Having a pre-filled form you could look over and send back is suggested occasionally, but seems never to pass. The nefarious explanation for why is that Intuit has good lobbyists [1], but I'm not sure how true that is.
We have pre-filled taxes in Denmark and they work fine. You have a month to look over the pre-filled forms and revise them if necessary. Although the tax system is also a lot less complex (taxes are high, but also simple). I know the IRS is doing something like that, just not giving it to you, which seems silly: I've gotten a letter before pointing out that I filled out a line incorrectly, which also told me what the IRS thought the correct value should be. I'm sure that was auto-detected by comparing something I entered with the W2 or 1099 information (I forget in which context it came up). So just pre-fill it for me, then, since you obviously already know what should go there!
In Denmark we have this (prefilled forms). Both for last years taxes and a preform for nexy years taxes. Income, tax, estate, interest, stock gains, and even tax exemption for commutes and similar are all filled out.
You simply login with your "easy id" and accept or edit.
Any oustanding balance in your favour is transferred to your bank account in about a week.
Any outstanding balance in the goverments favour will either be moved to next years taxes or billed automaticly dependant on the amount.
It all works out pretty good.. Even though we pay the worlds highest taxes.. (Sales tax 25%, car tax 180%, income tax 58%..)
I believe a new version based on JavaScript and iframes (sigh) is either out now or being deployed as we speak. Of course it sucks too (just less), but for different reasons: Recent posts on various forums have indicated that it uses something like 1MiB of JavaScript for what is basically a series of forms. The use of iframes is also kind of insane these days unless it's for branding/familiary-for-casual-users. The really weird thing is that official spokespeople have claimed that the iframe thing is for security reasons, which has me worried about what kind of security they imagine they can achieve in a compromised client. Hopefully(?!) it was just a spokesperson being ill-formed about the technical details.
Having a pre-filled form you could look over and send back is suggested occasionally, but seems never to pass.
This is the norm in New Zealand, simplified greatly by our tax code which is inifnitely less complicated.
The nefarious explanation for why is that Intuit has good lobbyists [1], but I'm not sure how true that is.
I've seen the topic come up on left-leaning US sites like Metafilter and it seems that in the US even nominal lefties who approve of big government are paranoid they'll miss out on their tax dodges if the IRS prepare the form for them as a first step.
Comments
Having a pre-filled form you could look over and send back is suggested occasionally, but seems never to pass. The nefarious explanation for why is that Intuit has good lobbyists [1], but I'm not sure how true that is.
We have pre-filled taxes in Denmark and they work fine. You have a month to look over the pre-filled forms and revise them if necessary. Although the tax system is also a lot less complex (taxes are high, but also simple). I know the IRS is doing something like that, just not giving it to you, which seems silly: I've gotten a letter before pointing out that I filled out a line incorrectly, which also told me what the IRS thought the correct value should be. I'm sure that was auto-detected by comparing something I entered with the W2 or 1099 information (I forget in which context it came up). So just pre-fill it for me, then, since you obviously already know what should go there!
[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-...
In Denmark we have this (prefilled forms). Both for last years taxes and a preform for nexy years taxes. Income, tax, estate, interest, stock gains, and even tax exemption for commutes and similar are all filled out.
You simply login with your "easy id" and accept or edit.
Any oustanding balance in your favour is transferred to your bank account in about a week.
Any outstanding balance in the goverments favour will either be moved to next years taxes or billed automaticly dependant on the amount.
It all works out pretty good.. Even though we pay the worlds highest taxes.. (Sales tax 25%, car tax 180%, income tax 58%..)
Edit spelling
Belgium alsof had one of the highest taxes in the world... And one of the most dificult ones, we have exceptions for everything :-(
What is an "easy id"? Not heard of that before. Is that specific to your tax records, or some kind of ID for all state services?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID
Looks like terrible, Java-based spyware.
I believe a new version based on JavaScript and iframes (sigh) is either out now or being deployed as we speak. Of course it sucks too (just less), but for different reasons: Recent posts on various forums have indicated that it uses something like 1MiB of JavaScript for what is basically a series of forms. The use of iframes is also kind of insane these days unless it's for branding/familiary-for-casual-users. The really weird thing is that official spokespeople have claimed that the iframe thing is for security reasons, which has me worried about what kind of security they imagine they can achieve in a compromised client. Hopefully(?!) it was just a spokesperson being ill-formed about the technical details.
This is the norm in New Zealand, simplified greatly by our tax code which is inifnitely less complicated.
I've seen the topic come up on left-leaning US sites like Metafilter and it seems that in the US even nominal lefties who approve of big government are paranoid they'll miss out on their tax dodges if the IRS prepare the form for them as a first step.