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Comment by robert_foss | Hacker News Reader

Having moved from Sweden to Germany I appreciate Elster existing (and not being solely paper based unlike the other many many German beaurocratic exercises one has to Wade through).

However it misses the most important part. In Sweden your tax declaration comes pre-populated with data they already have, like salary/pension/savings/stock sales/etc., and you can either just accept it as it is or make changes to the already existing data.

It's so easy that you in fact just can send an SMS (that is verified to be from you) to the taxation agency saying that their suggestion is right.

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Banks send you letter the weeks before with capital gains, interest payments and employers send you letters with totals of taxes paid. They note if anything needs to be done manually.

The total time spend combined for me filing taxes for the last 10 years is less than 15 minutes. And the reason it isn't less than 3 is because I've logged in (using biometrics and password on my phone that is a hardware token to my bank wich is used for instant secure identification) to check that everything looks OK and to add the commuting at least 10 km/day on bike deduction.

In Germany, it's actually similar. You can opt in to include the data submitted for you by various sources and include them in your tax declaration. The only drawback is you need to select each one (salary, basic info, church tax info) to import it into your declaration, and that you need to wait until end of February since that's the deadline for third parties to submit your data.

Also, some things, like capital gains, you don't even need to declare if you used only German brokers, since they are legally required to submit it for you.

It's called "Vorausgefüllte Steuererklärung" (see https://www.elster.de/eportal/infoseite/belegabruf_%28privat...).

Brazil is going that way too. Currently only public servants and people with an expensive X.509 certificate get this pre-populated tax return, though.

In Brazil we have that option, but one must have a cryptographic token accepted by the government to access it. People usually don't have them, while companies are required to have one.

It takes many clicks and requires to wait for a letter once but Elster offers that too (under the term "Belegabruf"). It then prepopulates the tax return with the data they have.

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