The states don't do the taxes manually, either.

Just like France, they could open source their software.

The US could stop taxing global income for individuals. US companies don't have to pay taxes on their overseas profits, why do people?

US companies do have to pay taxes on overseas profits, which is why they so often have subsidiaries based overseas. Those entities do not have to pay those taxes.

It's a distinction without a difference.

A regular US person gets a US tax credit for taxes paid to foreign governments. But if that's less than they would've paid to Uncle Sam, they still have to pay the difference here.

That's not true for these overseas subsidiaries. That, as you said, is a major reason these subsidiaries even exist (I'm sure local laws also require them in many cases, but still).

The subsidiaries will always exist - most countries require an employer to be a bona fide local legal entity of the right kind; e.g. an American company cannot have an Italian employee; they can have a self-employee Italian contractor, but not an employee - and the laws of “who is an employee” aren’t that simple (even in the US, as you can see in the case of Uber)

And their existence guarantees that tax burden will be optimized globally, rather than locally - the nontrivial price of setting up and running a subsidiary has been paid, so of course it will be used to get benefits as well.

I think I already acknowledged that local regulations might require a local subsidiary. It's the different tax regime for these subsidiaries (i.e. there's no "pay Uncle Sam the difference between the local corporate tax rate and the US corporate tax rate") vs for individuals, that I'm objecting to.

If those represent major complexities maybe there can be open source tax software that serves 80% of people, I.e. people in coastal cities that have one job, and then the remaining 20% have to pay for their software?

So sure. You can write software that can handle a simple Federal-only case. (Basically what used to be a 1040-EZ: W-2(s), a couple 1099s with all the cost basis info existing, standard deductions, etc.) But, at that point, your taxes are pretty simple to fill out anyway and I'm guessing there are even spreadsheet templates out there that let you type in some numbers and everything is calculated.

Moreover, the simple cases are also supported by the IRS free fillable forms product. https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/

Note that this isn't "the IRS." It's an IRS public-private partnership that people below some income threshold can use for free.

No, it’s usable by any income level. You’re thinking of Free File, which lets lower income users use TurboTax and other products for free.

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

> Free File Fillable Forms is the only IRS Free File option available for taxpayers whose income (AGI) is greater than $72,000. Taxpayers whose income is $72,000 or less qualify for IRS Free File partner offers, which can guide you through the preparation and filing of your tax return, and may include state tax filing.

Yes. I misread. Though it's understandable how one could confuse Free File Fillable Forms eith IRS Free File partner offers.

As a comment upthread said. It's presumably legit because it's linked to from the IRS site but almost everything else sets off alarms.

The IRS could not come up with a website and TLD that sounds more like a scam if they tried. :)

Yes, although you can get to it directly from the irs.gov site it does seem confusing at first that it’s on a .com

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

My experience of state taxes over 32 years (WA, PA and NM) has been that filing these returns is easy-peasy compared to my federal return (I'm self-employed).

I'd be happy to have a full federal filing system even if it left me to do my state taxes "by hand".

> My experience of state taxes over 32 years (WA, PA and NM)

One of those states (WA) doesn’t belong in the list of states that require personal income tax returns, unless you mean something else?

It's been 24 years since I was in WA :) I forgot they had no income tax. Sorry.

There certainly can be if you want to develop and maintain it.