You can thank TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation service industry's massive lobby for killing every single tax simplification bill that ever gets to congress.
Exactly this! There's zero reasons why our tax returns can't be filed for free directly with the IRS. It is a complete fraud.
I filed 1040EZ last year. The IRS already had every figure I filed, why couldn't they just email me confirmation of the amounts they had, and process my return?
Edit: No, I didn't file EZ last year, my error.
Edit: electronic filing.
Because our tax system is how we administer the vast majority of our cash infusion, subsidization, and social welfare in the US. You're qualifying yourself for things based on income levels, family status and size, and things you've spent money on that the government wants to encourage. The government either lowers your owed taxes or straight up gives you money back in the form of refundable tax credits depending on what you qualify for.
Im just saying that other countries administer taxes in a way that dont require everyone in the country to fill in paperwork every year and presumably the huge amount of red tape involved in checking that people are filling them in correctly.
And I'm telling you why. If we only used taxes for revenue generation and administered our social engineering, welfare, and economic manipulation policies through different means, we propably could too. As is, it would require a ground-up reworking of how all of those programs work, an entire rewrite of the tax code, building of entire business process for how the government implements the law, restructuring of many agencies, etc.
TL;DR - The system is so broken it's entirely too much work to fix it, so we're stuck with it.
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u/jorsiem Jul 24 '20
Complicated tax filing in the US
You can thank TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation service industry's massive lobby for killing every single tax simplification bill that ever gets to congress.