>This isn’t a purely hypothetical proposal. Countries like Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Chile, and Spain already offer such ”pre-populated returns” to their citizens.
Spain is the largest of these by far, with a little under 50 million people. Quick search says about 19 million households.
Did the researchers do their work in a way that could scale up to 60 million and beyond well? Just because the IRS has the data doesn't mean it's easy to do stuff with it. (Thinking about how the ATF has gun databases that are non-searchable.)
Like if you have a system and make an improvement that simplifies 10 million returns in a big country and 1 million returns in a small country, it's worth more in the big country.
I get the feeling they already do? My return was accepted in precisely 31 minutes this year. Not super complex but there were multiple things they had no idea about.
Can we stop this scaling nonsense? I never understand why things like these wouldn't scale. And then they forget to go check bigger countries like India and China and how they do things. If those can scale, surely argument is always moot...
They have the data and clearly can do things with it, as they do what are effectively automated audits, and send out notices if the numbers in the submitted returns don't match up with their data. It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to extend that system to automatically prepare the tax returns. As usual, it's just a matter of funding, programming, and continuing operational expenses. At worse, it would just take a while to generate all the returns, and maybe tax day would have to be pushed back a bit.
When the GOP gleefully raised taxes on middle class citizens of New York, California, Massachusetts, etc, they made millions of people ineligible for most deductions. The biggest real barrier for automated returns would be which noncustodial parent gets to claim dependents.
Spain is the largest of these by far, with a little under 50 million people. Quick search says about 19 million households.
Did the researchers do their work in a way that could scale up to 60 million and beyond well? Just because the IRS has the data doesn't mean it's easy to do stuff with it. (Thinking about how the ATF has gun databases that are non-searchable.)