Something that is not clear to me - suppose that the government in one of these countries that makes it easy to file your taxes doesn't do it correctly and you sign it and file it. Who is liable?

If the taxpayer can relieve their obligation by filing a government provided return, with the option to correct it, that sounds great. But if the onus is on the taxpayer to correct mistakes by the government, then all that is really happening is free government provided tax prep which may have a value of zero or less.

Ugh. Last year HMRC (the UK's equivalent of the IRS) sent me half a dozen cheques correcting mistakes in taxes. My employer changed some details in their compensation package and messed up somewhere.

It's automatic. Some system or human reviewer goes "Hey, this item is wrong" and then the machine re-calculates that and issues a new statement, but it also queues up any subsequent re-calculates and those may take a few days extra.

If they owe you money you get either a direct credit or cheque, if you owe them a small amount it's added to your next year of taxes, if you somehow owe a large amount you have to arrange how you'll pay.

For me the goal is to minimise paperwork, not minimise amount paid. I have money, I don't want to spend time doing paperwork (and no I don't want to hire somebody else to do it). So the US system would be intolerable.

I still remember receiving a tax refund for my holiday work in first year of uni, the tax code had been wrong. It arrived some 4 years later when I was in full time employment.

I mean, it was a cheer-bringing cheque - but at the same time I found the timing somewhat sub-optimal...

In the UK you don’t have to sign anything unless you are going your own taxes. If you are charged too much you can claim a refund, not sure if there is a time limit but if so I think it’s pretty long. The revenue service is audited and there are independent consumer protection groups that can help people who need it.

Also the online tax forms are actually really good. The government has a web team that has radically simplified and unified all sorts of government web forms and made a huge difference.

Wrong thread, but so far as I’m aware, we don’t pay 75% tax in the UK.

That sounds reasonable. So if you are charged too little, the worst that can happen is they send you another bill?

It would have to be by a lot.

If they realise you owe say £500 they just send you a new calculation saying here's why you owe £500, we wouldn't tax X amount of your income by law, so, Y = X - £500 now we won't tax the first Y next year.

Pay As You Earn means most ordinary workers in the UK have all their income taxes collected by their employer automatically. The employer doesn't know why you pay the taxes you do, they just get told a code signifying how much to charge.

There's a cute trick to let HMRC verify that payroll accounting is legit without snooping personal bank details of people who aren't suspected of tax fraud. Basically there is a field with a blinded cryptographic signature in it in electronic payroll feeds, all the signatures should tie up to tax records without revealing who exactly was paid how much.

> If you are charged too much you can claim a refund

For me, it's always been automatic. But that might be because I've been under PAYE (via an umbrella company) rather than anything more esoteric that requires me to submit a tax return.

The actor most likely to make mistakes is the one reporting the numbers in the first place, i.e. the employer. And yes they would be held accountable for that just as the government, could you show that the numbers your employer reported is not what shows up on your tax report. This is how it’s like in many European countries and it pretty much just works.

In Norway, you these days don't even need to sign if you have nothing to amend (we started with electronic delivery many years ago, then SMS signing if you had nothing to change, up to some years ago when not doing anything is an implicit signing of the prefilled tax return). If you do change anything, what you sign is something akin to "These numbers and information are given to the best of my abilities". AFAIK, you basically have 10 years to correct mistakes, and this goes both ways.

Currently you're responsible for mistakes you make in your tax returns anyway, so not much would really change, except that it would be a lot easier and less stressful for the vast majority of people. Edge cases get treated like edge cases.

They don’t have rich people or corporations in Chile?

Not to be pedantic, but... both the US and Chile are representative democratic republics, not democracies.

Neither is an oligarchy, either. And while corporations and individuals of means have a disproportionate amount of influence in American politics, Chile is not immune from the same phenomenon; it just takes a different form.

But I agree with you in spirit - wealth should not be a factor in how much influence someone has in a democratic system.

This is not what anyone has meant by the term "democracy" for a thousand years.

To back you up, I can confirm that people who spend their time thinking a lot about this stuff (political scientists and those in related fields) spend zero time quibbling over the use of the term "democracy" as it's commonly used, and are likely to eye-roll and attempt to disengage from conversation should someone push their glasses up their nose and "well, actually..." the issue. In most contexts they use democracy as an umbrella term, the same way everyone else does. Doing otherwise marks one as an outsider to the field, or a novice—any in teaching positions get to correct plenty of "clever" freshmen on the issue every year.

I am an outsider to the field. I'll just disengage entirely from political discussion and leave it to the experts.