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Comment by GoldenMonkey | Hacker News Reader

We shouldn’t have to file at all. Many European countries don’t. W-2 employees already have their taxes taken out.

The US wants you to pay taxes on your income. All of it. Not just the part that gets reported on a W-2, but also the amount you won in the March Madness office pool. They (and you) didn't get a W-2 for that.

And then there's the other end. Do you itemize? Do you deduct charitable giving? Do you want Goodwill, where you drop off your still-usable stuff, to have to know your Social Security number so that you can deduct that from your taxes?

If the government is going to do my taxes for me, they're going to have to have a much simpler tax code. I'm not necessarily against that, but it's going to be a fairly big change for a fair number of people, as quite a bit that we're used to disappears. Some of that will help us, and some will hurt.

The vast majority of filers have no additional income to report that isn't already reported with their SSN. And the current standard deduction is big enough, many people won't have additional deductions. And all of the "IRS does your taxes" plans actually have it set up so the IRS sends you/have available on their site a return populated with everything they know. So you can do nothing if it's correct or submit changes if you have additional income/deductions/credits.

I live in a developing nation in the southern hemisphere. My government sends me a pre-filled tax return that doesn't account for some deductions that I could take advantage of. If I want to, I can manually file a more detailed return. We're still working on reliable electricity tho, that's much more difficult.

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