How come the IRS doesn’t just mail you a bill if they know exactly how much you owe in taxes?
In: Economics
Because tax preparers lobby politicians to stop them from making IRS do just that.
This isn’t a joke.
TurboTax and it’s cohorts spend millions each year to make the tax law stay complicated so regular people have to hire them or buy their software to file taxes. Also, TurboTax promises irs to have a free filing system, but they [intentionally hide their free filing service from searches. ](https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hides-its-free-file-page-from-search-engines)
Lots of countries in the world does exactly what you suggest. When I was working overseas, the government would send me a tax Bill I can just pay online, and I only need to mail something back if I dispute the amount.
The US system is fucked up.
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