Trippin' Through Time

My bank already knows every time I buy stuff from the pharmacy. It also knows when I buy school supplies. It also knows when I buy hardware or materials for home improvement. It might not know if I sold my PS3 on Facebook, but Facebook certainly knows. Sometimes it's ambiguous, like if I go to a big box retailer and buy drywall+aspirin+groceries it'd all be lumped together, so a little bit of modification would need to be done to how receipts are tallied and how the software works. This seems trivial, though.

And the government certainly knows, too. Hell, other governments probably know enough about me to file my taxes.

The biggest obstacle would be edge cases, like selling my PS3 to my neighbor's kid in cash. There's no record anywhere. In that case, yeah, it makes sense to require me to file because I need to create a record of the transaction myself.

In all other cases, this is just busy work. The information is already out there and already in ten different databases, it just isn't being connected together because the IRS was created in a time when having such a complete digital transaction history was essentially impossible and because we want to pretend that we don't live in a panopticon.