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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

Also important is what happens to a business that gets caught. If the punishment is 'pay back taxes plus a moderate penalty, and here we'll even set up a convenient payment plan for you', then cheating on taxes is effectively a free roll. You have a 95% chance of saving a ton of money, and 5% chance of paying only a bit more than you would have paid anyway if you followed the laws.

That said, the absurd complexity of the tax code is also a problem here, since you don't want the government doling out bankruptcy-inducing penalties on businesses that might just be making an honest mistake. The whole system clearly needs an overhaul. It should be simple enough that when a business severely underpays, it will be very likely that they did so on purpose, and therefore a large, deterrent-worthy penalty can be justified.

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The complexity is by design to make it harder to audit and easier to hide cheating.

Given clear and straightforward code/laws, it becomes hard to cheat.

That is absolutely not true. Much of the complexity of the tax code is present in order to clearly prescribe rules in edge case situations in order to reduce judgement calls that would inevitably tilt in favor of the filer.

The complexity isn't driven by the IRS, they've been pushing for simplification but lobbyist for businesses push for rules changes, and lobbyists for the tax filing industry push for rules to solidify the need for their industry.

Just like Healthcare and Gun control, there are industries and 3rd parties with vested interests in keeping the system complicated and hard to track or enforce so they can profit.

The complexity is by design because congress for over 100 years has been creating laws one by one to give preferential treatment to various groups that they want to favor at the expense of others.

The consequence is that for anything moderately or more complex there is actually no correct answer on what your tax liability is. What is the value of an intangible asset? How do you define novelty for the R&D tax credit? There are thousands of intersecting rules that change your liability and many of those are up to interpretation.

> The complexity is by design to make it harder to audit and easier to hide cheating.

You ascribe too much to malice, when it is typically just plain old politics. Representative will only vote to tax X if his/her constituent Y is excluded somehow. Add these types of items over many bills/years and you get what we have today.

The tax industry lobbies heavily to influence tax code and laws to maintain their relevance. The IRS has tried many times to either simplify the tax code or offer services to tax payers to simplify reconciling obligations.

Remember in 2016 when the IRS wanted to mail out prefilled tax forms that tax payers would just sign and send back for or with a check? Remember how the tax industry lobbied Congress to pass the Free File Act of 2016 which permanently bars the IRS from providing free filing services?

I suppose that wasn't malice.

What about when big corporations lobby Congress to not close loop holes?

http://www.citizen.org/documents/corporate-tax-lobbying-repo...

Call it "plain old politics" or call it "malice" but either way it's intentional.

If your mistake is large enough that the penalty puts you out of business it was probably a pretty serious mistake. Or your business wasn't healthy enough to survive in the first place.

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