And the problem is that it is not trivial at all to calculate the right number. I think it is wrong for the government to force such a hard problem on all of their citizens, including the ones with low education.
It is so screwed up that in the past I got a letter from the IRS saying my accountant made a mistake on my stock sales and I owed several thousand dollars. My accountant made the calculations again and showed that the IRS actually owed me $60. I never heard from them after that.
Yeah, I agree with you that the general population shouldn’t have to do their own taxes with the technology that basically everyone now has.
The only 2 reasons I can think of to keep it this way are 1) people doing their own taxes results in at least some of them reporting random self-income and results in a non-trivial amount of extra tax dollars, or 2) tax preparation companies have captured legislators’ votes and the tax prep companies would lose shitloads of money if tax prep was a government responsibility.
And the problem is that it is not trivial at all to calculate the right number. I think it is wrong for the government to force such a hard problem on all of their citizens, including the ones with low education.
It is so screwed up that in the past I got a letter from the IRS saying my accountant made a mistake on my stock sales and I owed several thousand dollars. My accountant made the calculations again and showed that the IRS actually owed me $60. I never heard from them after that.
Yeah, I agree with you that the general population shouldn’t have to do their own taxes with the technology that basically everyone now has.
The only 2 reasons I can think of to keep it this way are 1) people doing their own taxes results in at least some of them reporting random self-income and results in a non-trivial amount of extra tax dollars, or 2) tax preparation companies have captured legislators’ votes and the tax prep companies would lose shitloads of money if tax prep was a government responsibility.
¯\(ツ)/¯
It’s (2), and (1) is just a bonus for them.
It’s number 2.