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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the point in the IRS running TurboTax themselves. The IRS should simply keep track of everyone's taxes and automatically send refunds or bills accordingly. Spend any extra money they have on auditing the rich.

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This is how it works in New Zealand. It’s not impossible.

In a lot of countries yes. At the very least the IRS could let you login and see the information they have about your earnings.

You can: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/get-transcript

Data for previous year are not available until well past April 15.

True, but you also don’t really have to file until mid-Oct. (You have to pay a reasonable estimate by the mid-April date, but the practical filing due date is 6 months later than that. See form 4868.)

There's no reason for the delay though. They get you your refund sooner, so they have the past year's data.

I think the idea is that the IRS would buy TurboTax, and then write some sort of bridge that auto-populates TurboTax with all the info it needs so most taxpayers to have very little to do.

But that seems like more steps than you'd need. The IRS already must have the ability to fill in everyone's tax returns, because they're able to calculate what nearly everyone owes, pretty accurately. Since tax returns are basically "follow the instructions and fill in boxes so that you can eventually get a final number", then that must mean that the IRS can already do that.

It's simply insane that this isn't how it's done in the US.

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