Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

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Addendum: make filing taxes a largely automated task where data are shared with the government so the online submission is merely a review of what is already on your W-4 (or what have you). Make it so dead simple it should take no more than 15 minutes for the average citizen with a computer. Anything that is purchased or paid to you should already be built in: if you paid mortgage interest, the deduction is automatically applied from data supplied by the lender; if you installed solar panels on your roof, the vendor will have already informed the government and the correct deduction is pre-applied; if you registered a corporation in your name, the filing service will relay your costs to the government, as will your lawyer, if you did not file personally. If you paid interest on your student loans, the taxman will know long before April 15.

Tack on a processing fee for manual deductions that scales with the potential cost of an audit.

This is pretty much how tax filing works in Taiwan (even for me as an expat here). Doing it in software (not great software but in the end result effective) and it's all just a review and crosscheck. Worked like a charm for the last 7 years. And even if you don't use the software, in the tax office it's about 10 mins to get everything done. Pretty much all info is in the central system already.

It really frustrates me that the US tax system is so complex you need a package like turbotax to get it done right, and the company uses my fees to lobby congress to keep this common sense from becoming reality.

In Finland personal taxes are pretty much automated. Every year I simply reviewed the taxation summary I automatically received in post, and accepted it by not doing any corrections (which can be sent via online service, or via mail). So basically I wouldn't do anything at all. In half a year I'd either get returns, or would have to pay the missing taxes if I underpaid during the year.

There are many cases where you would still do corrections, such as if you're owning a rental property and did some renovations there. Most of officially regulated things such as capital gains are usually automatically reported by your bank/stock holding service, though.

This is in quite a stark contrast to places where there's a lobby to change the laws yearly to make sure citizens have to use professional services for declaring their taxes.

You can't make it "dead simple" when some of the concepts are not "dead simple." Let me give you the example of debt vs equity. Just because the company/lender codes it as such, does not make it so. What might be treated as interest deductions may ought to be treated as dividends instead. It may be difficult to make this entirely automated.

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