 62 and 73 million returns (41 to 48 percent of all returns) could be accurately pre-populated using only current-year information returns and the prior-year return. Accuracy rates decline with income and are higher for taxpayers who have fewer dependents or are unmarried. We also examine 2019 non-filers, finding that pre- populated returns tentatively indicate $9.0 billion in refunds due to 12 million (22 percent) of them. [1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30008/w30008.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30008/w300...
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    One problem is that information is not tabulated by the IRS in time for a mid-April return date. Order your tax “transcript of account” in late March and again in late August. It’ll be substantially more complete in late August.
- FullyFunctional 4y ago
  I didn't point that out: I originate from a country in which I used to get a postcard summarizing what they thought I owed with a "Yes, I agree" checkbox and a field to sign. You could always file an extensive return if desired, but unless you had complicated (notably international) transactions, the return was basically accurate. This only works because there's a high level of trust in the government and low corruption, and having detailed tracking isn't (very) controversial. The US is almost the exact opposite on every metric so it wouldn't work for it.
  - hippich 4y ago
    I am from the country where most people don't even have to agree to anything - their income taxes already handled by employer on behalf of the government before each paycheck. But there is very low trust in government and it is dictatorship... I do not know if that was intentionally forced on citizens in the USA to do their own taxes (even tho IRS had accurate information from W3s for nearly half of payers) for that purpose, but I think such exposure to the behind scenes calculation of taxes might force citizens to be more aware of what they are paying. For example, back to my home country - I think income tax is something like 11% or 13% today. And most folks see this tax on their pay stubs. But what they do not see (although some are aware of) - employer pays extra 36% of the salary into social security. In the USA employee sees at least half of it (6.20% of 12.40%). The health insurance premiums are also prominent on the tax return, same with retirement. None of that is visible in any form to employees in my home country.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    The US demands extremely detailed tracking of your income. We just get nothing in return for it.
    - PopAlongKid 4y ago
      >We just get nothing in return for it. Maybe you don't, but a lot of wealthy people who can afford to hire tax professionals do. For example, how certain famous billionaires[0] have received billions of tax free income because they took the position that it could be classified as a certain type of income. [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/peter-thiel-has-amassed-5-billion-in-his-roth-ira-propublica https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/peter-thi...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Melatonic 4y ago
  As much as I hate doing it now the first few years I did my taxes I went all paper and it really helped give me a foundational understanding of it all. Especially when you make that one typo.
- ac29 4y ago
  > The IRS can already calculate your taxes for you Only if 100% of your income is reported to the IRS. Small amounts (under $600) often aren't, and while you might be able to get away with not reporting it, its obviously not legal. I had some slightly unusual small sources of income the past couple of years that I had to keep records of, report, and pay taxes on. Granted, a lot of people arent going to have much more than a W2 and maybe some interest income.
runlevel1 4y ago
NBER's biggest contributors are the US government. Ironically, the IRS isn't one of them.[1] As an aside, I'd love to see US gov research grants start requiring the work product to be made open source. [1]: https://www.nber.org/about-nber/support-funding https://www.nber.org/about-nber/support-funding
- MaxGhenis 4y ago
  Agreed. We're building an open source version of taxsim (plus benefit rules) at https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us.
analog31 4y ago
Imagine if the tax code itself were written in Python. def computeTax(**kwargs): .. blah blah .. return how_much_you_owe Of course we all know what comes next... from scipy.optimize import minimize
- tmm1 4y ago
  In 2014, the Policy Simulation Library [1] added a model called Tax-Simulator [2], which is a Python reimplementation of TAXSIM [3][4]. It is available as open-source [5], and designed to let researchers both change existing policy variables and implement new tax reforms in Python. [1] https://pslmodels.org/ https://pslmodels.org/ [2] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/ https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/ [3] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/about/history.html https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/about/history.html [4] https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxcalc/validation/taxsim27/README.md https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxc... [5] https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator
  - runlevel1 4y ago
    `policy_current_law.json` is really interesting: https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxcalc/policy_current_law.json https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxc... Looks like the data in there goes back to 2013/2014. I'd love to see older historical policy data.
  - fsflyer 4y ago
    France has an open source implementation of their tax code [0]. The paper [1] gives an overview of the implementation language, mlang. [0] https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966
    - MaxGhenis 4y ago
      France has also developed the OpenFisca framework [1] for tax and benefit rules as code, and its OpenFisca France [2] model is widely used (I think significantly more than mlang). We've extended it to the UK [3] and the US [4]. [1] https://openfisca.org https://openfisca.org [2] https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france [3] https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-uk https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-uk [4] https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us
HWR_14 4y ago
Congress won't let the IRS do it. To avoid that, Turbo Tax and the others promised to give free filing software out. That it didn't have all the deductions (pay for that) and was filled with anti-patterns to get people to sign up was something Congress ignored. I assume there were also some campaign contributions that changed hands.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

The IRS can already calculate your taxes for you. In other countries you just have to confirm what the revenue department calculates as your liability and hit "submit". You have to do the calculations yourself because TurboTax et al., and accountants lobbied so taxes are complicated and must be completed by the filer (or their accountant).

