Fun fact: the official tax filing application in Germany which has been around for a few decades is called "ELSTER" (apronym for Elektronische Steuererklärung, "Electronic Tax Return") which literally translates to "MAGPIE", as in "thieving magpie" ("Diebische Elster"). This is a form of self-irony which is quite unusual for the German tax offices.

OS portability has greatly improved with their online app [0], which is actually very good and easy to use. Before, the only stable way to run their Desktop application on Linux was through wine.

[0] https://www.elster.de/eportal/login

Having moved from Sweden to Germany I appreciate Elster existing (and not being solely paper based unlike the other many many German beaurocratic exercises one has to Wade through).

However it misses the most important part. In Sweden your tax declaration comes pre-populated with data they already have, like salary/pension/savings/stock sales/etc., and you can either just accept it as it is or make changes to the already existing data.

It's so easy that you in fact just can send an SMS (that is verified to be from you) to the taxation agency saying that their suggestion is right.

Banks send you letter the weeks before with capital gains, interest payments and employers send you letters with totals of taxes paid. They note if anything needs to be done manually.

The total time spend combined for me filing taxes for the last 10 years is less than 15 minutes. And the reason it isn't less than 3 is because I've logged in (using biometrics and password on my phone that is a hardware token to my bank wich is used for instant secure identification) to check that everything looks OK and to add the commuting at least 10 km/day on bike deduction.

In Germany, it's actually similar. You can opt in to include the data submitted for you by various sources and include them in your tax declaration. The only drawback is you need to select each one (salary, basic info, church tax info) to import it into your declaration, and that you need to wait until end of February since that's the deadline for third parties to submit your data.

Also, some things, like capital gains, you don't even need to declare if you used only German brokers, since they are legally required to submit it for you.

It's called "Vorausgefüllte Steuererklärung" (see https://www.elster.de/eportal/infoseite/belegabruf_%28privat...).

Brazil is going that way too. Currently only public servants and people with an expensive X.509 certificate get this pre-populated tax return, though.

In Brazil we have that option, but one must have a cryptographic token accepted by the government to access it. People usually don't have them, while companies are required to have one.

It takes many clicks and requires to wait for a letter once but Elster offers that too (under the term "Belegabruf"). It then prepopulates the tax return with the data they have.

ELSTER is one of the few examples that come into my mind in terms of "software done right": It's stable and "just works", at least for me.

It's first version was released to the public in 1999, so... Yes, ELSTER is around for almost 20 years now, getting constantly refined at least in the front-end.

All in all, it's something you wouldn't have expected here in Germany in terms of software projects from the government.

AFAIK, it is mostly developed in-house, at least the original version was developed by the Bavarian tax office. In my experience, if government software (for schools, tax offices, political participation, etc.) is developed by an external company, the primary objective of the company often quickly transforms from "creating usable software for all citizens" to "drain the most amount of money out of the infinite resources of the federal government".

It still is developed there but they have external consultants helping them.

I have to say that the UK's HMRC web-based self-assessment site has always struck me as being a really good example of tax returns done right.

It presents as the equivalent of the paper form but with many of the fields autocalculating for you, and offering contextual help. Quite nifty.

Yeah its pretty good when you consider the complexity it has to cover.

Here in Brazil the mascot of the Income Tax is a Lion, it's of an old ad campaign the government ran, comparing taxes with lions and saying "the lion is tame".

It's because of an old popular joke in that the government is a lion that will always take a lion-sized bite from your income.

It's really an old joke. On any reference I have ever found, no matter how old, the joke is already old and the readership is expected to know it.

Oh of _course_, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion's_share

Which is obviously intentionally ironic considering that

> The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which refers to the major share of something.

I wonder what other countries tuck these kinds of harmlessly blatant humor in similarly unexpected places. It's nice.

The danish tax authority is called skat. It has a double meaning of taxes and loved one, it's as if the German one was called Schatz/Schätzle, I think it's cute.

Isn't skat more like treasure that's also used for people? At least that's how it is in Norwegian. No idea why taxes use the same word, it sure so in Norwegian too.

In Holland we have the word schat which also means treasure (and loved one).

As an extension of schat we also have schatkist, which means treasure chest, which is also used as the translation for treasury.

