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I lived in Australia for a time and the taxes were a breeze. Enter a few identifiers like tax id number, it fetches the data from the government, confirm the data, done in 15 minutes. I couldn't believe it.

Taxes and health care in America are just so broken.

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I think this is relatively new. 10 or so years ago you still had to download a desktop app that looked like it was written in 1995 and go through each page.

Ha that's the app I'm talking about, it was about a decade ago. It was still mind bogglingly simple compared to US taxes.

The desktop app I’m thinking of was called “e-Tax”. More recently you could complete your return through the MyGov website with all data pre-populated. Perhaps there was a transition period where they were still using e-Tax but also could pre-populate the data. But before that, you still had to fill it all in from paper forms.

It’s a while since I’ve had to complete an Australian tax return.

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