Direct File officially opens in 12 pilot states

We're getting what we're getting becuase we're keep buying the ruse, the status quo, instead of insisting on a system that protects us in the way the founding documents intend.

Rather it's about end-user security habits, their credulity of arbitrary domains, and the mental load of noticing risks.

Imagine the IRS had an online payment portal, do you believe it should it be advertised as pay.irs.gov or as paymytaxes.com? (Or perhaps pay-my-taxes.com or pay.taxes.com is the real one?)

The `.gov` tld is explicitly for US gov tasks. Whether the service is trustworthy or not is a different question. Whether it makes sense to use an external service for identification is another.

But if it's used for official means, they should at least get a branding contract and brand and host it properly. If only because the governance of `.gov` can and should be used to mark things official.

So instead of funding it, we continue issuing 95% of maintenance funding each boxing round between showboating legislators issuing continuing resolutions.

The argument is that for the tax system to work, collection should live in a silo: drug dealers should pay tax without fear of prosecution (except for tax evasion), etc. This is the same reason TSA (if its mission were to keep people safe) should not look for anything but threats: we don’t want drug smugglers to invest in concealment technology when they fly.

The downside of the IRS using login.gov is that it theoretically could make interagency data sharing easier. In practice, though, it would probably makes things more secure.

USPS could offer to charge me for ad-free delivery, but they don't.

USPS pressures recipients to fetch and sift and dispose junk mail because there might be a critically important package. That's abusive. It's extortionate.

If you declare what they say, and it turns out to be wrong, they won't punish you for it.

so the old couple with papers strewn out over the table just keep doing that

the turbotax e-filers keep doing that

the “I know a guy” people keep doing that

and people that stop being dependents last year are going to use this

not much objectivity in this

As a Brazilian who has been using free government-provided tools to submit my taxes for decades (up to when I moved to Ireland, where I don't even need to do that), this is very interesting to me.

My point was more that there wasn't really a need to reinvent this wheel in terms of everything else. Not only is there a battle tested production system serving millions already, big chunks of it are in a MIT github repo.

That said I understand why the IRS doesn't just want to copy another country's. Not invented here and all that. But from the various countries systems I've used...the UK one is fantastic. Not just tax...same pretty clean UI and design across all the big gov sites.

People also like to get steady paychecks. In any progressive tax system, anyone who leaves a job mid-year would either mean everyone would have to have paychecks that varied or job changers would have a discrepancy at the end.

Having paychecks varying due to taxes would no doubt be spun by some as “theater to make you hate you taxes”.

Homeowners with mortgages probably don’t want to share those details with their employer, out of some combination of “it’s none of their business” and “could they use that information against me somehow?”

I get that filing taxes is annoying, but trying to set things up so my payroll department eliminates that seems the wrong path versus making the front door to the filing system easier to use.

The direct file is just for W-2. I don’t think it can even handle 1099-INT or DIV

An efficient economic system is inherently complicated. It should support people who take chances, people who start businesses, and people who innovate. At the same time, the system has to protect itself from people who want to exploit the benefits afforded to people who add value.

Unsuprisingly these constraints will inherently complicate the process.

All these armchair accountants believing they could devise a better tax system shows their ignorance rather than their expertise.

Do you want to see bureaucracy and inefficiency? Go start a business in Germany and compare it to starting a business in the USA.

I think doing taxes in the US can be an enlightening process. It has many benefits, it shows you how much you made, where the taxes go, and that recognition makes politicians less eager to nilly-willy raise taxes.

And with that it does keep your taxes lower, there is no doubt about that.

You spend a few hours and around 50 bucks each year but in return you save thousands. It is a much better deal than the alternative.

If you're doing all that crazy stuff you mentioned, then you're gonna need a tax prep specialist, yeah. But you're in a tiny, tiny minority if you're doing any of that, and you're almost unique if you're doing all of it. So it's OK if the system doesn't optimize for that very special case.

If you're just managing a W-2 and a few 1099s, and maybe one or two of the crazy things you mentioned, then it's easy to just do your own taxes and skip the tax prep scam industry. It takes me about two hours to do mine & my wife's. Most of it is just manually entering data into the IRS's Free Fillable Forms website, and then doing some basic calculator math, then copying most of the same info over to our state taxes. It's not trivial, and it will be a little frustrating your first time doing it, but it's about on the order of middle school math class exam. Not fun, but not graduate level physics or anything.

If you do screw up, the IRS will politely let you know your error and how to fix it. It's not a big deal. (Unless you're intentionally trying to hide something. Don't do that.)

[0] https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

They have.

Interestingly, I actually have trouble to do this with my HK job. There is no way to do this in my company. I have to pay the tax every year in "a giant lump sum".

Its the same in the USA for most workers. You file your taxes at the end of each year to confirm all the numbers are correct, and report deductions.

Many (most?) people in the US pay their taxes by withholding, which comes out of each paycheck. But if not, quarterly payments are generally required. You can make payments monthly if you like, but for determining if payments were timely, they'll be aggregated by quarters.

> I always wondered why giant tax jurisdictions never try to just do one single non-micro-optimized tax rate ladder across everyone and zero other taxes / deduction / special regimen etc.

All the wacky deductions and special credits and what not are implementation of economic policies. Credits encourage behavior, and taxes discourage it. For some, a paperwork burden is enough to discourage behaviors.

> France collects directly from salary, so now there's no tax return for the vast majority of tax payers, it's a bit riskier since you can't escape it, but... can't do much simpler.

The US does withholding, but it's not necessarily correct for many reasons; some good, some bad. If income tax was a flat rate with no deductions, withholding would be enough. But other sources of income, such as bank interest or stock sales, usually don't have withholding, so you'd need to pay those taxes separately. And your employer may not know about your spouse's income, etc. And, people like getting a refund, even it doesn't make fiscal sense.