We could do that in the US as the IRS has everything they need. The reason we don't is that there are people in Congress who believe that taxes should be a big pain so people resent the IRS and want to gut it. And companies like Intuit want it to be a pain so they can keep making money essentially rent seeking.

This is true, but progress is being made.

https://directfile.irs.gov/ is the IRS' direct file service, for those interested. It is supported in concert with 25 states from a tax filing perspective, and is free. From their email newsletter, improvements are rolling out month by month (continual expansion of tax scenarios supported).

https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-direct-file-for-free

Almost certainly going to get killed by DOGE though:

https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-direct-file-doge-treasur...

DOGE and this admin won't be around forever. Looking forward to the reboot.

>won't be around forever they're working on it.

I wish I shared your optimism. I think the process will be more like rebuilding from a pile of rubble than restarting a working system.

Tomato tomato. No optimism, only positive nihilism. We're all default dead, humans have existed for ~300k years, this is another bump in the road.

DOGE declared it woke fraud, waste and abuse.

Something about DEI I guess?

Isn't that Direct File? Unless they give it the axe of course...

If you gut the IRS are taxes abolished too? How does that work?

They're abolished as long as you can afford the lawyers to fight an underfunded government agency indefinitely.

A great question, and worth asking those who want to gut it.

There have been attempts to do the same in the US. It's blocked by two blocks; the tax preparation companies who make bank every year charging people for their services, and generally anti tax people who want the process to be painful to make people dislike taxes more.

Generally though if you just make a mistake the punishment is paying it back with some fee/interest not prison. If they think it's an intentional effort to dodge taxes though it can escalate to prison time of course.

To be fair, that "you go to prison" is not really true. The IRS will work with you to figure out most things and you are only in trouble if you are actively trying to commit fraud. You may get fined for some egregious mistakes, but those are typically of the form that are pretty egregious.

Yeah, in Cheek v. United States it was found that (in an exception to the normal rule) ignorance of the law is a valid defense in criminal tax cases due to the complexity of tax law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheek_v._United_States

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/0947055.pdf

Yeah, my experience with making mistakes on my taxes was that they sent me a bill for the difference, I paid the bill, and that was it. There wasn't even a fine beyond that I had to pay interest on the money I owed.

Sometimes the IRS is wrong, too, and you just mail them proof. Like if you forget to report your cost basis for a stock sale, they'll send you a letter and say "We're assuming the cost basis is zero, so here's what you owe!" and you just respond back with a letter that says "This is the cost basis, and here's a copy of my brokerage statement." and that's that. I've found dealing with the IRS actually quite straightforward and non-scary. As long as you have your paperwork in order. If you're careless about your records, then you're going to have a bad time.

Exactly this. Is what I meant by them working with you. They aren't playing some devilish game of trying to trick you into paying more. They tell you why they say you owe something and what it would take to get them to change that. And are fine if you need time to find it.

If you are actively trying to avoid the calls, I'm sure that is probably not a good idea. But, that is basically in the "actively trying to commit fraud" territory, at that point. No?

> As I understand in some countries, they instead send you a "pre-filed" statement (Finland, Denmark, Sweden, etc.). If everything looks fine, you don't need to send anything back at all. It's only if there is a discrepancy that you need to get in touch with the country's tax agency.

Yes. I'm in Sweden and self-employed so I have to take a few extra steps when declaring taxes, but just did that last month and it took around fifteen minutes. If you're an employee and your only active source of income is your job, as is the case for most people, "doing taxes" amounts to just approving the prefilled form that you get, which is just a couple of clicks. Or one signature and letter if you want to do it on paper the archaic way.

It works because every company has to submit a monthly report of what it paid its employees, and also deducts income tax on your behalf. So when the tax year is over, the tax agency knows how much you earned and how much tax was paid on that, which is all it takes.

Considering the standard deduction is default for many people now it does seem like filing taxes should just be a quick form on the IRS website.

For MOST people you take the standard deduction, and there's now only a handful of legit credits, maybe some small other types of income ... done.

Granted lots of people do NOT want it to be that easy.

The alternative minimum tax is certainly not the default for most people; you have to make quite a lot for that to be relevant. Do you mean the standard deduction?

Yes my bad.

Standard deduction is great but this is the first year I had enough cash to bother parking it in a Money Market Fund instead of my bank's savings account and whew boy does that have an irritating tax process.

And Intuit is one of the big powers keeping it like that.

In Spain we have had a "pre-filed draft statement" (that you have to confirm, but it's as easy as clicking "OK", or just mailing it back in the days when it was all paper) since 2003.

And there has been free government software for doing your taxes since 1988 (back in the day it was difficult to use and a bit terrible in general, but it was there and you could print your statement with a dot matrix printer... The web version nowadays is kind of ugly but pretty decent.)

You do not go to prison. This is a lie the tax prep lobby wants you to perpetuate. The IRS sends you a letter letting you know what you did wrong. If you agree, you either pay them the difference or cash the check they sent you. If you disagree, you file a dispute and there's a whole system for handling that.

