That's a common thing I have to repeatedly explain to people, that a large tax return is essentially a free short term loan to the government. I had a friend post a photo of $9k in cash with some comment in the direction of friendly prideful boasting of some sort. I replied to him informing about what happened and that he needs to update his withholding so he doesn't have a large return and emailed him some articles about the drawbacks of large returns. It's a pretty crazy world. I've also had a friend who donated a ton of his money through the year and itemized deductions and had returns in the tens of thousands of dollars. His HR department was using the family size withholding table which maxes out at like 6 dependents or something. I imagine they did so for simplicity and probably didn't have many individuals for which that table was suboptimal. I pointed out that there's a formula withholding section to the W4 that he needs to look into so he doesn't have these ridiculous sums of money come tax season.

the point is about the interest the government takes in the ratio of the number of tax collectors to the number of tax payers and keeping that number low; it's not about the merits or abuses of the 1099 status.