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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

In the USA the government also knows the money you make. They have all the data they need to be able to generate a pre-filled draft, and taxpayers could use that as a starting point and modify it if they needed to take a large tax credit for installing solar panels, or some other such thing which the government doesn't necessarily know about.

But it's against the law. The law specifically prohibits the tax agency (IRS) from providing pre-filled tax forms for taxpayers. Why? Who knows... I can't read the minds of Senate and House members! But I'd very confidently place a bet that it's entirely because of careful lobbying by the two companies (Intuit and H&R Block) who make large amounts of money off the current system.

References:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22596072/irs-turbota...

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you...

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That was my point.

They know the money you make, they can make it free and easy but they don't want to cut the middleman.

Even were this not the case—short of an arrest, there is no way for the federal government to “serve you” in a contactable manner—whereas my sense is that this is not the case in Estonia and a growing number of spam nations, ie the government can mandate that citizens be reachable digitally (e.g. portal login is sufficient). The IRS has no inexpensive and scalable way of proving that the person on my end of the Internet is the person with the SSN in the filling (login.gov is great but not pushed throughout all the service branches).

I think the bigger issue is the complexity of personal taxes in the US. The technology is a solved problem. Australia has had a government provided free tax client since 1998 with pre-fill facilities, which was retired & moved to a web portal in 2016.

You have entrenched interests keeping the whole process as difficult as possible.

I have to disagree here. It's not about the middleman. They probably know the income you made -- but they may also not know all the income you made. Self reporting of taxes is standard in many countries for this reason. People run small businesses, freelance, get cash payments, tips, etc that are outside their normal (reported) income. You are required to report this, even if the IRS doesn't know about it. That's why they will never send you pre-filled forms. They want you to report everything -- and they're certainly not going to make easier to skip reporting some of your income.

> Self reporting of taxes is standard in many countries for this reason.

A person up the comment chain in Spain said that's not the case there, and i can confirm the same for France - everything they know is pre-filled, and it's up to you to declare the rest. Of course some people will underreport, but so will those willing to in the American system ( for tips, cash payments, freelancing they can be fairly certain the IRS can't know). Nothing changes besides middlemen lining their pockets and regular people losing time.

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