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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

You don’t file a form with the IRS when you get married, have a child, divorce, pay for daycare, spend an unusual amount of income on healthcare, enroll at a local community college, leave your job, switch to selling pottery on eBay, buy a house, inherit money from the death of a relative, …

We could have IRS forms and the IRS maintaining an expansive database to cover all tax-relevant events and amounts, but that hardly seems desirable.

Federal income taxes are complex. Everyone will trip over that complexity multiple times in their lives, Federally-provided “easy file” or not.

EDIT: Just look at the qualifying criteria for the EITC, simultaneously one of the most important tax credits that many eligible low-income filers miss, and a massive source of tax fraud.

https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...

How in the world does the IRS figure out automatically if you’re eligible?

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All of this can be provided to the IRS through a crud interface in your IRS account and it’s entirely desirable to make paying taxes as easy and cost efficient as possible.

Automate what can be automated, make what cannot straightforward.

The claim was:

For most tax payers in the US, the government has all of the necessary information to calculate tax liability through W-2, 1099, and other filings from third parties.

They do not. And I think most Americans would recoil at the idea of giving them what they would need to compute liability under the bulk of current law.

So we’re really talking about a “public option” for tax filing software. The Treasury Department is giving it a try, we’ll see how it goes.

My comment was specifically to rebut this weak claim you put forth:

> We could have IRS forms and the IRS maintaining an expansive database to cover all tax-relevant events and amounts, but that hardly seems desirable.

If it’s tax relevant, why would they not be collecting and then storing a record of it for the relevant period of time? That is their responsibility: to store, process, and maintain this tax-relevant information in order to compute taxes or refunds due.

Again, look at the EITC eligibility. It includes information like which partner is supplying more than 50% of the support in a household. Primary residence qualification has a similar requirement. The IRS does not track anyone’s primary residence from year-to-year without the taxpayer telling them, and doesn’t assume they know. This is a good thing.

But they could, trivially, using homestead exemption public record data wrt primary residence. EITC can be an attestation online. I prefer systems that prevent tax fraud. If you want to prevent institutional overreach, that’s a governance issue, not “better they just can’t find the fraud.”

In France you have a basic way of pre declaring such things, then your "simple" money sources are pre declared (salary, dividends and interests, also public interest donations you did) then the situation is carried over unless you go and change it. You often mostly just have to look that everything seems alright (it generally is) and click OK.

> You don’t file a form with the IRS when you get married, have a child, divorce, pay for daycare...

Er, yes you do? I'm pretty sure all of the things you listed are explicitly included in the 1040 and associated tax forms we have today. Daycare expenses, for example, are supplied in form 2441: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-2441

This seems like pure FUD. The claim isn't that easy file would work for all people, the claim is that the present system is needlessly opaque in a way that benefits only the tax prep middle-men. More generally, it's really hard to claim that the US can't possibly accomplish something that many other countries already do.

The claim was that the IRS had all this information for most Americans without the content of the 1040’s they have to file today.

You're interpreting "tax liability" to include every possible deduction, when I think it's perfectly clear that OP was referring to taxable income before deductions.

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