When I look up the meaning of schat the dictionary says: A large collection of valuables. I see how an organization gets named after the very thing they are supposed to handle.

skat/skatt is common to danish/norwegian/swedish, and in all countries it means both taxes and treasure. In danish/norwegian it also means loved one, but swedes would miss that point.

The danes have chosen to name their tax authority not "skat authority" or something like that, just "skat" which evokes the friendly/funny pun.

In English, the word "skat" is used to refer to animal droppings.

technically it is spelled "scat"

> This is a form of self-irony which is quite unusual for the German tax offices.

Love it.

Adding a data point with Mexico:

All invoices are digital. Every person who gets a TaxId also gets a Private/Public keypair and generating invoices means signing the document with that key. The amazing thing is that now accountants talk about the XML, which is the legal representation of the invoice.

As a result, every year if you file your taxes, you go I to the government freely provided website , get into your account and most of the data is there for the exercise, including deducted money that you can get back.

If you are a standard worker earning less than certain amount (very sensible, so the vast majority of workers fall in there) you don't even have to file your taxes.

That's one thing that is good about this country.

>also gets a Private/Public keypair

Tangential curiosity: how is this part done? Do you download the keys from a government website? How do they handle key reissues if a private key is compromised?

You can download a java app which generates the key pair taking mouse movement as entropy and then you to go to a SAT(IRS equivalent) office with the key in a USB drive, they take your biometrics and save the public key to your profile. However, as most people only bring the USB drive, they usually create the key pair in the in the office. If your key is compromised or lost, you have to go to the office and they change it in very much the same way.

It's a somewhat tedious process, but if you keep the key safe, which they very much advice, most of the procedures, including tax fillings, are pretty easy and fast.

What you have just said has thrown me into a tizz trying to understand what you have said. Could you please give a bit more practical details. Say I want to claim rent/transport/medical expenses. Will doctors, car rental place and landlords all issue me an electronic receipt?

Not from Mexico, so it might be different for them, but one way how this works in some places is that the tax office gets all the electronic receipts from all the cash register/POS systems anyway, since that's how they monitor sales/vat/excise/etc taxes paid by the merchant and reduce the risks of "under the counter" sales where fake receipts are issued but taxes not paid on the sale.

So if the doctor's office punches in my legal ID number with the receipt (or if the ID gets added automatically from the billing system that a large hospital would have), then when the office sends all their receipt files to the tax office, the tax office will automatically add that electronic receipt to my tax deduction.

Yes. Not all spending can be deducted. But for the ones you do, you have the right to ask for the "electronic invoice" and the business has to give it to you.

When that happens they ask you for your TAX ID and then the business generates the invoice and your taxid and their taxid makes the tie. The Mexican IRS systems see all of this. So at the tax reporting moment, the system will have all that info.

It is pretty neat actually. However I think it is possible bc in Mexico people are not that concerned with privacy and all that.

Canada doesn't release its own software, but it certifies a selection of free and paid software of varying complexity.

I'd like it if we could take up other, simpler models of sorting out income tax but I use software out of this pool† every year and its served me just fine:

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/...

† usually StudioTax. I donated to them last year. It's not pretty software but it's effective and easy to use. https://www.studiotax.com/en/

"Our business model is similar to that of a street performer. You can use and enjoy our software and later decide if the experience was worth it and you can afford a donation. However, based on many users’ feedback, you should be wary of recent free offerings from big commercial organizations. To use our previous analogy, they are big circuses that send their clowns out to the street to attract unsuspecting customers to their tents and pressure them in paying for their overpriced shows."

I concur. Studio Tax is not pretty but it gets the job done for most people.

I used SimpleTax for the first time this year and it's a lot more intuitive than StudioTax which I used in the past. It may not be ideal for every situation, but it was much simpler for me.

In Sweden, the government does the work for most normal cases. They send you a suggestion of “this is all we know about” and you just say “yeah, seems right” via SMS.

In Ireland you don’t do anything in the usual case, unless you think it’s wrong, everything is taxed at source by the employers/banks.

Both cases different if you’re a company ofc.

Brazil has started offering pre filled income tax declarations.

However, they require a digital certificate to download (probably for privacy reasons) and I don't have one so I couldn't test it.

It seems a bit naive of the government to reveal to you your income sources they know about. If you have any hidden ones you can confidently not report them and pay less taxes than you would otherwise.

It's the same in Denmark and it feels right to me. It's not like they are doing detective work (per default). If you have a concealed source of income, I'd expect them not to know about it. Of course, you'd still be breaking the law by not reporting it and it could turn up if they notice something that doesn't add up somewhere.

