alt Hacker News1. Commercial lobby: Intuit/TT, tax preparers, firms that benefit from confusion
2. Political/ideological lobby (less today but still a factor): Grover Norquist railed against return-free filing (using the data they’ve got government sends you a number to pay, if you pay it you are 100% done with taxes no takebacks.)
Commercial lobby is an irritant but the “ideological” one is the most annoying and difficult to surmount.
Norquist & his camp says the government/IRS has fundamental conflict of interest as the collector and enforcer and taxpayers won’t bother to correct government calculation mistakes on their taxes. If there’s a real appeal process doing all the old-school recordkeeping there probably wouldn’t ever be a shortage of taxpayers eager to challenge/contest and file with their own paperwork.
Norquist and friends need taxes to remain a PITA & have high hassle factor for their fundraising and advocacy efforts. If taxes are too easy these people won’t have much political purchase railing against how annoying/$$ it is to pay taxes.
Idk anything substantive about tax policy (ie who should pay what share, best use of $$, etc I’ll leave to the “professionals”/political system) but just as an end user who uses tax prep services it sure seems like there is a concerted effort by people economically & ideologically incentivized to make taxes as annoying as possible
- https://atr.org/senate-conservatives-speak-against-return-fr...
- https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california...
- https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
The people to blame for complicated taxes are Congress and the President. Over time Congress slips in all sorts of special taxes and special exclusions to support their interest groups. The last time there was a concerted effort to simplify the tax code was 1986 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986 .
Critics of the 1986 Tax Reform Act said, why bother simplifying the tax code when Congress will just make it complicated again? The response was sure, we'll just need to clean up the tax code again every 20 years or so. Well that's never happened since.
In 2017 many in Congress wanted to simplify the tax code. Unfortunately Trump said he didn't want to simplify taxes, he just wanted to lower them. As one great example, some folks wanted to eliminate the State and Local Tax deduction (SALT), which is a complicated deduction. (Example: You file federally based on "estimated" state and local taxes, but if you get a refund or owe state and local taxes, the next year you have "adjust" your prior year's deduction.) Instead of eliminating them, the 2017 tax bill just phased them out at higher income levels, which just adds complexity to an already complex part of the tax code.
Certainly the act of filing one's taxes can be made a bit simpler, but it seems there's never any incentive behind actually simplifying the tax code itself, because every tiny change to the tax code creates winners and losers who object.