The most communist part is that the whole process is fully managed by the government tax office, not some 3rd party private company.

The not communist part is that it takes unbelievable amount of corruption to program and maintain these services under the hood. They figured out that it's hard to measure how much human work needed to develop such a thing, so they can just invoice whatever unbelievable amount they want. American companies help with that as well. Windows and Office license for state offices 3-4 times higher than the normal price for consumers, because for some reason they can't buy it directly from Microsoft, they have to buy from local appointed dealers... Actually MS was fined for this for USD 8.7 Million, the local party in one of this deal was promoted to higher government position afterwards.

So actually this doesn't exist for making the peasant's life easier, just to have jobs to steal from.... It's just accidental that our small life becomes a bit less miserable during the process.

In the US, brokerage companies legally have to send you a Form 1099 which covers all investment income over the year. You then include this when submitting your taxes. They probably send a similar report to your government instead.

Yeah it’s an unpleasant afternoon the majority of which is from the gathering of financial documents not from the math and filling it out. But if you don’t have government form literacy or basic arithmetic skills I imagine the 1040ez still can be rough. My issue with being expected to fill it out is much more connected to the fact that it just sucks to have to do than the fact that it’s difficult. Though also sometimes it’s a real pain in the ass to get your tax statements from a job you quit like a year prior and moved.

That's just for free tax filling software, i.e. a government sponsored TurboTax alternative. And that was definitely needed.

What they're talking about is not having to actually do the filling at all, or at least only having to file in certain cases. The government pays for employees that look at your stuff, says "that's the amount", and asks you to confirm.

Granted, with the way tax filing software has advanced, and how simple the vast majority of people's filings are going to be, the difference is not very substantial anymore. The majority of people just need to click through the screens and answer the questions, so it takes a little time but it's hardly a true hassle.

The reason it's been like this in the US for so long is because of the heavy lobbying to keep software like that proprietary and the system complicated enough that people need to use it.

But it's also been because of decades of conservative bullshit refusing to fund the IRS to the degree that they could provide the services that other countries get. IRS literally could not and cannot afford the manpower to handle the taxes of every American for us. Software lets them circumvent that.

The rationale is the tax companies want it this way, and pay politicians a lot of money to keep it this way

I'm not an expert by any means, but my understanding is there is a "tax accounting lobby" that works hard to prevent any measures to simplify it, because they would go out of business. Intuit and others.

As he said the it's lacks the funding for those tools. The systems were developed in the 70s, developers are retiring and there are less and less people to handle it. I'm order to even do that for everyone the IRS needs an upgrade. I work with these systems everyday.

What if I'm just lazy?

gaol

What if I only made 2 dollars?

I’m all about paying my fair share of taxes, but the way our tax laws are set up are utterly asinine, and they’re the way they are because tax prep companies literally spend millions of dollars every year lobbying to keep them complicated, because the complexity is literally the foundational aspect of their entire business model. I am absolutely not going to defend how insane and Byzantine US tax law is, nor should anyone.

Why yes it is that thing that you correctly identified, you really should have more faith in yourself