I think a few of you can't read. To begin with, the original post said nothing about simplifying the tax code. They were talking about the filing process. I said it would make more sense for them to simplify the taxes laws themselves.
I think some people also missed the part about the IRS screwing up and sending me notices that I owed more taxes. I don't need to hear about Turbo Tax always messing things up - the IRS messes things up. So it's OK if they mess up, but not OK when Turbo Tax messes up? Or is that just the automatic hatred of corporations? (And while you MUST do your taxes, no one is actually making you use Turbo Tax, and I am capable of doing my taxes manually, so no corporation is in control of me.)
For people who look at some data, decide everything is right and click okay, will they notice if the IRS has messed something up? You do realize that the vast majority of people would probably never know the difference. One of the errors they made and notified me about was nothing at all complicated, and was in fact something that would more affect lower income families, the ones who are the least likely to know if their information is correct, and the least likely to know what the tax laws were that caused this error to happen. It was because they changed a law, I did it correctly, but the IRS messed it up and claimed I owed more. I can almost guarantee you that the average person qualifying for this credit would never have realized that the IRS was messing up their law change and would have just paid the extra tax. Some of you have a little too much faith in people who are too ignorant to know the different, but that's who gets hurts.
So it's not just about certain people who want to have control over doing their own taxes. There are laws that will affect people, not related to information obtained from a bank or employee, that they really won't understand or know anything about, and will just have to trust the government, even though the government screws up too!
It still boils down to: do you really trust the government that much? I don't care what they already know. Not to mention that if they got the opportunity to start doing things behind people's back, they'll do it, and a lot of people would never know. (Because they already do things behind people's back.) Quite personally, I find this trust of the government to be on the scary side, and the more people just trust things and shrug it off like this, the more scary it gets.
(Please note that nothing I posted is meant to support Turbo Tax. Just talking about the concept.)
