Hacker News Reader

Comment by Biganon | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where this idea came from (I've seen it on reddit a LOT), but it's the same here in Switzerland: you do it yourself because the tax department has no idea how much you made precisely, what you can deduce from it (expenses you had to do in order to acquire your income), etc. It just makes more sense to have everyone manage their own taxes.

View on HN

The IRS already has most of your income information and much of your deduction information. They already use this to validate if your return makes sense.

In effect, the IRS already does most of a taxpayer's paperwork. Since they do this, it might be nice to provide it to taxpayers for review and correction, rather than making us all start from zero each time.

The higher cost of administration is the part that makes me bug-eyed.

Auto-filing and simplification would be so much cheaper.

The IRS already has a web portal that lets you retrieve your data. This could be executed by adding more info to that. The higher cost of administration on that shouldn't make anyone bug-eyed, no matter how wonderful your idea of auto-filing and simplification is.

> and much of your deduction information

No, no they don't. At most they have your mortgage interest deduction - side hustle expenses, charitable contributions, etc. are not reported to the IRS automatically.

The IRS doesn’t have your deductions, but at the same time most people don’t have enough to itemize anyway, especially since Trump increased the standard deduction for individuals and families.

I think simplifying the tax code first requires trading in our deduction system for a flat tax or lower taxes across the board. Then you could get to a simple postcard bill every year. Too many special interests to let that happen though.

Depends how intricate your taxes are. Perhaps 30 million people file Schedule C, which covers freelance income, gig income, etc.

The IRS will (mostly) know your gross income, but it won't know the exact details about claimable deductions such as business travel, business meals, supplies, etc.

The only way it could know that would be to peer inside your credit-card statements, bank statements, etc. and make judgments about what was work related and what wasn't.

I'd rather do the tallying myself -- which is a chore -- rather than have IRS software make guesses that are a) awfully nosy and b) bound to disadvantage me.

You're right. The IRS emphatically does not have everything. Please accept my deepest and humblest apologies for implying in any way, shape, or form that they do.

In addition to hundreds of millions of W-2s, the also IRS has 1099s and 1098s of various sorts. For the majority of Americans, the IRS already has the majority of their tax data. And the infrastructure already in place to provide this to them. Why not present it along with the opportunity to amend it? Or tally from zero yourself, if you prefer. This is what I intended to communicate earlier, and I can see I failed to be clear.

You're absolutely right. The IRS in no way has everything! Do you think it's maybe worth considering that it might be possible to make many people's lives easier for a very small marginal cost by letting people see what data the IRS already has about them? It might not work for every single person every single time, but it might work for a lot of people a lot of the time.

Thanks, Kalium, but the fault is all mine! I read your original comment too narrowly. It's my apology that is needed, and I hereby submit it.

Thanks for the very helpful clarification. Your argument for provisional disclosure is compelling.

In the UK vast majority of people don't do their own taxes. Your employer pays the tax on your behalf directly from your salary and updates the tax office as to how much you make. In turn, the tax office tells your employer how much tax to pay from your salary, without any input required from yourself.

In fact most people I work with don't even know there is such a thing as a tax deadline every year or anything like that, because....why would they? if you are a normal full time employee there is absolutely no need to file your own taxes. HMRC has all the information it needs to tax you year on year.

>>what you can deduce from it (expenses you had to do in order to acquire your income)

Well, at least here in UK there's practically nothing you can deduct from your taxes if you are a "regular" full time worker, so that solves that issue.

> Your employer pays the tax on your behalf directly from your salary and updates the tax office as to how much you make. In turn, the tax office tells your employer how much tax to pay from your salary, without any input required from yourself.

Same thing happens in the US. When most people file their taxes here, they get money back because they already overpaid.

For example I spent a few thousand trying to launch a business this year, and that is all tax deductible. So I'll file that with my tax form that my employer sends me (with the salary info prefilled), and I'll end up getting some money back because my taxable income is lower than what the gov't expected.

The government automatically doing it doesn't preclude from letting taxpayers be able to amend it. The vast majority of people have simple tax returns, and all that information is already electronically flying around with unique identifiers (social security number).

It's trivial for government to be able to automatically produce a tax return that's basically almost all done for everyone.

This is exactly how South Korea does the taxation. Employeers are required to report employees' incomes and also deduct the tentative tax. The final tax is set by the year-end settlement where you can put documents for income deduction and tax credit to the National Tax Service. Common documents (e.g. credit card expenses count towards income deduction) are electronically available in one place and it is not very hard to get hold of other documents if you are an employee. In the end you pay or get the delta between the tentative tax and the settled tax.

From what I remember in Switzerland, the forms were prefilled, just like neighboring countries. Your salary was automatically takes from your employer, any declared children are carried over year to year etc. Then all you have to do is correct and add any complex stuff

Reply on news.ycombinator.com