I can't believe so many commenters here are crying out for a nannier nanny state where all of their financial transactions are monitored by the government and once a year they have to sign a paper agreeing that the government has watched them correctly.
That flies in hte face of the usual comment torrent decrying centralized spying from any agency, government or otherwise.
In the 40 or so years I have been doing taxes I have not once seen the amount deducted as taxes match the amount owed. After various deductions (retirement savings, medical expenses, charitable donations, political contributions, governmental program incentives, etc) and jurisdictional disagreements (employer in one province, residence in another), I and those I do taxes for always get money coming back.
Requiring every financial (and otherwise) transaction I undertake to be registered with some central government authority to they can (in theory) correctly prefill my tax forms is anathema. Be careful what you wish for you might just get it.
I don't know if you're just not aware of this, or what, but most of the data on your taxes is stuff that already gets reported to the government. There's no reason for consumers to fill out a W2 every year, the government as it exists today already has that data. The same is the case for a lot of investment information, it already gets reported to the IRS today.
You don't need to build an expanded government surveillance program for the IRS to stop requiring filers to fill in information that the government already has. This has nothing to do with having a "nanny state", and everything to do with a coordinated campaign from bad-faith actors like Intuit to try and pretend that it's pro-freedom or pro-privacy or some crud to act like the government doesn't already have your W2.
That flies in hte face of the usual comment torrent decrying centralized spying from any agency, government or otherwise.
In the 40 or so years I have been doing taxes I have not once seen the amount deducted as taxes match the amount owed. After various deductions (retirement savings, medical expenses, charitable donations, political contributions, governmental program incentives, etc) and jurisdictional disagreements (employer in one province, residence in another), I and those I do taxes for always get money coming back.
Requiring every financial (and otherwise) transaction I undertake to be registered with some central government authority to they can (in theory) correctly prefill my tax forms is anathema. Be careful what you wish for you might just get it.