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Just send the taxpayer a bill that says what the IRS think they owes. That information is already there! It's already being calculated! Just print and send! (I

Just send the taxpayer a bill that says what the IRS think they owes. That information is already there! It's already being calculated! Just print and send! (I am being somewhat facetious here, as I'm aware there's always vastly more complexity to anything being done by a bureaucracy the size of the federal government than meets the eye, but still.)

throwaway5959 4y ago
It’s not a problem of technology, it’s a political issue thanks to tax software providers.
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  That is the lobby portion. There is also a fairly large portion of the country that doesn't want to make it easier to file taxes because it encourages complacency with having the government take some of your money.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  That corporatism is a part of it, but not the entire story. It's not like the IRS is a helpless victim of capitalist lobbying here. The IRS, and all parts of government, like having power over peoples' lives. Here's an interesting and relevant news story. https://news.yahoo.com/irs-urges-millions-taxpayers-delay-151136162.html https://news.yahoo.com/irs-urges-millions-taxpayers-delay-15... If even the IRS doesn't know what their own rules are within the many pages of vague, complicated, and contradictory rules, what chance does an average person have to not mess up at least one thing in their taxes? The immense complexity of the tax code and the chance for getting something wrong gives them power to theoretically try and ruin anybody they want to go after, or at least have them have a lot of influence over peoples lives. Governments want power and influence, and the IRS isn't going to vote to give away their own power. Having everybody being afraid of the IRS and making people jump through hoops gives them power and influence. This type of power isn't something that will go away with a fight.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > It's not like the IRS is a helpless victim of capitalist lobbying here. I'm not sure who you think is concerned about the feelings of the IRS, or its victimization. You've got the victims all topsy-turvy. Congress, an unbroken chain of bipartisan administrations, and their IRS are the perpetrators. The corporate cash is literally the only reason they care. > the IRS isn't going to vote to give away their own power. The IRS doesn't vote. Your theories of power are weird.
    - logicalmonster 4y ago
      > I'm not sure who you think is concerned about the feelings of the IRS, The IRS isn't exactly mute and helpless. If the IRS came out at some inquiry and loudly said "Millionaires and billionaires can hire a tax firm to deal with these piles of paperwork we make people fill out, but it's a disgrace that normal people have to spend a great deal of time/money and life stress dealing with their taxes, when we already very likely know exactly what the upper theoretical bound of their tax payment is." > The corporate cash is literally the only reason they care. The reason for anything complicated cannot usually only be attributed to one reason. Money is always big influence, but so is power, and probably other variables. > The IRS doesn't vote. They're not literally voting, but they're choosing what benefits them the most, right? Are you familiar with an exploratory task force or committee being where ideas are sent to be killed? > Your theories of power are weird. My theories of power are literally the standard throughout all of human history. People very rarely voluntarily give up power that exists that benefits them. Giving up power is so rare that the very few examples of it we have in human history, such as George Washington declining power, are heavily celebrated.
      - red-iron-pine 4y ago
        Congress owns the IRS's budget. They control the tax laws. What the IRS wants as an org is ultimately irrelevant, they're beholden to elected officials, who are in turn beholden to their voters and donors -- with a strong emphasis on the latter.
- snotrockets 4y ago
  Not just them. There's a whole contingency of right wing (both D & R) donors who ask for making taxes frustrating for most, as they don't want people to look favorably on the act of paying taxes, to keep people like the late Justice Holmes Jr. a minuscule minority.
deelowe 4y ago
Almost every deduction I take is report both by myself as well as the relevant 3rd party. They literally get a report from brokerages on stock transactions and yet I also have to calculate cost basis and all that. Why?!
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  To try to catch you lying of course.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Those are the easy cases. The hard ones are deducting expenses for businesses.
  - deelowe 4y ago
    I have to do that too. Either way, it’s all a giant pain and seems largely to be a waste of time
