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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but what about the >95% of the population which doesn't fall under weird edge cases?

Why doesn't the US provide a free 10-minute online wizard for them, like plenty of other countries are already doing?

Even the complex cases fit into an overarching tool. Most people in the UK don't submit tax returns because they don't have any income beyond their salary. Even if you do, you then use the tool which asks you a series of questions like "do you have a student loan?" and "did you receive any dividend income?", then you have to fill in some next level detail if those are true. I'm sure there are people with weird tax arrangements that need to work outside of the wizard, but I'd wager it was less than 1 in 1000, and those people tend to have the money to pay for fancy accountants to do it for them.

This is true for some European countries too. No tax filing is needed for salary only income. I don't remember when I filed my taxes last time.

Basically I only do mine in about 15 minutes, most spend on verifying what I actually paid for things. Because I go over of the basic deduction so I can deduct for workspace, internet and electronic equipment. But the workspace is going away so probably won't bother after this year.

Everything else is fully automatic.

You also only need to fill in a tax return if you have income (or capital gains) above a threshold. SO having some interest paid on a savings account etc or a small side business or selling an asset at a small profit above what you paid for it does not mean you have to make a tax return.

I'm not sure how it is in the US, but in Canada a huge amount of low-income benefits are directly tied to filing your taxes. Most Canadians experienced this in our college years when we got GST (our VAT) refunds due to being low-income adults.

Canada recently announced that they're going to go for automated tax filing and it turns out the biggest cost may not be implementing it, but that they'd end up having to pay out a lot more in benefits to low income people that don't file.

To be clear, i was talking about the UK.

> Most Canadians experienced this in our college years when we got GST (our VAT) refunds due to being low-income adults.

VAT refunds for people on low incomes is something we have in the UK. I think we should!

This program was called IRS Direct File[1], and DOGE/the current administration killed it.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Direct_File

Because it is (or was it the time this article was written) against the law. The company that owned the tax preparation software lobby to Congress to pass a law requiring that the IRS not provide a free and easy way for people to submit their taxes.

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