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Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

> Have the government “make” their own version. There would be little attention paid to user experience, since there’s no competition and the bureaucracy has no incentive to create good products.

Empirically, the place I live in (Zürich, Switzerland) has offered excellent government created tax filing software for several years (used to be somewhat monstrous Java apps, but nowadays the software is web based and really convenient to use), for ALL taxpayers, as far as I can tell.

I would argue that there IS an incentive to the government to make tax compliance simple, and keep grumbling to a minimum.

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How does the Swiss tax system work? How are taxes added and/or removed? Do you have tax deductions or other incentives?

The truly weird thing about the American tax system is the way it handles deductions and other incentives. You can't take advantage of them unless you know they're available and request them specifically. This gives the government a real incentive to make the tax code as complicated as possible. If you don't know what deductions are available to you, then you'll probably miss some or all of them and end up paying a lot more money than you would have if the process was more straight forward.

There are all sorts of deductions, and there are also anti-deductions, e.g. imputed rent for homeowners. The more common deductions are enumerated in separate fields, the others you can itemize on more free form input.

It's not like all of those deductions are obvious here either. When we moved back to Switzerland, I had an accountant do my taxes once or twice, but after that, I knew what kinds of deductions I could claim.

Switzerland has no AMT, which is one of the more painful parts of the US filing process in my experience.

Most people use very few deductions, and most people use the same credits it deductions. Tax software shows that's it's trivially simple for the vast majority of of people. Where tax law gets complicated is high net worth, self employment, or business ownership. If love for taxes for these people to be simpler, but realistically if you need these deductions that aren't already captured by the IRS you should be hiring a competent tax professional. There's no reason the vast majority of Americans need to file except that it's intentionally painful to make people hate taxes, the IRS knows how much you make and what you owe because they already receive your tax documents from the organizations that provide them to you.

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