Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkr-hn | Hacker News Reader

The fear people have about going to jail over taxes is not really supported by the statistics. It turns out people who work for the IRS aren't stupid and recognize it's hard to pay taxes from jail. Most people who get nailed that way knew exactly what they were doing.

PDF: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

View on HN

That vignette is meant to be sardonic, not realistic. The point is that the government absolutely could just file your taxes for you and send you a check or a bill, if they weren't lobbied by tax prep companies like Intuit and extremists like Grover Norquist.

That's a popular view, but only true for people who don't have any deductions, depreciations, business expenses, mileage, etc. For a large group of people, the IRS can run the math only after you submit the full list of inputs.

This doesn’t preclude the government pre-filling and giving you the option to amend. It would save everyone time, even the people who amend because some information would already be pre-filled.

You could always apply to a refund based on that information. But the government already has 99% of what is needed to file your taxes, they are just not allowed by the lobby of tax preparation.

In sane countries, the "popular view" holds, as it should. Not so much in the US, though. The IRS knows how much I make, I want them to send me a form that says "we think you made this much, if that's true and you have no fancy deductions, sign here".

Then I just sign a form and return it instead of slogging through the bullshit that Intuit et al has lobbied for.

It's a reductio ad absurdam joke

Reply on news.ycombinator.com