If the government can determine that my taxes are wrong, then they know the amount I have to pay. So why can't they tell me the correct number up front? (Yes, I know the reason why, but I still feel like it's a valid question)
I've always wondered if I could file some kind of freedom of information act request to get the IRS's opinion of what my taxes should be; and/or to get the source code to the IRS's program to calculate what their opinion of my taxes should be.
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That being said, my Dad worked for a few years at the IRS part-time before he finally retired. He loved it. (My Dad is one of those people who enjoys taxes and finds them soothing.) I concluded that the IRS is a white-collar make-work program. It also leaks a lot of confidential social information, because he got to see all kinds of tax returns from all slices of economic status.
The issue is the government doesn't and shouldn't know every possible detail of your life so if you're in a complex tax situation (most people aren't and can just take the standard deduction) you'd still need to do the preparations. But for the vast majority of people the government does already know what you're taxes should be because you're just taking the standard deduction which 87% of people did in 2018 and that number has grown slightly since then. [0]
For more complex cases where you have more deduction and income sources the government doesn't really know all the individual setups you may or may not qualify for and they only audit a small percentage of filers every year.
The reason it's been blocked is a mess of ideological and economic. Ideological from people who interested that want to make taxes more annoying so people are generally more anti tax and then they get elected and make cuts to the top percentages/businesses permanent while the tax cuts for the majority of citizens are temporary. This sets up a debt crisis when those 'temporary' cuts are also extended they can use to leverage for government cuts. On the economic side there's a huge amount of money made each year by preparing taxes for people too intimidated by the complexity to DIY it. So they ally with the generically antitax side to keep their business going.
They can determine your taxes are "fishy" and then demand further documentation. Say you declared you sold a car and profited, but seemingly under-reported the sale price. They'd show up and demand to see the bill-of-sale, maybe contact the buyer, etc. How would the government know ahead of time what price you sold the car for?
Most fraud about car sales is to claim a lower price in order to skip on sales taxes collected by the states' motor vehicle agencies. Not all states charge a sales tax on individual-to-individual sales. Here in Kentucky, the state constitution says that taxes have to be charged on the assessed value, so part of the annual registration is based on the assessed value (min $100 for boats or $200 for cars/trucks). I used to work for KY's Transportation Cabinet (combo DMV + highway dept).
These examples are silly, most people are not selling a car privately all the time and they can handle any reporting or changes when you transfer the ownership.
In many countries for the majority of the population they can and do determine how much tax should be paid, and many people don’t have to file tax returns.
