Furthermore, the government has surely implemented the algorithm itself in order to verify submitted tax returns, so the implementation cost of pre-computing everyone's tax should be comparatively small.
Everyone is hating on TurboTax for making money, but they’re pretending the government tax machine has no such motivation, which simply is not true.
Many countries pre-fill the tax return, but require the citizen to submit it. The citizen is responsible for the submitted information, not the government.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161209003500/http://www.ayotte...
[0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/publications...
The only times I've heard of the IRS going after people who unintentionally violated the rules, they were intentionally and obviously violating the spirit of the law but thought they were within the letter and were wrong.
In my experience you can make a good faith effort to figure out what your supposed to owe and pay it. In this case the IRS will treat you fairly and waive all types of fines. Or you can try to aggressively avoid taxes that you should owe in spirit. And in this case you have to be damn sure you're within the letter of the law because the IRS will try to hammer you if you color outside the lines. These seem like two fair options to me. And everyone I know who was slammed by the IRS was doing the latter.