Why doesn’t the IRS send me a tax bill based on the info they already have? | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn’t the IRS send me a tax bill based on the info they already have?

politics.stackexchange.com

33 pointsingve20 comments

The tax preparation companies such as H&R Block and Intuit spend a lot of money lobbying Congress to keep this from happening.

This might be true but it's not needed.

I'm looking for the documentary about the US economy and the silent industries that secretly prop it up.

Taxing people is work. To make an industry responsible allows both government to not invest and risk additional losses but allowing people to overpay gives them a surplus while allowing for those that make mistakes that cost the government to recoup in justice fees.

I remember the video having lawyers asked what the most profitable industry in America was, they all claimed the legal system when it was accounting.

Things are more complicated than you think.

There are many SSNs in use by multiple people. It's an immigration issue so the IRS turns a blind eye.

Also there's a larger number of cases where the address the IRS has on file is incorrect.

So there's a huge risk of the refund going to the wrong person with pre-filled returns.

Yeah PAYE is really really hard and complex. The only countries that do it are Germany and the UK and France (from 2018) and Australia and New Zealand and Ireland and ... etc. etc.

Population of: USA: 325 million Germany: 81 million France: 65 million UK: 65 million Australia: 21 million New Zealand: 4.7 million

This is a tired trope, because this seems to forget that more people also equals more resources to deal with more people. It's not a substantive argument to just say "well there's more of us so this can never work", which is what I assume you're trying to say here.

California tried this for a trial of their state taxes. Response was overwhelmingly positive. Yet lobbyist for big tax firms fight against it.

It still there and very popular, but it is opt-in. However, the majority of people who use it, opt-in.

Oh, I didnt realize that still. Thanks!

"A silent weapon system operates upon data obtained from a docile public by legal (but not always lawful) force. Much information is made available to silent weapon systems programmers through the Internal Revenue Service. (See Studies in the Structure of the American Economy for an I.R.S. source list.)

This information consists of the enforced delivery of well-organized data contained in federal and state tax forms, collected, assembled, and submitted by slave labor provided by taxpayers and employers.

Furthermore, the number of such forms submitted to the I.R.S. is a useful indicator of public consent, an important factor in strategic decision making. Other data sources are given in the Short List of Inputs.

Consent Coefficients - numerical feedback indicating victory status. Psychological basis: When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government."

The IRS doesn't always know everything. For example, they don't know how much medical expenses were incurred in the tax year. If there's a centralized place where all relevant expenses and incomes are logged, then maybe they should do it for everyone. Else, it's going to be a problem going back and forth with IRS over the right amount of taxes to be paid.

They don’t need to know that, though.

For instance, the irs could send you a statement with everything they know and a total at the bottom.

You can either pay that, or if you think you should pay less, prove it by filling out a bunch of 1040/1099/etc forms with supporting evidence.

Frankly, I’d love it. If it’s close enough, I think many people would pay a bit more just to eliminate the hassle.

There's no reason why they can't. If you're an employee and/or a student then everything you do should be reported to the government, taxes should have automatically been withheld, and the government should be able to figure out everything on their own. They always double-check your calculations anyway.

Only if you're self-employed or have special situations should you need to file anything, and even then, many of these situations can be something where you tick a box or submit a document and then they still do everything automatically.

The situation in the US and Canada is ridiculous.

Disagree. For such people the government will generally have everything on the income side. They won't necessarily have everything on the deduction side.

However, even partial data like that would be very useful. The IRS sends you pre-filled forms. You can change anything that's wrong, add anything that's missing. Do your taxes, or just submit the changes and let them deal with the rest of it and send you a bill if need be.

If you have things on the deduction side that the government doesn't already know about, you can submit a self-assessment or an amendment. Deductions themselves should be simplified.

You bring deductions up as if it's a problem but many other countries, like the UK, do it this way without problems.

Most people here do not submit tax returns.

> If you're an employee and/or a student then everything you do should be reported to the government, taxes should have automatically been withheld, and the government should be able to figure out everything on their own.

In such cases, isn't it already super straightforward to file taxes? Just copy-paste information from W2 to 1040ez, and you are done?

The point is that a hundred million people could well do with not spending the time and effort to copy-paste that information and figure out if they're doing that correctly, and there also would be a hundred million less declarations for IRS to review.

That's how it works in quite many other countries; if you don't have anything peculiar, then you simply don't do anything at all, the appropriate taxes were already withheld by the employer and that's it. You file a declaration if you're running a business, are renting property as a landlord, or something like that, but the vast majority of "normal people" do not need to care how the tax declaration process works.

Article 1, section 2 of the US Constitution prohibits direct taxation. If the IRS sends you a bill, that's becoming a little more 'directy' because they are just assuming that every single head had a W2 with no deductions outside of the narrow info that they know and now you have to proove them wrong. Whereas asking you what you think you should owe and giving you an opportunity to present all facts is more of a levy, and much more just. What this person is asking for on Stackexchange is just pure laziness and super narrow thinking about what activities one could potentially get involved with in one's life. Those who point toward H&R block as being at fault: well yes they would certainly want to maintain a horrible IRS UX, but that is completely separate from how taxes are levyed, which is constitutional. Also I love Sweden but just because Sweden does it does not mean automatically the best solution.

Article I Section 2 was amended by Amendment XIV (“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”). The original text is legally void.

Grover Norquist.

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