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Comment by dylanjermiah | Hacker News Reader

Have to keep TurboTax and its derivatives in business somehow :)

That's not just a funny comment, it is literally true!

"For more than a decade, Mr. Bankman and a small group of tax experts have called on the government to create a tax preparation method that they say would vastly reduce the time and cost of tax-filing for most people. Intuit has been a primary obstacle to the effort."[0]

[0]: http://nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/personaltech/turbot...

It would be humorous if it wasn't so disheartening.

I've always wondered what would/will happen when the tax code gets so complicated that nobody can understand it, and we have to rely on a machine to interpret it. A sort of brave new world where the inputs are collected by computers, the tax is calculated by computers and taken by computers, all understood only by a small cadre of tax coders. Kind of scary.

Milton Friedman explains tax code complexity brilliantly here:

http://youtu.be/TruCIPy79w8

I've been thinking about this recently too. In Australia the government is looking into using IBM Watson to automatically make administrative decisions, e.g. assess applications for immigrant visas.

I can foresee a future where legislation becomes ever more complex and people defer to Watson as the source of truth as there will be nobody left in the public service who needs to know the actual text of the law.

Fun times ahead.

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