ClydeR
04-16-2015, 09:16 PM
The idea in this article may sound good at first blush, but conservatives and Intuit are right to oppose it. If the government ever gets ahold of your tax information, you can kiss your privacy goodbye forever!
The reform plan would work like this: Today, employers, banks, brokerage firms and pretty much every other financial organization in the country send the federal government detailed records about our economic activity every year. These organizations also send you, the taxpayer, a similar set of documents, which are forms with names like W-2 and 1098. After you file your taxes, the government matches its two sets of documents to make sure you have filed correctly.
To Mr. Bankman, this double documentation doesn’t make much sense. If the government is already collecting financial data from employers and banks, why can’t the I.R.S. use that information to precalculate our tax returns for us? At the very least, why can’t tax software just connect to the government’s database to download all the information that the government has collected, saving us all that record-keeping and data entry?
“Imagine if your vehicle registration fee was done the same way,” Mr. Bankman asked in a recent interview. “Imagine if the state said, ‘Go to your car, find your VIN number and then look at this table that has different tax rates to find out how much you owe.’ If they did, people would probably need to hire an expert for that too.”
The idea of the government filling our tax returns for us, known as “return-free filing,” has been met with much opposition from several groups, including conservatives suspicious of the I.R.S. And as the investigative news organization ProPublica reported in 2013 and 2014, some of the most intense opposition has come from Intuit, which has spent millions lobbying to oppose methods for the I.R.S. to create a tax-filing system that might free us from having to use software like TurboTax.
More... (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/personaltech/turbotax-or-irs-as-tax-preparer-intuit-has-a-favorite.html)
According to the article, we're the only country in the world that does tax returns the right way.
The reform plan would work like this: Today, employers, banks, brokerage firms and pretty much every other financial organization in the country send the federal government detailed records about our economic activity every year. These organizations also send you, the taxpayer, a similar set of documents, which are forms with names like W-2 and 1098. After you file your taxes, the government matches its two sets of documents to make sure you have filed correctly.
To Mr. Bankman, this double documentation doesn’t make much sense. If the government is already collecting financial data from employers and banks, why can’t the I.R.S. use that information to precalculate our tax returns for us? At the very least, why can’t tax software just connect to the government’s database to download all the information that the government has collected, saving us all that record-keeping and data entry?
“Imagine if your vehicle registration fee was done the same way,” Mr. Bankman asked in a recent interview. “Imagine if the state said, ‘Go to your car, find your VIN number and then look at this table that has different tax rates to find out how much you owe.’ If they did, people would probably need to hire an expert for that too.”
The idea of the government filling our tax returns for us, known as “return-free filing,” has been met with much opposition from several groups, including conservatives suspicious of the I.R.S. And as the investigative news organization ProPublica reported in 2013 and 2014, some of the most intense opposition has come from Intuit, which has spent millions lobbying to oppose methods for the I.R.S. to create a tax-filing system that might free us from having to use software like TurboTax.
More... (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/personaltech/turbotax-or-irs-as-tax-preparer-intuit-has-a-favorite.html)
According to the article, we're the only country in the world that does tax returns the right way.