When you look at the donations politicians receive and the ROI they produce you quickly realize that they are way too cheap. Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.

Maybe lobbyists should be punished by having their skin fully tattooed blue like smurfs.

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

The system he mentioned is usually equally simple for self-employed.

Lol not really in practice.

For most people, those deductions are less than the "standard" deduction you can take instead. For most of the people who do itemized deductions, it's mostly just your mortgage payment and state taxes, which the IRS already knows about, and maybe charitable donations.

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?

The majority of Americans are W2 wage earners that take the standard deduction.

For a truly uniquely complicated tax system please move to Germany.

I highly doubt that it's more complicated than the French or German tax system.

> Just look at the dense jargon ... There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that?

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>

Even so, Direct File was possible.

Until it wasn’t.

It is not that complex. RSU's or options are pretty straightforward.

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

If they genuinely can't work out what you owe, why bother paying it at all? Shouldn't there be a massive tax evasion problem?

> It started requiring phone numbers and things...

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.

You know, the IRS is basically defunded, even not counting the whole shutdown thing. I wonder how many people need to file handwritten by mail before it becomes a significant problem

That's about it being closed for the 2025 tax year (because the filing deadling has passed), not about the program being shut down.

Very related discussion from 6 months ago:

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

The form that you fill out has a very tearse description of the field, but the actual instructions are in a separate document. For example, form 1040 is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf and the instructions document is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf

The instructions make it very clear when a field in the form should be used and what should go in it.

Unless you have a unreasonably complicated return, you need absolutely no knowledge of tax law. It's all just "take the number from box X on form A and write it in box Y of form B."

No tax software or expert will never produce a wrong answer, because too many questions have no guaranteed right answer, due to inconsistent interpretatios within the IRS.

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.

People file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.

1% of returns filed by tax software have errors, which is infinitely more than 0%

>it can NEVER produce a wrong answer

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.

Fwiw they have already bought all you financial info from Experian

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

The only reason I care about companies having my data is that it means the government can get to it. In this case I am required to give my data to the government anyway, so why would I care if OpenAI / Google has it?

I think they meant that it should be a lot faster to develop software that implements the tax code with the assistance of AI coding tools.

ISTM one ought to be able to use AI to translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format. No personal data needs to go anywhere near the AI.

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.

I'm surprised that there hasn't been an "this is good for bitcoin" comments yet.