Yes, it's stupid that we do it this way, but there's no need to propagate the tax prep lobby's fear mongering.

Glad to see I wasn't the only one taking issue with that claim.

It is frustrating, as I understand why it is stressful to get a call from the IRS. For the vast majority of reasons you will get that call, it really should not be, though.

And agreed that it is silly we do things this way. It is equally silly that we have built up most people to think they are supposed to have an adversarial relationship with the IRS.

I think that's true in most cases for usual good faith errors. But(!) if you're not filing, or making an egregious error, thinking you're being clever and evading taxes, or keeping accounts below reporting thresholds on purpose, you can get investigated and potentially go to prison, so the threat is there in certain circumstances.

Even "no filing" won't get you in prison if you were not aware that you weren't filing. Happened to me once for state taxes, specifically. A lot of us were remote and didn't realize the company we were working for had messed up and not reported anyone's income to the state.

That said, yes, if you are attempting active fraud, then you are doing more than just making mistakes on your taxes.

That's not the situation described in the post I was responding to, and I don't think it applies to most tax filers.

The "situation" was a meme about filing taxes in its broadest possible conception. I don't agree that there's a distinction to be drawn here, and I already explicitly noted that this doesn't apply to most filers.

I guess you could include intentional fraud under the phrase, "What if I get it wrong?" but that seems pretty far outside the intent of the question.

I don't agree that it's far outside their intent of the question. I actually think it was pretty close to the heart of it, which is an idea of complying with the bizarre way in which the United States has decided to process taxes.

The truth is you can, in fact, go to prison, and that it is indeed rare for that to happen, but it can happen and I acknowledged its rarity.

You pay the difference plus interest! But yes 100% agree. That's how I learned you need to pay estimated taxes ;-)

Are you referring to this bit by Joe Zimmerman? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpWCK7t_iaw>

Tax prep companies lobby congress so that they can continue to exist and be profitable.

They don't really know how much you owe.

And that only works if you have one income, and if you only have one income filing your taxes is that easy

This kind of take is only true if you haven't given the tax system any thought at all and just want to dunk on the IRS to get upvotes

The govt only has an idea of what you might owe from "official" information (W2s), Since we don't live in a totalitarian society where the govt knows everything about you.

Filing taxes is the govt telling you to make sure to report anything they do not know about.

Also you do not go to jail for getting your taxes wrong, you go to jail if you fail to fix them after being audited or fraud.

Ah right, that's odd, wasn't aware I lived in a totalitarian society here in the Nordics. We literally just get a notification to check it, and because the state is neither trying to gotcha us or baby us, that's just the norm. The part that takes longest for me in the whole process is usually the 2FA.

If you do absolutely nothing but have a single salary job, taxes take about 5 minutes.

I do more than that which is I hire an accountant because the govt does not know everything about me.

But they could absolutely move to a system where the vast majority of filers could attest that the numbers IRS already has are all the income they have and be done with their returns. Then only the subset that has other income or adjustments would need to do a more involved filing.

These all apply here in Sweden. The information from the equivalent of those W2s is all available to me directly through the tax authority's portal though, so when I filed my taxes the other day I just logged in, checked the numbers looked sane, pressed a button, and the process was done.

It took about 5 minutes. It would have been more like 30 seconds if my Swedish was a bit better.

There's nothing we're doing here that you couldn't do in the US, you just don't.

>Since we don't live in a totalitarian society where the govt knows everything about you.

But… we do?

Totally agree, I find it absolutely obnoxious that it is a crime to make a mistake in the tax return documentation.

EDIT: Ok, I'm not from the US and for some reason I was under the impression that incorrect tax returns were punishable crimes. I guess some movie I watched as a kid impressed that notion and it was never challenged until now.

Mistakes are not a crime. The people that goes to court for tax evasion are the ones that commit fraud: they knowingly lie in the tax forms to avoid paying taxes. It includes people that forges expenses, or other documents.

It hardly ever raises to the level of crime.

The issue is that the IRS has 7 years to audit a tax return, and since taxes are due at the time you receive the income, the interest is backdated if you happen to underpay taxes and it compounds. So if they audited your 2019 return today and you underpaid $1k, you’d owe $1333 today with compound interest over those 6 years.

I think there's more nuance than that to it. I've made mistakes on my taxes, not been charged with a crime.

Small oops mistakes, I've never heard of someone being charged criminally.

BIG "yeah that was intentional" kinda obvious under-reporting of income, that turns into charges at times.

I actually had a big misunderstanding in terms of amounts once where the IRS thought I cashed out a large 401k. They simply sent me a letter and we mailed back and forth and I showed them that in fact I didn't cash it out and it just moved and it was all good.

It is not a crime to make a mistake. Who the hell is telling you this?

> Who the hell is telling you this?

The OP of the currently highest voted HN comment thread on this news article, for one:

    > Me: What if I get it wrong?

    > Gov’t: You go to prison

It couldn't be more obvious that's a joke, though.