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The description of this makes me skeptical. People have been asking for a system where the IRS does your taxes for your, sends you the draft, and you add in an

by hedora 3y ago

The description of this makes me skeptical. People have been asking for a system where the IRS does your taxes for your, sends you the draft, and you add in any deductions, etc. They already do your taxes in the background to confirm your return is correct, so this is not significantly more work for them (in fact, it is probably less work). In some countries with such a system, unless you intentionally lie, you are absolved of legal liability if the government screws up your taxes. The article makes it sound like they are building a crappy turbo tax clone instead.

foota 3y ago
That might take more work in terms of process changes, but the setup would be there.
RC_ITR 3y ago
>They already do your taxes in the background to confirm your return is correct This is a common misconception. Most places that send you forms also send them to the IRS (but by no means all places). The IRS makes sure that the information you put in your forms is the same as the forms they got, but they know nothing about your dependents, whether you pay mortgages interest, etc. Now, the counterpoint to that argument is that c.90% of people just take the standard deduction anyway now that there's not SALT, but the argument there is that we should move completely away from deduction-driven taxes (which is probably the solution). As for TurboTax et al, those places are not sending your forms to every state tax agency (why do people always forget about state taxes in these threads?), so there's still very much a need for some solution there. Probably IRS data sharing, but good luck getting all the states to agree with the Feds on tax forms (just look at the SALT battle).