IRS unveils 'paperless processing initiative' for taxpayers | Hacker News Reader

IRS unveils 'paperless processing initiative' for taxpayers

cnbc.com

32 pointsgmays9 comments

There really needs to be some option you can choose that's like "I don't want to cheat on my taxes like a billionaire and pay 3 percent, but I also don't want to spend 2 weeks of my life scrambling to recover documents from 20 different banks and past employers so I can pay a normal rate instead of 70 percent".

In Australia, the ATO knows everything. Employment income for a start, but also bank account interest, dividends, health insurance payments, and a lot more. For the average person, the pre-fill is all you need and you can just submit the return as-is.

Not sure why the US isn’t able to do that. All employers and banks have your SSN, right? Sharing data with the IRS at the end of the tax year isn’t rocket science.

Short answer: Lobbyists.

Basically, the Intuits, H.R. Blocks, Jackson-Hewetts, et al., stand to lose a large chunk of their revenues if the IRS did everyone's taxes for them.

Additionally, those in power, or with enough influence over those with power, do not want to fund the IRS to have easy visibility into all of those possible revenue streams in an easily correlated manner.

I....don't hate this. "Here's 33%, it's probably more than I can get away with paying but I don't want to deal with the hassle" is absolutely something I would sign up for.

FWIW my effective tax rate last year was like 28%. To know down to the penny how much is going to taxes and not having to worry about filing would be a dream.

What would be really powerful is if they included all the documents that were sent to them already without you having to upload them:

Here is your W2 as sent by your employer

Here is your 1099-INT as sent by your bank

Here is your 1099-B as sent by your brokerage form

Please upload other forms not sent to the IRS and any add in any other income and deductions.

This would really make me happy and save me many hours of time, and likely save millions if not billions of hours across the US.

Can’t you already do this using their online account transcript? I’m not yet comfortable using that as the source of truth at this current time but it seems like they do let you at least view what was sent to them albeit in pretty raw form. It looks like all the forms are converted into dot-matrix printed text documents.

>What would be really powerful is if they included all the documents that were sent to them already without you having to upload them

They already do. Any taxpayer should be able to get their own "Wage and Income" transcript via self-service at the IRS web site. This includes the standard info documents you listed plus many others.

However the timing of when they become available might require filing for an extension (i.e. after April 15 due date). Still have to calculate and pay the tax due by the due date.

More importantly, the taxpayer receives their own direct copy of these documents long before they are available from the IRS.

[dupe]

News and discussion from two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36976331

Reply on news.ycombinator.com