> The IRS is not actually a godly being that has omniscient knowledge of every transaction that ever goes on and in the future. For the majority of people they

> The IRS is not actually a godly being that has omniscient knowledge of every transaction that ever goes on and in the future. For the majority of people they have complete knowledge of everything you are going to report. If you don't believe this its easy to test: file your taxes with omissions and see how quickly they contact you to let you know you messed up. There should absolutely be an option where you just tell the IRS to figure it out based on electronic reports that are already being reported to them from your employer's payroll system and other sources and have it just show you a summary that you checkmark (or override if you're one of the minority that has an exceptional case). This is basically what things like TurboTax do for most people, most users rarely enter much of anything, the data is pulled from databases that have the same data that was already forwarded to the IRS. But of course there's a fairly substantial price for this 'convenience' when it should be built into the federal tax system and free for everyone to use as it is in some other countries. What's stopping this from being the norm isn't the small percentage of exceptional cases but rather lobbying from Intuit, etc.