> A very simple and obvious example is the administration of taxation, where the government have most of the information already, and the rest is just going through the motions.
IIRC, IRS higher-ups have talked before about wanting to do this (since it would cut down on enforcement/audit costs to just tally up everything in-house and send a bill or refund), but the current laws don't allow them to implement it.
Having a pre-filled form you could look over and send back is suggested occasionally, but seems never to pass. The nefarious explanation for why is that Intuit has good lobbyists [1], but I'm not sure how true that is.
We have pre-filled taxes in Denmark and they work fine. You have a month to look over the pre-filled forms and revise them if necessary. Although the tax system is also a lot less complex (taxes are high, but also simple). I know the IRS is doing something like that, just not giving it to you, which seems silly: I've gotten a letter before pointing out that I filled out a line incorrectly, which also told me what the IRS thought the correct value should be. I'm sure that was auto-detected by comparing something I entered with the W2 or 1099 information (I forget in which context it came up). So just pre-fill it for me, then, since you obviously already know what should go there!
In Denmark we have this (prefilled forms). Both for last years taxes and a preform for nexy years taxes. Income, tax, estate, interest, stock gains, and even tax exemption for commutes and similar are all filled out.
You simply login with your "easy id" and accept or edit.
Any oustanding balance in your favour is transferred to your bank account in about a week.
Any outstanding balance in the goverments favour will either be moved to next years taxes or billed automaticly dependant on the amount.
It all works out pretty good.. Even though we pay the worlds highest taxes.. (Sales tax 25%, car tax 180%, income tax 58%..)
I believe a new version based on JavaScript and iframes (sigh) is either out now or being deployed as we speak. Of course it sucks too (just less), but for different reasons: Recent posts on various forums have indicated that it uses something like 1MiB of JavaScript for what is basically a series of forms. The use of iframes is also kind of insane these days unless it's for branding/familiary-for-casual-users. The really weird thing is that official spokespeople have claimed that the iframe thing is for security reasons, which has me worried about what kind of security they imagine they can achieve in a compromised client. Hopefully(?!) it was just a spokesperson being ill-formed about the technical details.
> Having a pre-filled form you could look over and send back is suggested occasionally, but seems never to pass.
This is the norm in New Zealand, simplified greatly by our tax code which is inifnitely less complicated.
> The nefarious explanation for why is that Intuit has good lobbyists [1], but I'm not sure how true that is.
I've seen the topic come up on left-leaning US sites like Metafilter and it seems that in the US even nominal lefties who approve of big government are paranoid they'll miss out on their tax dodges if the IRS prepare the form for them as a first step.
Not only that. Even the people who want to cut taxes all the time like Grover Norquist are against it. They want to make tax paying as painful as possible.
You can just decline to report the complicated parts of your income (but report the majority, so you don't look like a cheater), and IRS will fill in the parts you skipped (reported by others, banks, etc) and a and you a bill for the difference with a bit of interest added on.
The problem is there's an assumption that the government data is right, and disproving their data as a taxpayer would be tough. (Fighting city hall is tough)
In the current voluntary compliance regime, a very small number of returns receive audit treatment of any kind.
A few years back I miscalculated my self-employment tax. Didn't get audited, just got a letter saying "You miscalculated and overpaid", followed by a check for the $100 or so.
The government can disagree with your return based on their data without auditing. A couple of years ago, the government told me they thought I'd under-reported my taxable income from a couple of years earlier (I had, because a place I'd worked had failed to give me a 1099). I wasn't required to undergo an audit; they just said they thought I owed this much money and I should either pay it or explain why I didn't actually owe it.
well the UK system seems to work well I got one rather complex tax situation sorted out with a single phone call.
Previous employer went bust the hard way so I had a couple of tax years where my income was up and down - I rang up got though quickly the operator on the other said ok yes your owed xxxx we can change your taxcode for most of it and for this tax year you will get a refund after the tax year end.
I was expecting to have to take lots of calls and take several months to sort out.
The more information you have the better. You could still dispute the numbers the IRS. I fail to see any downside in such a system (other than for TurboTax and CPAs)
IIRC, IRS higher-ups have talked before about wanting to do this (since it would cut down on enforcement/audit costs to just tally up everything in-house and send a bill or refund), but the current laws don't allow them to implement it.