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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

That majority of people could fill out the 1040EZ in 10 minutes and call it done.

There's no way for the government to know what your work expenses were, what you donated to charity, and so on and so forth through many of the deductions. If you don't want to maximize your return, you can be done in less than 15 minutes.

Even making more than 100k, with stocks through multiple brokers, a 401k, interest from multiple accounts, a house, student loans, and probably a few others I forgot to mention, it took me an hour and a half to do my taxes and cost me under $20 on freetaxusa (whatever the price for the state taxes they charged was low enough where I didn't care to figure it out on my own).

The tax code is one of those boogeymen items that everyone attacks, but in reality isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

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Let's start with an MVP then.

For federal taxes, the government takes your W2 and 1099s, and prepares a tax return, with the standard deduction. If you either know you have a complicated federal situation (and people know if they do), or think you can do better with itemizing your deductions, then you have the option to do it differently.

Then, iterate every year to make it a little better, until 96% of people don't have to think about it.

> That majority of people could fill out the 1040EZ in 10 minutes and call it done.

How long does it take to understand that it's all you have to do?

> There's no way for the government to know what your work expenses were

What? That makes no sense.

> what you donated to charity

Same. This makes no sense.

> it took me an hour and a half to do my taxes and cost me under $20 on freetaxusa

wow. I guess you are used to filling your taxes so you're fast.

I've used h&r block, some irs.gov-recommended online fillable forms, and some other free tax software in the last 5 years (I've only had to file taxes for 5 years now). On average it takes me about 30 minutes, and one year i did pay $20, not realizing i could've done it for free.

Maybe you're not American? Or haven't done taxes?

In the US, you can deduct your work expenses if you so choose (such as required clothes, for instance). Since you did this on your personal card, how would the government have any idea that you bought that suit for work? And the same goes for donations to non profits.

Work clothes are only deductible if required and not suitable for ordinary wear and only for tax years prior to 2018. A suit does not qualify.

> how would the government have any idea that you bought that suit for work?

Because your work tells the IRS. I have expensed a shit ton of stuff and I don't say anything about that to the IRS when I file my taxes. I'm hopping that the W2 says enough.

I have never spent more than 90 minutes doing my taxes, and I have done them myself (on paper or with software) for 20 years.

Okay, sure. But wouldn’t it be great if for some portion of the population, they really don’t have to do a thing (because they think the government got it right)? Isn’t that better than everyone having to spend at least 10-15 minutes?

How much taxpayer money will be spent compiling taxes for all working adults in the U.S.? I'm guessing this is more work than it's worth. I don't think filling out a simple form once a year is that much to ask, even if it takes as long as a few hours to do.

Edit: Not sure why I have negative points here, I was just saying that the process of implementing a system to actually get people their taxes and accommodating all the edge cases and ensuring everything is perfect enough that people literally don't have to do anything is probably not worth it compared to doing a check of submissions against the IRS own findings. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, I'm all ears and not super knowledgeable on the system (obviously)

EDIT2: Also, not implying that it can't be done, just that it's not worth it to the IRS to do something like that. Seems like otherwise it already would have been done?

The same amount of work that goes into verification systems to cross check your manual entry against all of your financial data they’re ingesting from payroll, investment firms, and other data providers.

It’s asinine to think the IRS should not be in the business of calculating your tax liability and providing you a friendly way to square up, free of charge, when they’re already doing most of the effort required (and have spent the government funds to do so).

Isn't the whole idea that it's a sort of verification? We propose what we made and what we owe, and another entity has their own proposal of what you made and what you you owe.

I'm just spit balling here, I don't have a strong opinion on it either way.

The IRS is friendly enough to accept your proposal and then confirm if you’re right or not (to their standards). It’s not a negotiation. That’s why this is annoying. There is no value in the majority of filers going through the process so Intuit can profit.

The IRS already does most of this work, lest you be tempted to claim that you made $7 last year and nevertheless fed your 118 dependents. It’s just not being shared with you....

150 million filings (not counting retired and children), on a 3Ghz CPU core? Not terrible long. Maybe they get fancier with a dual core box.

How much does it already cost the tax payers by paying these third parties like TurboTax to do it? It would be cheaper for the public to have the IRS do it since they are doing it already anyway.

> 1040EZ

There is no 1040EZ anymore, with the change to the postcard^W (at least one) full 8x11 sheet of paper that's similar to the EZ but that everyone begins by filling out.

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