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  You don’t have to. If the bases are all reported to the irs, you just need to put the totals on schedule D. It’s amazing how much whining there is about these forms. A smart high schooler could do even a moderately complicated tax return. It’s when you own a business of some kind (including investment properties) that things get hard.
  - rqtwteye 4y ago
    Some people have a lot of other things to worry about.
    - bradleyjg 4y ago
      But plenty of time to complain, apparently.
- morpheuskafka 4y ago
acdha 4y ago
This is a political problem. It’s not like people at the IRS don’t see the appeal but that Congress hasn’t authorized doing it: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  Yeah, it's largely a problem of Intuit doing a huge amount of lobbying of our elected officials.
kodah 4y ago
> That information is already there! It's already being calculated! This is a common misconception, especially on HN. For the average tax payer this might be truthy, but only insofar as the IRS is aware of certain tax events. If you had a kid, the IRS might be able to correlate that you and someone had a child, and they might, depending on the county registrar, be able to determine you're married. This gets even more complicated with business interests and finance in the small business realm. That's to say, the system you described probably isn't ever going to materialize. The IRS is not some omnipotent entity. They're going to need something akin to TurboTax that asks you a bunch of questions and juxtaposes that with things they know for certain like your net income and net losses that are reported throughout the year. That system also needs to be able to read and adapt to evolving tax code as time goes on.
- ok123456 4y ago
  Make a buffer of $3k: you don't owe a return unless the difference between what they have per-calculated and what owe is over that. This would eliminate 95% of returns and tax documents. This is roughly what the UK does.
  - kodah 4y ago
    The IRS already kind of does this. They know that when someone itemizes their expenses and their net income is x while net losses are y that their itemization has an error threshold of +/-z, where z is an already padded number. All that does is decrease the number of non-random audits they have to do. I'm not sure it'd really make taxes any more simple or complicated than they already are. It's probably important to note there's many different camps here: 1. People who want a simpler tax code (eg: flat tax) 2. People who don't want to have to pay tax processors 3. People who don't want the IRS submission to be an exercise in hedging Personally, I'm more in camp 2, because I recognize our tax code is full of levers we use, that change and adapt, to incentivize activity in the economy.
- ldoughty 4y ago
  They didn't stop the IRS from telling us what they know and what they expect, and if it's accurate and you don't dispute their information, you pay the bill and attest you have no other income. I wouldn't care if I over pay. After paying someone hundreds in fees to do my taxes I don't usually get much of any money back. I'd rather let the government keep $400 than give it to a tax company that probably won't actually help me in an audit.
itake 4y ago
My employer over-reported my income in 2021 multiple times on multiple w2s by 1.8x. We are still trying to sort it out. I don't think I want a system where my employer could financially ruin me by misreporting income to the government.
- josegonzalez 4y ago
  In which case you'd have the possibility to contest and file something more specific to your situation.
  - itake 4y ago
    Your suggestion sounds like the current system: I have to calculate the correct taxes and file them based on the truth.
    - piperswe 4y ago
      Well yes, if you think the numbers the IRS calculated aren't quite right you'd still be free to file your own return.
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  This is why the IRS sending you a pre-filled return would help with such a situation. Right now the employer can make mistakes and you don't even know.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Similar example from Germany: In one year I had some "extra income" besides my job and had to file a return and pay some extra money. The next year they asked me what my "extra income" was for that year and when the letter got lost by me they just assumed the same amount as the prior year and sent me the bill for that. After the initial shock and beating myself up for that mistake, I could simply file a correction and got it fixed with no problem.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
You have that option if you have a very simple tax return. It’s like the IRS’s version of “I’m feeling lucky”.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
This is how it works in Norway. Same in the rest of Scandinavia I think.
cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
Norway did this by text message 20 years ago. That the US makes it a labyrinthine game of special exceptions and complexity belies the obvious gamification geared towards the rich and to frustrate everyone that goes well past any excuse of bureaucracy. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's obvious wealth transfer from everyone not obscenely rich or obscenely poor disproportionately excluding centamillionaires and billionaires.

