This is true in the US as well, but the tax authority (IRS) gives you nothing but blank forms to fill out yourself.
It is more like a test, where you get nothing if you answer correctly and penalty if you make a mistake.
Note: IRS does provide a way to download what they know as a pdf (what banks reported, for example), so one can get some help with the "test"
The IRS does not have the resources to manually verify all of everyone's income, so instead they use a process of flags which trigger audits of varying depth. Flags include things such as certain reported amounts/types of values. Shallow audits review some submitted records, and the deepest ones are detailed, extensively scrutinizing all aspects of all records by a forensic accountant in an attempt to identify some criminal behavior.
But I have no idea how much of this is true as I think about it. It's just some things I've intuited/reasoned out over time.
Seriously though, I would love (hate) to read what sort of ethical backflips they had to do to make IRS reform a bad thing. I'm presuming they tried to make logical arguments.
That’s what happened to me when TurboTax applied too many credits.
That’s when I learned that the IRS had everything they needed to just send me a bill.
