I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8bene.pdf

And even if you do have a lot of things to report, why not just report those things directly and let the IRS calculate your taxes, rather than you having to do it, fill out a complicated form, then the IRS does the calculation anyways to make sure you did it right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267

For every form I've ever had to file with the IRS, there's a corresponding set of instructions. Those instructions inevitably have a definitions section and/or define the terms in-line.

The instructions for form W8-BEN-E are at [0]. The definitions section starts at printed page 4 and continues through to printed page 7. Some terms you mentioned (like "Excepted territory NFFE") are not in the definitions section, but are described in their own sections.

I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes. I'm definitely going to object to your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.

[0] <https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8bene.pdf>

It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!

This way, you’d have to really be into lobbying to suffer the tattoo pain and permanent branding.

Luckily for me, my state rolled out its equivalent of Direct File a couple years ago, and it's fantastic. Just like Direct File was.

I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...

Basic taxes are trivial in the US if you just work to live, it is essentially one page. However, there is an extremely long and fat tail where the government has no way of knowing the correct details to compute your taxes. There are myriad subsidies and offsets that have to be accounted for, many of which depend on what State you live in.

If you earn a lot of money, like the tech people that frequent this website, you are much more likely to find yourself in that fat tail. It can become esoteric quite quickly. The Federal tax code has to accommodate the completely independent tax codes of all 50 States in a reasonable way.

That seems like a nightmare of a product as far as privacy is concerned.

> The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: Recordkeeping, 12 hr., 40 min.; Learning about the law or the form, 4 hr., 17 min.; Preparing and sending the form, 8 hr., 16 min.

The French tax system is pretty simple. Taxes are high, but simple. The website you use to file your taxes is also pretty simple, and every single field has a button that explains what it is about and in which cases you should write stuff inside.

The only annoying parts are if you have accounts outside of France, you have to declare them. And if you get dividends/capital gains in foreign currencies outside of the EU, you have to calculate yourself how much tax you owe using a bunch of tables per country and currency.

Except those corrupt politicians want lobbying to be profitable, so they can profit from it too. And if they ask for too much, they’ll just bribe the next guy or may even try to put their own in office. Can’t have that!

It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310

[1]: Although I find it incredibly frustrating the lengths they go to to avoid negative numbers on the forms.

Until it wasn’t.

Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.

Every time they speak there should be a visual reminder of who they've taken money from.

This is a better exploration of what needs to happen: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-corporate-power... ( I found this article via HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45317731 )

Not just the basics. I found that it could do everything I needed including Schedules C, D and E.

IIRC, its limitations are if you're earning in multiple states, or are earning foreign income.

Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.

What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.)

The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant.

https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office...

There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.

You might run into similar problems.

If you donate to a large charity, there is a good chance some of that $ goes to lobbying, as it should. (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)

If you work at a large company, 100% chance it lobbies, for good reason. Large employers lobby for better mass transit (because parking garages are expensive), more housing (because it is cheaper to lobby than pay employees more so they can afford $$$$ houses), or friendlier business laws (no one likes paying more taxes).

Lobbying is everything from "help us use orphans as a source of cheap protein!" To "keep the national parks funded".

I spoke in objection to one very specific claim:

> [The] implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.

Feel free to imagine that I was addressing something else. It's a free country and all.

You also might want to look at the estimated average time for a non-business taxpayer to complete a 1040. If the 1040 estimate methodology is typical, then those estimates are pretty pessimistic.

Kirsten Sinema got a job as a senior lobbiest after her short congressional stint.

It involves reading a lot of instructions, with many references to other documents and other sections. It involves copying a lot of numbers from one place to another, and doing basic math on them to get a new one.

It could be improved a lot just by automatically calculating more fields, and adding more of the "worksheets" that are in the instructions into the forms so it can calculate those for you.

Also, Americans have to file both fed and state taxes (with different rules)

Deductions can get esoteric if you sold a bunch of stock. Even then, not that bad.

Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.

This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!

However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.

a) You're already trusting them with every piece of information in your tax return. It'd cost like five cents to use that information to discover your phone number... if they're malicious, you're already fucked.

b) When? At the end of the process where you're doing stuff like attesting that you're not lied on your tax return? I don't remember them demanding a phone number up front, and I also don't remember whether or not I refused to provide a phone number at the end.

Free file: government partners with private companies to offer free tax returns through their software for low income people. It's suspected a lot of people don't know about it, and just use the paid versions of filing software because you have to start the process on IRS.gov and dark patterns were employed by the snakes at Intuit et al. Hence "just 3%". Been around for decades.

Direct file: New program (since 2024) for eligible people to file directly for free with the IRS, no third party tax software middleman. Only half the states are eligible, income criteria, simple taxes only. 300,000 touted as a bigger number because it's a very new program.

As the government it should be possible to reduce the negative impact of making mistakes.

>Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.

Then start simple. You don't have to cover all of tax law at the start.

https://theworknumber.com/solutions/products/income-employme...

