I don't know what Sweden's tax code looks like, but at least here in the U.S., the IRS simply can't know a lot of the information necessary to calculate your taxes. How would it know how much you paid in daycare expenses, tuition and tuition interest, home mortgage interest, etc?
You can say that we just shouldn't have deductions for these sorts of things, but that's a very programmer way to look at things (we need to get rid of these features because they would be hard to program). It's also not theoretically sound. An income tax is supposed to be a tax on net accretion to wealth. Expenditures that are non-consumptive should be excluded from taxable income because they don't represent an increase in wealth.
> I don't know what Sweden's tax code looks like, but at least here in the U.S., the IRS simply can't know a lot of the information necessary to calculate your taxes. How would it know how much you paid in daycare expenses, tuition and tuition interest, home mortgage interest, etc?
The same way that it already does know many of those things -- you know those student loan interest, mortgage interest, etc. statements you get at the end of the year that you rely on when filling out your tax forms, and that the tax forms refer to by form number? Yeah, not only are the people you paid required to send those to you, they are already required to file them with the IRS, as well.
There's some things that may not be amenable to this solution, but many taxpayers aren't effected by them and the workload if you reduced filing to addressing those would be minimal -- the IRS just sends you your precomputed "basic" return, with instructions on the handful of potential adjustments you might need to report and document and send back, and a deadline to do so if the basic return isn't all you need (along with the same deadline to pay any balance if the basic return is correct, or any remaining balance on the corrected return.)
Then, if nothing is filed before the deadline, the IRS sends out refunds (if applicable) or starts collection on any amounts due and not paid.
I agree there are exceptions, and even in the ideal world, many Americans will still end up having to submit something. But I think that starting from zero is silly. The IRS already knows a lot about our income - they must, that's part of how they check the correctness of our returns.
I think a system where the IRS says, "Here is what we know about your tax situation. We have calculated your taxes. If we owe you, and you agree, you don't have to do anything. If you agree, and you owe us, please pay us. If you do not agree, ammend this information and submit, with payment if necessary."
Forcing each American to start with a blank form seems wasteful, to me. It's a reproduction of work. I absolutely agree with your upthread comment about taxes being inherently complex, so please don't mistake my comment for an argument against that point. But I think that many Americans would be able to just accept what the IRS suggests, or at least use what the IRS says as a starting point. I think that the existence of the 1040A and 1040EZ forms support this point. (I tried finding numbers on how many people use those forms, but could not.)
This is solvable through policy: Have the daycare, educational institution, lender, mortgagee send the IRS (and you) a form detailing the amount you paid. Hell, this is already the case for most tuition and mortgage interest payments.
You can say that we just shouldn't have deductions for these sorts of things, but that's a very programmer way to look at things (we need to get rid of these features because they would be hard to program). It's also not theoretically sound. An income tax is supposed to be a tax on net accretion to wealth. Expenditures that are non-consumptive should be excluded from taxable income because they don't represent an increase in wealth.