I am not able to find a citation for this, but I would be surprised if more than a small fraction of Americans had significant non-wage, non-financial institution investment income to report. A solution doesn't have to solve a problem for everyone to be useful.

That's just income. There is also the issue of deductions and credits, which covers many more people. The income portion of my taxes takes me about 5 minutes. Most of my time is spent on the deductions and credits portion.

Seventy percent of households take the standard deduction or have no income: https://taxfoundation.org/who-itemizes-deductions/

For most people, taxes are not as complicated as they are made out to be. If you can file a 1040EZ you can fill out the form in 10 minutes. If you have a "normal" return with mortgage interest it's still not that difficult.

Most people are just afraid of making mistakes (it's not a big deal if you do, you'll get a notice and you file an amended return). Or maybe they just feel their time is too valuable to spend an afternoon filling out forms. But most individual tax returns are really not that complicated.

Making sense out of the ambiguously-worded instructions has always been the complicated part for me. I have always found this to be infuriatingly stressful, so I hire professionals to deal with it.

The trick is to not try to infer anything that is not there. The instructions are dumbed down to the point they actually are hard to understand. Just do literally what they say and don't think about whether it makes any sense.

I would be willing to bet good money only a tiny percentage of people have income outside their employment. People who have real estate or bitcoin profits could always file an andendum.

You would lose that bet. 12 million Americans filed a Schedule D with $5k+ in capital gains in the last year the IRS has stats on. (That's 1 out of every 8 returns.)

https://www.irs.gov/uac/soi-tax-stats-individual-income-tax-...

There are numerous other ways to have income outside of formal employment in the US. The most salient one for tax purposes is self-employment.

Let me amend to say "...only a tiny percentage of people have income the government doesn't already know about."

Surely most of that capital gains stuff is stock and bond sales.

So you have a good start, one which is enough for the vast majority of people. Those that do have those things have to do a little extra work. I'm not seeing an argument against doing this.

There are two simpler IRS forms (1040EZ and 1040A) for people with simpler tax situations which are used by something like 40% of filers. People with simple tax situations really just need to transfer a few numbers to a form and send it in. I guess the process could be even simpler but it's already pretty straightforward if your income streams and deductions are simple.

How else are we gonna catch Capone?