throwaway5959 4y ago

It’s not a problem of technology, it’s a political issue thanks to tax software providers.

tastyfreeze 4y ago
That is the lobby portion. There is also a fairly large portion of the country that doesn't want to make it easier to file taxes because it encourages complacency with having the government take some of your money.
logicalmonster 4y ago
That corporatism is a part of it, but not the entire story. It's not like the IRS is a helpless victim of capitalist lobbying here. The IRS, and all parts of government, like having power over peoples' lives. Here's an interesting and relevant news story. https://news.yahoo.com/irs-urges-millions-taxpayers-delay-151136162.html https://news.yahoo.com/irs-urges-millions-taxpayers-delay-15... If even the IRS doesn't know what their own rules are within the many pages of vague, complicated, and contradictory rules, what chance does an average person have to not mess up at least one thing in their taxes? The immense complexity of the tax code and the chance for getting something wrong gives them power to theoretically try and ruin anybody they want to go after, or at least have them have a lot of influence over peoples lives. Governments want power and influence, and the IRS isn't going to vote to give away their own power. Having everybody being afraid of the IRS and making people jump through hoops gives them power and influence. This type of power isn't something that will go away with a fight.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > It's not like the IRS is a helpless victim of capitalist lobbying here. I'm not sure who you think is concerned about the feelings of the IRS, or its victimization. You've got the victims all topsy-turvy. Congress, an unbroken chain of bipartisan administrations, and their IRS are the perpetrators. The corporate cash is literally the only reason they care. > the IRS isn't going to vote to give away their own power. The IRS doesn't vote. Your theories of power are weird.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    > I'm not sure who you think is concerned about the feelings of the IRS, The IRS isn't exactly mute and helpless. If the IRS came out at some inquiry and loudly said "Millionaires and billionaires can hire a tax firm to deal with these piles of paperwork we make people fill out, but it's a disgrace that normal people have to spend a great deal of time/money and life stress dealing with their taxes, when we already very likely know exactly what the upper theoretical bound of their tax payment is." > The corporate cash is literally the only reason they care. The reason for anything complicated cannot usually only be attributed to one reason. Money is always big influence, but so is power, and probably other variables. > The IRS doesn't vote. They're not literally voting, but they're choosing what benefits them the most, right? Are you familiar with an exploratory task force or committee being where ideas are sent to be killed? > Your theories of power are weird. My theories of power are literally the standard throughout all of human history. People very rarely voluntarily give up power that exists that benefits them. Giving up power is so rare that the very few examples of it we have in human history, such as George Washington declining power, are heavily celebrated.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Congress owns the IRS's budget. They control the tax laws. What the IRS wants as an org is ultimately irrelevant, they're beholden to elected officials, who are in turn beholden to their voters and donors -- with a strong emphasis on the latter.
snotrockets 4y ago
Not just them. There's a whole contingency of right wing (both D & R) donors who ask for making taxes frustrating for most, as they don't want people to look favorably on the act of paying taxes, to keep people like the late Justice Holmes Jr. a minuscule minority.

deelowe 4y ago

Almost every deduction I take is report both by myself as well as the relevant 3rd party. They literally get a report from brokerages on stock transactions and yet I also have to calculate cost basis and all that. Why?!

tastyfreeze 4y ago
To try to catch you lying of course.
kortilla 4y ago
Those are the easy cases. The hard ones are deducting expenses for businesses.
- deelowe 4y ago
  I have to do that too. Either way, it’s all a giant pain and seems largely to be a waste of time
bradleyjg 4y ago
You don’t have to. If the bases are all reported to the irs, you just need to put the totals on schedule D. It’s amazing how much whining there is about these forms. A smart high schooler could do even a moderately complicated tax return. It’s when you own a business of some kind (including investment properties) that things get hard.
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  Some people have a lot of other things to worry about.
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    But plenty of time to complain, apparently.
morpheuskafka 4y ago

acdha 4y ago

This is a political problem. It’s not like people at the IRS don’t see the appeal but that Congress hasn’t authorized doing it: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

idopmstuff 4y ago
Yeah, it's largely a problem of Intuit doing a huge amount of lobbying of our elected officials.

