Comment by ghostofmycat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghostofmycat | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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