Not all though. I developed admin-phobia since I moved back to France. Being a contractor here is such a FUCKING nightmare compared to UK and US. Sure the US could do without turbotax. BUT AT LEAST YOU GUYS HAVE TURBOTAX

The only thing worse than a private monopoly is a public one.

In the case of taxes in the United States this doesn’t really follow because if the government says you owe $x.xx then you have to go through the bureaucracy either way to either pay or dispute the charge. For most people (simple wage earner) TurboTax and other software is just an additional regulatory tax and no different than the government except that it takes money from citizens.

A government has a monopoly on taxation by definition or else it can’t be a government so calling it a public monopoly doesn’t make a lot of sense.

ethbr0 is referring to monopolies enforced by law for private companies; they're not trying to point out the government itself is a monopoly.

The difference is that if the IRS provided the only filing solution AND adjudicated taxes, there'd be no adversarial tension.

Right now, the IRS is forced to establish some sort of data interchange format and adjudicate incoming tax filings equally, because they're required to work with TurboTax et al. (even if only required from a practical standpoint).

If they also provided the only filing solution, that pressure would be gone.

IMHO, the best possible outcome is definitely IRS-supplied free file + private options, if users would like. Keeps everyone honest and on their toes.

Huh? What adversarial tension is needed for filing?

It’s literally data entry.

Tax prep/accounting (what to put where for cases where there is ambiguity) can always be different.

That doesn’t apply to W2 earners though (in 99% of cases)

Free filing would by definition be both, as people using it would be unlikely to have separate tax prep services.

Ergo, imagine there's a checkbox option that would apply to 25% of free filers to save them money. How would the IRS free file handle that from a UX perspective? What are their incentives?

Alternatively, suppose a feature used by 10% of filers is broken for the current tax year. How long does it take to get fixed?

Current private solutions are incentivized to optimize those ("We save you the most money!") and fix them ("Our software isn't broken").

And because only the data transfers over to the IRS, all the prep optimization can be done independent of the IRS.

Some of the incentive concerns would be alleviated by (as this did) building this from a different branch of government (e.g. US-DS).

But at the end of the day, it's still the government telling you how much to pay the government. Or as the joke went about the 1040-EZ: "How much money did you make? Good. Give it to us."

You are correct, and I hate it ! Hahaha, sigh.

The only thing worse than a public monopoly is where you have to navigate both a public monopoly, and a private monopoly, which is how taxes work in the US.

There is no monopoly on tax preparation in the US. It’s a highly competitive market.

Dozens of companies sell online products to file, and thousands of individual providers are available too.

> It’s a highly competitive market.

It's a competitive market on a stupid game. The market solutions (maybe mostly just intuit) fight to keep the game near impossible for the lay person to play. They generate "GDP" by making it more grievous than it need be.

At least part of this is a symptom of a broken political system (the current process of voting encourages 2 party system which are incentivized to not experiment)

The political system is this way because the cities/urban areas and the rural areas have fundamentally different interests, and the vast majority of the resources and land area isn’t in urban areas.

The federal gov’t has enough power to make either of these groups miserable; and so each is using it to fight out who gets to do so.

Picking one to win isn’t going to stop the conflict, but it could turn it into a shooting war.

There's a monopoly to a first-order approximation.

Apparently TurboTax has ~70% market share for tax preparation software, and TurboTax + H&R Block have ~95% market share. [0]

But even that's still a heck of a lot more competitive and responsive than if the IRS shipped the only tax prep solution.

[0] https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/tax-prep-2021-turbotax-...

No, not even by "first order approximation" because plenty of returns are done without any software at all, or done by professionals with different software.

> Dozens of companies sell online products to file

They all suck, and in a better society, that number for normal people would be close to 'zero', because the IRS could just send me a bill to attest to and sign.

You could establish a corporation in a UAE freezone with visa and not even need to keep books. Of course assuming your laws allow it.

> Of course assuming your laws allow it.

The spherical cow of the accounting world

Also a bit of a Heisenbergs cat!

A lot of things are ‘legal’ as long as you don’t get audited.

Did you mean "Schrödinger's cat"?

Doh, thank you!

US law doesn’t allow it, or at least it doesn’t allow you not to declare and pay US tax on any income you make no matter where you make it.

Yes, the US government generally frowns on tax dodges. Famously, that's how they have put away hardened criminals like Al Capone.

But of course, the dynamics of our current system are such that the people least likely to be able to defend themselves legally are the ones which are frequently targeted for tax dodges. How many years do the extremely wealthy have to dodge taxes before the IRS finally comes down on them? Meanwhile, a friend of mine got dinged for a $500 deduction for unreimbursed work travel and not having receipts (a $2000 fine which she had to borrow money to pay).

What type of contractor? Micro-entreprise is really simple for side gigs, and if it's your main job, declaring as an SAS and getting an accountant makes it (relatively) painless in my experience

Yes it’s the “getting a 2000€/year accountant” part that I thought I didn’t need (cause I never needed one in the us).

Amusingly I live in France and filling my taxes take me a total of two minutes checking the numbers and clicking ok. Really depend of your situation I guess.

I mean, kinda?

I worked in a country that automatically fills out your tax return. Sure, it was nice that the form was pre-populated, but you know what I did? I doubled checked all the numbers to make sure they were right.

Were they? No, my employer had miscalculated retirement contributions resulting in a higher tax bill for me.

So I ended up doing all the math anyways, just like I do in the US.