I assume this would still be a crime, and you'd be held responsible for lying on the past forms in discovered. The only difference is, this is optimized for making the common case easier - the case of typical income of regular, honest individuals.

Not really. Everyone is aware of what is automatically reported to the tax authorities.

Until you're selected for a random audit and quickly get charged with tax fraud.

They only know what they sent you. So an audit wouldn't turn up new information just force you to prove existing information.

Do note that it the responsibility of the employer to report who is employed, so if anything is missing, then it will generally be the company that is the one in the wrong. Especially as the company also pay employer fees for employees, so it would be a flagrant case for the tax agency anyhow.

> Brazil the _Receita Federal_ (IRS equivalent) provides a free multi-platform Java desktop app for filing your taxes.

Other fun stuff about that desktop app...

* Originally, it was a DOS-only program (yes, it's that old). Then for a while, it was Windows-only, then for some time (probably due to the Linux users complaining) there was both the Windows-only version and the Java multi-platform version, and later the Windows-only version was discontinued.

* The original way of sending the output of this program to Receita Federal was to write it to a floppy disk and take it to a bank, which would read and upload it. Later functionality was added to send it through the Internet instead, and some time later the floppy disk option was removed.

> probably due to the Linux users complaining

For a while a lot of non-aligned countries were mandating the exclusive use of open-source software by government agencies, because the idea of their government being beholden to a US corporation was anathema. I suspect this was the motivation behind eliminating the Microsoft-only government service.

I haven't heard much about that open-source requirement lately. I suspect the Long Reach has been making quiet moves behind the scenes, and the ascendancy of neofascist regimes in many of those countries will do what fascist regimes always do (ie. cater to the cartel making up the fasces).

Short recap from somewhere else:

In the Netherlands we had (for a very short while at least as far as I remember) a DOS program as well on diskette. I never used it but my dad did when internet explorer was not yet evil and msn was a network. You could send it in via modem (9k6 baud yay!) and it would work ... sometimes or hand it in via the diskette. Once the internet got going you could send it more easily as you could send the created files directly instead of relying on the modem dial-in via dos.

For myself I never filed on paper (2002 first one). After the introduction of windows programs they ported it to linux the next year (filed the first one on windows only on a library pc, program might have existed earlier) and have now switched to web based. If you had a company which did their taxes on time everything was (and is) filled out mostly correct. You check it and sign off. As a student it took a while to fill in all the deductibles but if you just have to pay you are done in minutes.

Is/was it perfect? Far from. Does it work for most people? Yes.

> The original way of sending the output of this program to Receita Federal was to write it to a floppy disk and take it to a bank

My cousin started work as a company messenger back in the early 80s and these are the sort of tasks he used to do. Its amazing that the profession has died out in in such relatively short space of time. I guess courier companies have filled in the slot but courier companies would never have coped with the number of documents that needed to be ferried about town in the old days.

The old Australian online tax filing system, through to the early 2010s, was an extremely 90s-looking Delphi application, Windows only for most of that time until they released an OS X port towards the end. Linux support consisted of a note on the website saying "some users have reported success with Wine". I don't believe they ever did floppy disk output though.

It's been replaced by something far nicer and web based! Though the old application was still definitely better than doing taxes by hand or having to pay for some third-party thing.

In Spain it used to be a Java desktop app as well, the last incarnation of a software that started as a DOS program distributed in diskettes back in 1988. Now it's no longer a standalone program, but a website (not sure which technology, but it runs in current browsers without requiring Java installed, AFAIR).

The government makes a draft declaration for you, if it's OK you just have to digitally sign your agreement and provide a bank account to pay or receive your return (if you haven't already done that in the past). Otherwise you need to edit it adding whatever they've missed, but this is only needed if you do complex stock trading, operate with money abroad, etc. For most people it's just skimming through it in case there is an obvious error, and confirming the draft.

Once you confirm the draft, it takes only around 2-4 days for the tax return money to appear in your bank account.

The website's UI is good. Spanish e-administration webapps are a bit hit-and-miss, some are dreadful (digital certificate request, I'm looking at you), but that particular one is fine and has always worked well for me.

Same in France, it's a simple website. You receive a notification email, connect with a simple login and password, check that the pre-filled form is correct, and validate.