tmm1 4y ago
From the abstract of NBER paper I mentioned [1]: > Each year Americans spend over two billion hours and $30 billion preparing individual tax returns, and these filing costs are regressive. To lower and redistribute the filing burden, some commentators have proposed having the IRS pre-populate tax returns for individuals. We evaluate this hypothetical policy using a large, nationally representative sample of returns filed for the tax year 2019. Our baseline results indicate that between 62 and 73 million returns (41 to 48 percent of all returns) could be accurately pre-populated using only current-year information returns and the prior-year return. Accuracy rates decline with income and are higher for taxpayers who have fewer dependents or are unmarried. We also examine 2019 non-filers, finding that pre- populated returns tentatively indicate $9.0 billion in refunds due to 12 million (22 percent) of them. [1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30008/w30008.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30008/w300...
- sokoloff 4y ago
  One problem is that information is not tabulated by the IRS in time for a mid-April return date. Order your tax “transcript of account” in late March and again in late August. It’ll be substantially more complete in late August.
FullyFunctional 4y ago
I didn't point that out: I originate from a country in which I used to get a postcard summarizing what they thought I owed with a "Yes, I agree" checkbox and a field to sign. You could always file an extensive return if desired, but unless you had complicated (notably international) transactions, the return was basically accurate. This only works because there's a high level of trust in the government and low corruption, and having detailed tracking isn't (very) controversial. The US is almost the exact opposite on every metric so it wouldn't work for it.
- hippich 4y ago
  I am from the country where most people don't even have to agree to anything - their income taxes already handled by employer on behalf of the government before each paycheck. But there is very low trust in government and it is dictatorship... I do not know if that was intentionally forced on citizens in the USA to do their own taxes (even tho IRS had accurate information from W3s for nearly half of payers) for that purpose, but I think such exposure to the behind scenes calculation of taxes might force citizens to be more aware of what they are paying. For example, back to my home country - I think income tax is something like 11% or 13% today. And most folks see this tax on their pay stubs. But what they do not see (although some are aware of) - employer pays extra 36% of the salary into social security. In the USA employee sees at least half of it (6.20% of 12.40%). The health insurance premiums are also prominent on the tax return, same with retirement. None of that is visible in any form to employees in my home country.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The US demands extremely detailed tracking of your income. We just get nothing in return for it.
  - PopAlongKid 4y ago
    >We just get nothing in return for it. Maybe you don't, but a lot of wealthy people who can afford to hire tax professionals do. For example, how certain famous billionaires[0] have received billions of tax free income because they took the position that it could be classified as a certain type of income. [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/peter-thiel-has-amassed-5-billion-in-his-roth-ira-propublica https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/peter-thi...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Melatonic 4y ago
As much as I hate doing it now the first few years I did my taxes I went all paper and it really helped give me a foundational understanding of it all. Especially when you make that one typo.
ac29 4y ago
> The IRS can already calculate your taxes for you Only if 100% of your income is reported to the IRS. Small amounts (under $600) often aren't, and while you might be able to get away with not reporting it, its obviously not legal. I had some slightly unusual small sources of income the past couple of years that I had to keep records of, report, and pay taxes on. Granted, a lot of people arent going to have much more than a W2 and maybe some interest income.

runlevel1 4y ago

NBER's biggest contributors are the US government. Ironically, the IRS isn't one of them.[1] As an aside, I'd love to see US gov research grants start requiring the work product to be made open source. [1]: https://www.nber.org/about-nber/support-funding https://www.nber.org/about-nber/support-funding

MaxGhenis 4y ago
Agreed. We're building an open source version of taxsim (plus benefit rules) at https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us.

analog31 4y ago

Imagine if the tax code itself were written in Python. def computeTax(**kwargs): .. blah blah .. return how_much_you_owe Of course we all know what comes next... from scipy.optimize import minimize

tmm1 4y ago
In 2014, the Policy Simulation Library [1] added a model called Tax-Simulator [2], which is a Python reimplementation of TAXSIM [3][4]. It is available as open-source [5], and designed to let researchers both change existing policy variables and implement new tax reforms in Python. [1] https://pslmodels.org/ https://pslmodels.org/ [2] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/ https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/ [3] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/about/history.html https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/about/history.html [4] https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxcalc/validation/taxsim27/README.md https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxc... [5] https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator
- runlevel1 4y ago
  `policy_current_law.json` is really interesting: https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxcalc/policy_current_law.json https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxc... Looks like the data in there goes back to 2013/2014. I'd love to see older historical policy data.
- fsflyer 4y ago
  France has an open source implementation of their tax code [0]. The paper [1] gives an overview of the implementation language, mlang. [0] https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966
  - MaxGhenis 4y ago
    France has also developed the OpenFisca framework [1] for tax and benefit rules as code, and its OpenFisca France [2] model is widely used (I think significantly more than mlang). We've extended it to the UK [3] and the US [4]. [1] https://openfisca.org https://openfisca.org [2] https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france [3] https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-uk https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-uk [4] https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us

HWR_14 4y ago

Congress won't let the IRS do it. To avoid that, Turbo Tax and the others promised to give free filing software out. That it didn't have all the deductions (pay for that) and was filled with anti-patterns to get people to sign up was something Congress ignored. I assume there were also some campaign contributions that changed hands.