It already does this. The form validation checks that you have filled in the required fields and on most forms about half of the field values are not user-editable and instead auto-calculated from the other half.

It also looks for the required related forms you should have attached. The worksheets are another matter and aren't required to be attached, so they aren't part of the validation. It's assumed that you have read the instructions and done the worksheets elsewhere, although you certainly can attach them anyway.

And if that weren't enough, you've go municipal taxes too, in a few places like New York and Detroit.

Oh shit, wait.

For some things. But there are also several fields that could be calculated, but aren't.

> It's assumed that you have read the instructions and done the worksheets elsewhere

Yes, but it would be helpful if it had something to do the worksheets as part of the site instead of you having to do the worksheet elsewhere.

The instructions for each form published by the IRS every year are already written by professional technical writers to be unambiguous. Do you mean that someone ought to write a simplified english grammar transpiler? I think that would genuinely be interesting. What's missing are the guidelines the technical writers are using, but that can probably be derived.

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

As for "having most of your tax information", they don't. They know your reported income. You see that on your W2s/1099s/etc. What they don't know is whether or not you had a kid this year, or whether you lost a kid this year, whether you got married or divorced, if your spouse is claiming the kids this year or not, the number or amount of your charitable contributions, whether you have deductible mileage expenses, or a million other things.

And options are worse.

There is a reason Americans spend staggering amounts of time and money on tax preparation. It is simple until it isn’t.

The US is not a county optimized to provide quality services inexpensively. It is a business optimized to maximize profits.

Which is free for nearly everyone, but is only marginally better than paper filing your own taxes.

We formalized it! It is called an application fee, and it is set high enough so they the government employee doesn't need to take bribes outside of their salary.

Other countries set application fees so low that government employees barely earn enough money to eat, so they take bribes.

NYC solves a huge part of their police corruption problem by just paying officers more.

> When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests

I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!

The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12521#:~:text=The%20I...

Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)

In my experience, the form instructions tell you clearly when you should and should not file a form. They also clearly indicate which other forms are to be filed when you meet specific conditions (income limits, possession of specific other forms, etc.).

Granted, I don't run a business, nor do I have exceptionally complex finances, so there are a great many IRS form instructions that I have never seen. Because I've not see them all, I'd never say that every such form instruction is clear, but the ones I've encountered have been.

This part makes enough sense.

> They're like fucking Eagles fans.

Now you've gone and implied 95% of sports fans aren't that way?? I don't understand your argument any more.

They are missing the context that only a fraction of filers are eligible to use free filing and that TurboTax paid something like 140 million to settle claims that they are misleading filers. That suit is why they now admit only 37% of people are even eligible to file for free.

I touched this point in my previous reply. But let me reiterate it again. Those politicians are supposed to just talk to their constituents and represent their interests. That's their job description. If the voters who sent them to the legislatures have to lobby them afterwards, what is the purpose of these politicians anyway? Is their job to con the public into choosing them, so that they can leech the same public? Evidently so, and that's the fundamental problem with democracy in US these days.

> The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.

While EFF and ACLU do a commendable job, their existence don't justify lobbying. It's the other way around. Lobbying make them a necessity to regain some semblance of balance and fairness. They wouldn't be needed if the politicians were doing their job in the first place.

Not for most people. It’s a giant pain in the ass if you have bank accounts and want to file correctly.

If all you do is plug in your w-2 and pretend that’s your whole tax return and you don’t care about anything except the standard deduction, sure. That’s not correct for most people.

> state taxes are filed at the same time and each state has its own separate system

Can we stop pretending like this is a problem insurmountable for the federal government?

This idea that TurboTax can make this work but the government can’t is absurd.

That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is: "We did your tax return for you based on all the information reported to us. Please click 'OK' to complete your return for the year."

Very odd. I wonder (but not enough to investigate) what's so different between your situation and mine that I'd not be asked for a phone number during initial configuration.

"Email and phone verification

If you are not receiving the verification codes, from both sources, you will not be able to create an account:"

There are also other services that provide free efiling regardless of income, it’s not just TurboTax.

At the end of the day, you can always do the paperwork if you really don’t want anyone seeing your taxes and mail it. Could it be better? Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.

> In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or

As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.

An additional factor is state taxes really need to be packaged together with the actual solution.

Just passionate enough to say that everyone unhappy with Intuit lobbying against free tax filing and simplified tax codes doesn’t understand?

> As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.

This is misleading. The IRS does have this because for most people it does not change year to year. It would also be trivial for them to provide a way to input this data if/when it does change.

You also seem to be simultaneously claiming that the US tax system is too complex for the government to feasibly automate and that filing taxes is trivial.

Either you hold contradictory viewpoints here or you have some undisclosed interest in this area.

Decade later the US lost most of its soft power due to the abuse of its dominant military and economic position in the world and then lost its dominant position too with the rise of the economies around the world.

People now see the US as a strong state on the lands of native Americans on the continent called North America.