Same in Chile. If you have a regular, salaried job, your employer reports your earnings and all income taxes that have been paid, your bank reports your interest income, etc.

It takes less than 5 minutes to do your taxes unless you have unusual sources of income.

I also want to brag about Tax-On-Web for Belgium. Development started over 15 years ago, it's been steadily improving over the years, it even works for linux users, it already fills in all tax details they already know (like wages)

I love it!

In Australia a sort of spreadsheet-like app is published each year. It pulls in data from a variety of sources (banks and employers mostly, IIRC), fills in everything it can and then lets you do the rest.

Windows only last time I did it (7 years ago?), things may have improved further since then.

All Web based now, no thick client. It still pools in all of your data from various sources as the old e tax client did. It was only Windows too from what I recall. It's all been centralised in myGov for a few years.

It's online via mygov these days. took a couple of steps back initially since it was missing functionality but I think it's mostly there now.

I moved to Australia last year and was shocked that it took me less than two minutes to file taxes. What a dream.

Similar in NL; it used to be a desktop app (which IIRC was even distributed via diskettes or a CD-ROM but later just a download), nowadays it's a webapp. Also prefills most information from employers (who already pay your income tax for you every month), mortgages, banks, etc.

The only complexity for me came when I bought my house (some costs are deductible) and when I had to report Bitcoin held at Coinbase (and for that I had to report the (EUR) on January 1st 2018 specifically).

There are proposals in the US to do this.

I think the best I've seen so far is Andrew Yang's plan:

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/making-taxes-fun/

Opt in to have your taxes automatically done. National celebration of projects completed. Ability to specify where 1% of your taxes go.

So not only make it easy to do, but try to make it fun and shift the mindset from burden to societal contribution.

In Israel employee taxes are calculated and paid by the employer.

Only self-employed, people with side-jobs or people who make over a certain threshold need to file their taxes manually (and in that case things are a bit complicated).

Healthcare, pensions and benefits are paid as part of the paycheck if you are employed (they are universal and mandatory, so not the same as in the U.S.), there are no other deductibles that a regular person can claim.

In Ukraine there is a government webapp where you can fill all possible tax forms, and they come mostly pre-filled. The only small hurdle is getting the private/public key, it's fast, but only happens upon request or if you have a bank account at supported banks. If you were only on a payroll, you don't need to declare anything at all, it happens automatically.

As an American living in Kanton Zürich, I used both (paid) TurboTax and (free) Privat Tax (straight from the cantonal government).

Swiss one was way easier to understand by far. As a side effect of doing those taxes, it was easy to see my actual wealth and my actual net income for the year. Which in America is a sin.

UK provides a web form. Pretty well done one considering the complexity. I think you can use your own software too if you like and theres some sort of submission api.

The only out-of-date thing I've noticed on the UK one is stuff like 'this PDF of your tax return is 1.5mb, on a dial up modem this might take 5 mins to download' etc. And I guess some people might still be on that kind of link so fair enough

edit: And yeah in the UK you dont have to file at all if your situation is simple (e.g. you just have one job and one source of income).

It's probably worth noting that most people in the UK don't have to file at all (if you're on a wage and not in the top tax band, it's all automatic in your paycheck), and if you have a dispute/complication you just write a simple letter to the tax office laying out your case.

I've used the mobile app on Android, it wasn't a joy (it still lacks some polishing), but it was certainly VERY straightforward.

Personally I don't have lots of stuff to file, but I did everything under 1 hour, while still discovering how to use the app and learning a bunch of taxes nomenclature.

I was under the impression - perhaps falsely - that taxes in Brazil were nightmarishly complex?

Its simple if your are an employee and complex if you are an employer. For the self employed there is a super simple filling up to a certain threshold. Companies also have additional requirements based on revenue brackets, number of employees and type of economic activities they do. Anything sligth complex eill require multiple agencies fees and byzanthine laws.

There's a lot of players involved. IMO for regular people it's simple/cheap, but for companies/employers it's complex/expensive

Federal government charges taxes on income, production, import/export and over bank operations; states charge consumption and vehicle taxes; cities charge service and property taxes. Then there's also contributions that employers pay for workers, and some that workers pay.

However, consumption tax can compound itself (because of sales between distributors, or taxes over raw materials), so there's a "substitution" formula which can get pretty weird (but companies take care of it).

Similar case in Spain.