I completely agree. I was pretty terrified until I opened the letter and saw a check. I assumed it was an audit.
The thing that is often ignored, unknown, or forgotten, is that it doesn’t have to work this way. Some countries send you an end of year report on how much they collected from you and you can audit them as well. It’s less laborious than our system. I am blissfully unaware of the complications of such a system but I’d like to think that it works better. I’d like to think the people of the IRS would prefer that too.