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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy we still don't get a pre-filled out form that you can simply verify and sign. Done. Amend if needed.

Bonus: An option to indicate where ~5% of your taxes goes to.

1. That's how it's done in France AFAICT. In April/May we get the pre-filled form on our tax site [0,1] and make sure it's ok, then tick a box.

2. We also have a website for that (though it's probably just a glorified multiplication and graph) [2]

[0] https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier

[1] it looks like https://www3.impots.gouv.fr/simulateur/calcul_impot/2019/sim...

[2] https://aquoiserventmesimpots.gouv.fr/

In UK there is not even a box to tick. Vast majority of people don't ever file a tax return themselves, I've recently had a discussion with someone who has worked in the UK for 15 years and he was surprised to hear that tax returns are even a thing - it's so automatic that he has never even thought about it.

There are still some things I had to fix, for instance: support payments from my parents, which are tax-deductible for them, and that I have to declare; the fact I got in a PACS [0].

If I moved abroad, I'd be worried some things like that get missed for whatever reason ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_solidarity_pact

Yes, of course there's loads of circumstances that require you to fill a tax return manually. But even then the sections about your employment are filled automatically based on the returns submitted by your employer.

The thing is that if you are a British resident who only works one job and doesn't receive money from any other source, then such person would literally never have to think about their tax return - it will be done fully automatically without any input from them whatsoever.

Do charities in the UK report donations to the government? Do they not have business expense deductions? That's the kind of thing that usually requires someone to fill out a return.

The donor doesn't have to file anything, and charity gets the extra money. When donating to UK charity you specify your name and address and confirm you are a UK taxpayer. You pay in after-tax money, the charity then gets extra money from UK government at the standard tax rate.

Yeah, in Sweden it's trivial to do your taxes: you log into a website online, you check that the salary number seems accurate, and if you have no amendments, you just click "OK" (more or less). You sign it with something called BankID, which is an internet-identity thing you can get from your bank. I think it took me all of 7 minutes last year.

Planet Money just did a story on this, someone in California tried to get Ready Return passed (which does almost what you're stating). It didn't pass by one vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyReturn

Don’t even have to sign one in Finland. You get a prefilled form and if there are no amendments to be done then that’s it.

I'm Chilean. It just took me ~40 seconds to complete my tax declaration, skimmed through all companies involved (employer, banks and pension fund), typed in my bank account for my tax return and done.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/278...

The single thing that bugged me the most this year was on my state taxes. I got this nice W2, with copies for the federal tax filing, the state tax filing, and my own copy. But my state doesn't want me to send them the W2. No, they want me to print out their own special little additional form, and transcribe the numbers from the W2 onto that. Seriously, WTF?

I actually thought about civil disobedience on this - just staple the state copy of the W2 there and let them deal with it. Maybe next year...

in Spain we have that option, we can get a draft electronically an accept it, but still is far from a user friendly experience

Planet money just released an episode explaining why that doesn't happen: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/epis...

tl;dr: All the infrastructure is in place and everybody loves the idea (Literally 99% approval in the test-run of 80,000 taxpayers); but Intuit (Makers of the TurboTax software, who get rich thanks to people's confusion and frustration), spent $28 million lobbying against it.

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