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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much how it works in most of europe. Not even mailed, during the filing period log into the tax authority's site, check that the pre-filled declaration looks OK and validate.

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Sounds glorious. In the U.S., figuring out taxes is like:

Take line 39b, multiply it by your age as determined by worksheet 6689. If you are between 41 and 43 years of age, enter '0'. If you were not subject to the Railroad Act of 1938's exempt dependent pension clause (this is not common), add 13 to this number in hexadecimal, else, subtract 2 and multiply by 1.388688. If you did not have healthcare for more than 14 minutes during the prior year and line 17 is 4 or greater and you live in a zone designated as "clown free" by your local municipality, draw a unicode snowman on this line and prove Fermat's theorem in the margins of Schedule Q...

We can change this if we want. We just need to collaborate and apply pressure on legislators.

1. Propose legislation to allow the IRS to perform the work directly third parties are currently performing

2. Have it sponsored (look through opensecrets.org, find legislators who aren't taking money from intuit)

3. If you don't vote for it, we work to replace your with a competitor in your next election cycle

Is this really the case? Can't most people can just file with a 1040(A or EZ) and be done pretty quickly. I was under the impression that you only have to break out the crazy worksheets or software if you want to get fancy with your deductions or take advantage of tax credits.

You can save alot of money this way, but really it's the deductions that are the complication (and the audit risk...) but how can you simplify the deduction process, you have to get specific by the very nature of the task.

> I was under the impression that you only have to break out the crazy worksheets or software if you want to get fancy with your deductions or take advantage of tax credits.

I don't think you can use a 1040EZ if you want to take any deductions (like mortgage interest, student loan interest, etc).

I don't know why an e-filing system couldn't handle that, form wizards aren't rocket surgery, you'd just have e.g. a page were you select types of loans outstanding, which would insert steps to fill in relevant information. And the system could even remember that year to year so next year they'll be preselected and if you haven't taken/discharged anything you can just nextnextnext to whatever section comes after that.

You can file 1040EZ if you don't have any deductions, and it's pretty simple. Probably simple enough for the IRS to pre-compute it for you.

If you want to claim deductions (healthcare expenses, mortgage interest, charitable donations, etc) you need the full 1040. It's still pretty easy, but you would at least need to tell the IRS what those deductions are before they can compute your taxes.

I think the really complex stuff doesn't kick in until you have a complex scenario and you want to completely optimize it. I had a complex tax return one year when I got a large stock grant. Every other year it's taken 2-4 hours to finish a 1040 with some normal deductions.

2-4 hours is way more than I want to spend, but also not enough to get me motivated to fight for simpler tax codes.

Once you have a kid, spouse, house, or significant medical bills you had better not use an EZ or you're just throwing money away.

You can't file for free on the IRS site if your income is above $62k, no matter how simple your filing is:

https://www.irs.gov/uac/Free-File:-Do-Your-Federal-Taxes-for...

Edit: I'd love to know a logical reason for that policy beyond "f- the rich".

"Tax software provides jobs for Americans, and if we remove obsolete laws that make the tax software important - you would cost Americans jobs!!!!"

As the site shows, Free File Fillable Forms is available to everyone, but it's not as easy as the step-by-step wizards of TurboTax and TaxAct. There's manual arithmetic involved, following the PDF instructions, looking through tax tables, etc.

While you can file for free above $62,000 (you have to use the fillable forms, and not the tax prep software), the reason I think the reason for the divide is ultimately that the sub-$62k annual income segment isn't of particular interest to the tax prep (software/services) industry, so providing free tax prep software to them doesn't hit the kind of political pushback that a generally-available solution would.

I don't see this working in the US without first simplifying the tax code. Right now if the government sent this out I would assume a majority of people would have some deduction they could take.

1. I was under the impression the vast majority only gets the standard deductions (which would probably be applied by default or something)

2. if the default doesn't match your status, you just change what you need to change and validate that

I guess it would work for anyone who can file a 1040EZ. The rest of us will still be stuck doing the same old forms to fix what the government thought we owed.

Most people have multiple valid deductions, but they add up to less than the standard deduction. If all of them add up to be more than the standard deduction, you have to itemize all of them, which is a PITA, but if you don't do that then you're paying too much tax.

There are some deductions you can take in addition to the standard deduction (student loan interest, moving expenses, some education expenses, etc). These all change the adjusted gross income, from which the standard deduction (or itemized deduction) is subtracted.

edit: I suppose some of this could be pre-computed if all the different companies sent the info to the IRS and states you lived in during the year. But that's probably too much work...

A lot of people at least get student loan interest deduction (with all the college debt around), which I believe pushes out out of 1040EZ lane.

Many deductions have to be supported by forms that are already provided by third parties both to the taxpayer and to the IRS. There's no reason these couldn't be included in pre-computed taxes sent out to taxpayers.

Its not done in the US because the makers of tax prep software and providers of tax prep services have lobbied against it the several times it has been proposed, and with a very substantial industry that is completely threatened, they have plenty of motivation to lobby hard.

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