kodah 4y ago

> That information is already there! It's already being calculated! This is a common misconception, especially on HN. For the average tax payer this might be truthy, but only insofar as the IRS is aware of certain tax events. If you had a kid, the IRS might be able to correlate that you and someone had a child, and they might, depending on the county registrar, be able to determine you're married. This gets even more complicated with business interests and finance in the small business realm. That's to say, the system you described probably isn't ever going to materialize. The IRS is not some omnipotent entity. They're going to need something akin to TurboTax that asks you a bunch of questions and juxtaposes that with things they know for certain like your net income and net losses that are reported throughout the year. That system also needs to be able to read and adapt to evolving tax code as time goes on.

ok123456 4y ago
Make a buffer of $3k: you don't owe a return unless the difference between what they have per-calculated and what owe is over that. This would eliminate 95% of returns and tax documents. This is roughly what the UK does.
- kodah 4y ago
  The IRS already kind of does this. They know that when someone itemizes their expenses and their net income is x while net losses are y that their itemization has an error threshold of +/-z, where z is an already padded number. All that does is decrease the number of non-random audits they have to do. I'm not sure it'd really make taxes any more simple or complicated than they already are. It's probably important to note there's many different camps here: 1. People who want a simpler tax code (eg: flat tax) 2. People who don't want to have to pay tax processors 3. People who don't want the IRS submission to be an exercise in hedging Personally, I'm more in camp 2, because I recognize our tax code is full of levers we use, that change and adapt, to incentivize activity in the economy.
ldoughty 4y ago
They didn't stop the IRS from telling us what they know and what they expect, and if it's accurate and you don't dispute their information, you pay the bill and attest you have no other income. I wouldn't care if I over pay. After paying someone hundreds in fees to do my taxes I don't usually get much of any money back. I'd rather let the government keep $400 than give it to a tax company that probably won't actually help me in an audit.

itake 4y ago

My employer over-reported my income in 2021 multiple times on multiple w2s by 1.8x. We are still trying to sort it out. I don't think I want a system where my employer could financially ruin me by misreporting income to the government.

josegonzalez 4y ago
In which case you'd have the possibility to contest and file something more specific to your situation.
- itake 4y ago
  Your suggestion sounds like the current system: I have to calculate the correct taxes and file them based on the truth.
  - piperswe 4y ago
    Well yes, if you think the numbers the IRS calculated aren't quite right you'd still be free to file your own return.
rqtwteye 4y ago
This is why the IRS sending you a pre-filled return would help with such a situation. Right now the employer can make mistakes and you don't even know.
arlcode 4y ago
Similar example from Germany: In one year I had some "extra income" besides my job and had to file a return and pay some extra money. The next year they asked me what my "extra income" was for that year and when the letter got lost by me they just assumed the same amount as the prior year and sent me the bill for that. After the initial shock and beating myself up for that mistake, I could simply file a correction and got it fixed with no problem.
- xen2xen1 4y ago

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

You have that option if you have a very simple tax return. It’s like the IRS’s version of “I’m feeling lucky”.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

This is how it works in Norway. Same in the rest of Scandinavia I think.

cvccvroomvroom 4y ago

Norway did this by text message 20 years ago. That the US makes it a labyrinthine game of special exceptions and complexity belies the obvious gamification geared towards the rich and to frustrate everyone that goes well past any excuse of bureaucracy. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's obvious wealth transfer from everyone not obscenely rich or obscenely poor disproportionately excluding centamillionaires and billionaires.