You could've read the very next sentence, which makes the point the first sentence set up:

> Assets must be accounted for when calculating wealth, so the tax service will be required to track and value assets including vehicles, homes, and material good etc. for every citizen to see if the wealth tax would apply to them -- if we didn't report material goods, the wealthy could sock money away in expensive cars, artworks, jewelry and other material non-real-estate assets as they already do for investment.

What you are describing is tax fraud and is already possible in the current system.

The burden is showing that you have under $XM in assets. You'll need to show your net worth somehow, so that the IRS (or equivalent) knows not to tax you. Otherwise I could assure you that I totally only have $1M in assets, with definitely no Swiss bank account or yachts.

I will admit to not knowing much about a wealth tax, so maybe there is an established solution here. But it seems like the default would be a privacy and administrative burden even on those people not paying the tax.

It wouldn't be a burden for most people; it would just be a yes/no checkbox alongside the many other checkboxes when you're filling out your taxes.

"Do you have assets in excess of $X million?"

If you claim you don't, and the IRS has reason to suspect you do, you're opening yourself to a brutal audit and potential jail time.

Most people would not have to deal with this.

Yes, and then the IRS would say, well, to check that, we need more access to all the data in the world. And people will sell it with "so that we can find the criminal rich people". But they will have the data for everybody.

You stopped reading...and missed the whole point. The idea was, to say if a tax doesn't apply to someone you still need to do a deep valuation of their assets. Someone could hide 10M in a painting and live in a regular house, have regular "income".

Different issue. What you are describing is tax fraud and is already possible in the current system.

Perhaps you should have continued reading because then you would have understood his point.

It doesn’t matter what the floor is, you still have to report all your assets to the IRS to prove you don’t meet it.

In many countries, reporting high value assets is already part of their tax reporting and is not an added step. For countries that don't, the added step could be as simple as a single checkbox: Do you have over 25M in assets? I'd imagine most people can confidently leave that unchecked.

You need to track every single taxpayer continuously just to know if that cutoff was reached.

lol ya tracking everyone would be really dumb but you don't need to do it.

Many countries already have self reported high value assets as part of their tax filing process. Pretty easy to add a self-reporting step "Do you have over $25M in assets"? Most people can confidently leave that unchecked so they don't even need to waste any ink. Lying would be tax fraud and is already possible in the current system anyways.