Although I agree that the IRS can make a guess, I'd rather just change it to a system without so many damn details

Most people trade through brokers like Coinbase, which does report

> overseas earnings

I don't think this applies to the VAST majority people

> business expenses

Also doesn't apply to the vast majority of people.

When you transfer stocks it transfers the basis for you.

Of course every category doesn't apply to most people. But there's about a thousand of them.

Ever drive Uber? Ever get a donation on Twitch? Ever gamble?

There's so many ways you can get a little chunk of change and IRS wants a slice of all of it

Even with a system of "not so many details", a few things are simply going to slip through the cracks but this isn't going to affect most people.

I pay something like $120 to TurboTax annually to file federal taxes and taxes for two states. I've got a W2 from my job, dividends and gains/losses from equity sales from my brokerage, 1099-Rs for my IRA and 401k, a 5498 for my HSA, and a bunch of deductions for charitable giving, which I perform through my DAF. Every single one of these forms is submitted to the government with complete information needed to compute my tax burden, except for the cost basis of my RSUs which is against some idiotic law to report to the IRS. Fix that, and the IRS can send me a bill. What percentage of the population do you think has more complex taxes than me?

Sometimes real small, like a few hundred bucks driving Uber. I took a deduction on miles driven as well.

Filing this kind of shit, and keeping records is insanely time-intensive. Easily several days of work.

Not to mention every brokerage already sent them the data, all of my bank accounts reported interest paid, but I need to do it manually again