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Comment by dustbunny | Hacker News Reader

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The Canadian government doesn't provide a DirectFile equivalent. The closest thing we have is Wealthsimple's tax software which just _happens_ to be free (and for what it's worth, in my experience, is also pretty good).

I would love for the Canadian government to release free tax software analogous to DirectFile!

It also takes me a while to collect and calculate all the information required for the home office tax credits and the cost basis for stocks I've sold or moved to my RRSP or TFSA. I probably spent six hours on it this year.

personally i'd prefer a tax system that was easy enough to understand in an hour. like, really simple, instead of a complex bag of sticks and carrots. less waste, less time, more clarity on how much productivity is partitioned off for government services.

would really render moot the "TurboTax lobbying", "government already has info", etc conversations.

NZ Tax system is like this, takes me an hour to do my company yearly returns on their website, an hour every month for the GST and 15 mins every month for the payroll and kiwisaver (pension) of two employees.

The fact they have an "other" category in the IR10 form that captures the breakdown means I don't have to worry too much about terms that mean nothing to me or my business and 90% of my earnings can just goes in that. No need for an accountant as long as you have good separation of business and personal transactions.

Doing tax is always going to be unpleasant, I don't see any downside to the government making it easier for the person filing the return.

People have been fighting that battle for a while now. It never seems to get off the ground

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax

Moving from a progressive tax structure to a (mostly) regressive one is a bad idea, so I am glad FairTax never went anywhere.

I am all for simplifying the tax code but consumption taxes are the wrong way to go about it.

"Fair tax" is just an attempt to lower the tax rate of higher incomes that get hit by progressive brackets. Same for "flat tax". Calculating the tax rate is easy, the real problem is always to determine what gets taxed. That's where the loopholes are.

I haven't seen any evidence on "government already has info". It might get all the info if they send a taxpayer into audit. But there's no indication it really knows without audits.

No, the government already has almost all of your information every year from the start. Every time you get a W-2, a copy is sent to the IRS. Same with the vast majority of most tax forms. That why, if you lose any of your forms (at least the ones that say something akin to "This information is being furnished to the Internal Revenue Service."), you can request them from the IRS[1].

Some investment-related returns aren't sent to the IRS but I would estimate that for 90% of people, their taxes could be accurately calculated by the information the IRS has on file.

Additionally, I guarantee that these calculations are being made by the government anyway. If you file a tax return that is mathematically incorrect, you are very likely to receive a correction letter from the IRS[2]. This isn't an audit, it's just a letter saying that your taxes were wrong and they redid them for you, with a new outcome.

1. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/transcript-types-for-individ... (see "Wage and income transcript")

2. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/understanding-your-cp12-noti...

The IRS has your 1099s and W-2s. For most people filing your taxes is this weird quiz where you file your taxes and the IRS checks your return against what they already know.

sorry, doesn't apply to US, but does apply to other Western governments (note i'm not endorsing this, just pointing out it exists): https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-s...

Yes, although it's not always ideal too. E.g. for personal business you're required to conduct all transactions through a dedicated business bank account. But it's easily avoidable by using a different account, and there are cases when you cannot use the business bank account even if you want. But taxes are computed automatically from only that bank account. To stay honest, you need to decline automatic tax calculation and file separate forms to pay more taxes, no one does that.

It takes me half an hour with FreeTaxUSA . It can be easy, but TurboTax doesn't like their software to be easy for some reason.

It took me about that long to do both fed and state with Free File Fillable Forms. I was so surprised, I wondered why I didn't check it out sooner. I think most Americans can do this just as easily.

I know folks outside the U.S. like to riff on us for our complicated taxes and the pay-for filing lobbies, and yes, they have reason to. But, I really think the issue is that we folk in the U.S. are just too scared to try what really is a simpler method.

I do Free File Fillable Forms, and I’m something of an amateur tax expert - friends and family come to me for advice. But yet every year there’s some weird edge case that I have to figure out by digging through the Schedule D instructions or the 1040 instructions or… Sometimes I’ll go through one of the paid systems up until the submission step where you have to pay, to make sure that my numbers line up.

The system is just really complicated if you have anything weird, and “anything weird” happens a lot.

"some reason" is that they upsell you on additional features and "audit protection" in case you misuse their complicated software.

FreeTaxUSA is great but it took me much longer to figure how to deal with sales of RSUs.

Even easier if your employer automatically syncs with CRA. No filling in forms at all.

In other countries, the government does the taxes for you, and sends you a pre-filled form that you can amend or change.

yeah employer has always synced, so it (wealth simple) autofills basically everything. then i just add my family specific stuff

just want to chime in to say that it's around that fast in the US as well

Most people will just have to enter their W2, choose the standard deduction, and then click submit. There are free tools that do this already like FreeTaxUSA.

That said, I have 2 gripes with the current system:

1. companies like TurboTax lobbying to prevent the government from building their own tool... if TurboTax is genuinely better then people will still use it even if the govt builds a tool.

2. the tax code being so complex that it's profitable for wealthy people to avoid taxes with special deductions and hire lawyers to defend them from the overstretched IRS.

== it's around that fast in the US as well==

Do you have a source for this claim, because I found this:

==Individual income tax return filing is the most time-consuming element of the tax system, with the average taxpayer spending 13 hours to comply with the Form 1040. For individuals with business income, the average amount of time it takes to file taxes is even higher: 24 hours.==

https://money.com/filing-taxes-time-money-burden/

Maybe I'm just extremely fast but I can't imagine it taking that long because like I mentioned, it's just those 3 steps for most taxpayers. It's hard to explain unless you've actually filed taxes in the US which most foreigners haven't.

The estimates you shared are based on survey responses so you'd have to take them with a grain of salt. All the other websites are repeating the same survey.

13 hours is wild. I bought a house, got married, sold a bunch of stock, and qualified for a bunch of deductions last year. We filed jointly in maybe an hour and a half, including finding all of the paperwork. I'm pretty good with numbers and instructions, so I could see 4-6 being the average.

It was through freetaxusa, maybe handwriting balloons the job a bit? But it looks like only 14% file physically.

13 hours is an insane estimate. Its never taken me more than an hour or two. There's no way that's the average

What makes it easier than US taxes?

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