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Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

I don't want the tax code simplified, I want them to send me a tax bill and for that to be the end of the story for those of us not running a business.

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We can do both of those things only if we mandate a lot more financial data sharing with the government.

All financial data should be shared with the government. Also, the government should have access to your ID and social security number and address.

Easier said than done. Given the depth and breadth of the tax code and the types of information that might be relevant, I don't see how it could be automated as-is without violating the 4th amendment.

Where does automation come into this?

Why anymore they already have a copy of everything my work, brokerages, and banks have.

W2s and 1099s are common, but they are a very small part of what someone could have on their 1040. If, as proposed above, we'd want to automate it without simplifying the tax code, there is way more information required. You'd need to know nearly every exchange of value that someone makes and why they did it. And they'd need to more closely track where people live, travel, work, etc.

FedNow seeks to facilitate adoption of these practices: https://explore.fednow.org/

FedNow is for payments. That is a small subset of the information needed to determine someone's tax given the current landscape of credits and deductions.

A generic link to the FedNow website doesn't even begin to substantiate your claim. To start with, where is there any evidence that FedNow intends to share any information about individual payments with the Treasury department?

That is currently the legal responsibility of the financial institutions (for payments over a certain amount), not the ACH network. The ACH system doesn't have information like SSNs or EINs to associate with individual payments.

Does FedNow have a plan to start gathering and requiring that information from depository financial institutions just to do a simple bank transfer?

I mean, for myself personally, they already have everything from my bank, brokerage and employer and my job is to send them a copy of a bunch of forms they already have and have them do calculations they already did.

And while many of the people on this forum direct deposit their salary from their single white-collar job into a bank and take the standard deduction, tens of millions of Americans don't.

That's not to say it wouldn't be impossible to automate our taxes, but we'd probably want to tweak quite a few things in the tax code if we wanted to make automatic filing work without either being onerous or inaccurate.

The system I've heard people recommend is that the government gives you a tax form with everything filled out and you can either pay that or redo it yourself with corrections.

What data sharing?

A very significant number of people take the standard deduction and only include data in their return that has already been provided to the government by their employer and perhaps their brokerage and retirement management firms.

Yes, the IRS could prepare a return with the data they already have.

But that wouldn't be a system that would be ...

> the end of the story for those of us not running a business.

as claimed above

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