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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

> "In the most technologically advanced countries, filing a tax return is free, easy and fast: Instead of taxpayers painstakingly calculating figures themselves, the government provides estimates of what they owe based on the very bank records and wages it already collects. Intuit, maker of the popular tax preparation software, TurboTax, has funnelled millions to oppose every effort to make tax day less painful."

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill...

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That makes no sense. Reporting income is is easy. The IRS will mail you a correction of you make an error.

Deductions are the hard part, which is not govt tracked.

It's easy, but it is not as easy as it should be. They should be able to send me forms pre-filled for all of my sources of income (In my case, and in most cases, they already know all of that information. Some may still need to do some data entry.) What takes me a few hours could take me a few short minutes.

Government doesn't move at Silicon Valley's pace. The ability to cheaply track your income from all sources and bill you directly for your taxes is barely a few decades old.

Plenty of governments in other parts of the world already do this. In Spain (and I assume in most parts of Europe), the govt provides a draft of your return, which most people just accept through their internet bank.

The US is a tad larger and more politically/legally disparate than Spain; those factors alone make it much more challenging.

In New Zealand you don't even have to file a return unless you owe money or have some special stuff going on. When I started working here there was a very simple flow chart ending in one of 2(or 3?) big circles with a letter in it. You find the right letter and write it on the line;done. That's the last I've dealt with Inland Revenue(IRS equivalent).

Intuit successfully got laws passed that prevent the government from communicating to tax payers the information it already has about taxes owed. User name is apt.

PDF forms can do basic math (of the sort that you do when filling out the tax return) but that functionality isn't available on the IRS forms. So every year that means several hours of double and triple-checking things that should be rights only take a few minutes. It's really aggravating to consider that there are people who want the process to be as tedious and difficult as possible.

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