Warp wrote:
>   Here in Finland all that is automatic: You receive a pre-filled form
> with all your income, tax reductions, etc. already put in. If everything
> is correct, you don't have to do anything about it. Only if there's
> something not in the form already (for example some significant payment
> which has not been notified to the tax officials, or something which is
> worth tax reductions) you'll have to add it to the form and return it.

It's official: the Finnish are more intelligent than the Americans!

How can I move to Finland? :)

By the way, the IRS recently looked at completely automating the tax 
process (meaning the individual would only have to look over the final 
result to make sure it's accurate).  It's one of their goals, but they 
decided that the technical hurdles involved would make a full 
implementation problematic (while they did collect bids from various 
companies, the IRS's own analysis concluded that most of those bids were 
wildly optimistic at best).

Even doing it for a small portion of the population would be more 
trouble that it's worth, at present.

A more realistic immediate goal for them is allowing you to do your 
taxes online at the IRS's web site, rather than paying a third party to 
do them for you (there is a partnership program between the IRS and 
various tax prep companies that allows those companies to do your taxes 
online for free, but only for certain qualifying individuals {your 
income has to be in a certain range, and your return can't be very 
complex}).  This would eliminate a large part of the business of tax 
firms, but the IRS actually seems more concerned about the taxpayers 
than the tax preparers.

Maybe that's because the IRS isn't run by politicians?  Unfortunately, 
they still have to report to them :(

...Chambers

Post a reply to this message