What about rental income?
What about expenses related to rental properties?
Lots of things the government doesn’t know…
Nobody is saying filing taxes should never be necessary. Only that it shouldn’t be necessary for most people.
The flow should be… Employer and financial institutions send info to IRS (they mostly do already). Then, in January, IRS sends a “Is this correct?” notice to residents. If correct, no action is needed. If not correct, then make adjustments.
- IRS pre-fills all it knows about you
- you log into to IRS web site to check if everything is correct, and provide additional data or correct invalid data
- submit
Oh look. By implementing this you may join Sweden and a bunch of other countries in the 21st century.
free-file is estimated to cover 47% of Americans. we fund public schools even though a significantly smaller proportion of Americans are children. you would have a hard time finding any government service that applies to 100% of people
