For federal taxes, the government takes your W2 and 1099s, and prepares a tax return, with the standard deduction. If you either know you have a complicated federal situation (and people know if they do), or think you can do better with itemizing your deductions, then you have the option to do it differently.
Then, iterate every year to make it a little better, until 96% of people don't have to think about it.
How long does it take to understand that it's all you have to do?
> There's no way for the government to know what your work expenses were
What? That makes no sense.
> what you donated to charity
Same. This makes no sense.
> it took me an hour and a half to do my taxes and cost me under $20 on freetaxusa
wow. I guess you are used to filling your taxes so you're fast.
In the US, you can deduct your work expenses if you so choose (such as required clothes, for instance). Since you did this on your personal card, how would the government have any idea that you bought that suit for work? And the same goes for donations to non profits.
Because your work tells the IRS. I have expensed a shit ton of stuff and I don't say anything about that to the IRS when I file my taxes. I'm hopping that the W2 says enough.
Edit: Not sure why I have negative points here, I was just saying that the process of implementing a system to actually get people their taxes and accommodating all the edge cases and ensuring everything is perfect enough that people literally don't have to do anything is probably not worth it compared to doing a check of submissions against the IRS own findings. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, I'm all ears and not super knowledgeable on the system (obviously)
EDIT2: Also, not implying that it can't be done, just that it's not worth it to the IRS to do something like that. Seems like otherwise it already would have been done?
It’s asinine to think the IRS should not be in the business of calculating your tax liability and providing you a friendly way to square up, free of charge, when they’re already doing most of the effort required (and have spent the government funds to do so).
I'm just spit balling here, I don't have a strong opinion on it either way.
There's no way for the government to know what your work expenses were, what you donated to charity, and so on and so forth through many of the deductions. If you don't want to maximize your return, you can be done in less than 15 minutes.
Even making more than 100k, with stocks through multiple brokers, a 401k, interest from multiple accounts, a house, student loans, and probably a few others I forgot to mention, it took me an hour and a half to do my taxes and cost me under $20 on freetaxusa (whatever the price for the state taxes they charged was low enough where I didn't care to figure it out on my own).
The tax code is one of those boogeymen items that everyone attacks, but in reality isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.