Annie Lowrey: “If you are anything like me, you have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks opening letters, finding receipts, requesting PDFs, scanning documents, and going through your credit-card statements line by line. It’s tax season. And in the United States, taxes are a DIY affair.
“This is the case even though Washington could probably do your taxes for you … Yet Uncle Sam demands that Americans fire up TurboTax, head to a storefront preparer, hire an accountant, or sit down with a sharp pencil and a strong cup of coffee to get their taxes done each spring. The average filer spends 13 hours on their 1040—a time tax that many of our wealthy peer countries have reduced to a couple of minutes, if that. Prepopulated documents and return-free systems are common everywhere but here. Sweden lets residents file by text. Canada prefills paperwork. Japan sends households a document summarizing their tax contributions. If everything looks copacetic, many workers get to do a blissful nothing. Denmark, Estonia, Spain, and Norway have similarly simple processes.
“The United States imposes a cost in cash, as well as in effort. A majority of Americans, whether wealthy or poor, pay for help with their return, spending an average of $290 annually. Add up the amount that people spend out of pocket, and you would have a sum 12 times larger than the IRS’s budget. The situation is needless, as well as annoying. It’s far past time for it to end.”
Read more: https://theatln.tc/YL0l32h0
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/tax-day-irs-filing/686805/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo
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