>Catch up

It helps when you are the incumbent and you get to build the system in lockstep from day 1.

Agreed. I suspect an open-source competitor could be much better than all of these if organized well.

> The IRS themselves need to provide this "auto tax" service.

Interestingly, they now can: under the Free File program, tax prep companies would offer free filing (for taxpayers below 72k AGI) and the IRS would not compete with their service.

After a ProPublica investigation in their dark pattern shenanigans (leading to about 3.5% of taxpayers to use the program when 70% are eligible) confirmed by the HSGA Senate Committee and NYS DFS, the IRS both updated its rule to preclude e.g. hiding Free File programs for search engine, and removed the rule which prevented them from competing.

Sadly the IRS has been hamstrung time and again by the GOP, both financially and politically. They can't even do their core jobs of collecting tax and auditing the taxpayers they need to, so it's unlikely they'll have the clout and funds to set up a free filing program any time soon, let alone one properly integrated with their likely antiquated and in dire need of updates computer systems.

We have this in South Africa. It was always easy to do your taxes before, but since last year they do what they call an "Auto assessment". The South African Revenue Service collects all the documents they need (payslips, medical aid, pension etc.) from the respective organizations, fills out the tax form for you, and lets you know it's ready.

I logged in to check that they did it correctly, which they did, and approved it. Literally took ten minutes. Nine of which were just reviewing all the fields on the form.

Obviously this does not work for people who have very complex/unusual tax situations, but for your average person it's great.

The tax prep industry lobbied Congress to prevent the IRS from auto-tax filing. The compromise was "free filing" for those with median incomes and below. For a majority, W2s, 1099s and the previous years return can provide an auto-filing framework. The IRS would send your their draft and you agree or modify. Other countries do this.

Ideally there would be a "tax dashboard" on the IRS site where you could log in and see your (YTD): - Income reported - Taxes paid - Tax credits and deductions - Expected balance (+/-)

Then at the end of the year, you'd log in and click one button to verify the numbers and either pay or get a check.

My employer didn’t send me a W2 this year which caused me to seek another method to access this information. I created an account on irs.gov and was surprised to find a single PDF for each tax year containing W2’s, 1099Ints, 1099Divs that I assume were given to the IRS on my employers/bankers behalf.

Now it would be great for a tax program to ingest this PDF and auto-populate your tax return. Unfortunately no PDF for 2020 exists yet and it says it might not be available until October? I don’t know if generating this PDF is a slow process or if this information is intentionally withheld until after the tax filing date to make sure you are “honest” on your taxes.

I grew up in France, our bureaucracy is pretty intense and old school. But they send you a nice little note with your W2 and how much you own them. If they missed anything you can amend their draft. Usually it take 15min to complete the whole yearly process. Even with some midly complicated situation like renting and being landlord, living between two countries, cryptos.

As noted in other comments here, an "auto tax" service only really works on the happy path. There are parts of the tax code which are highly subjective in more complex situations and require explicit elections on part of the filing party. These elections can have consequences far beyond the immediate tax filing transaction.

In one sense I totally agree, but in the other sense, it seems like it could be terribly invasive privacy wise.

Or just make their implementation of the tax code public?

> - It would close all the loopholes megacorps/wealthy individuals use to pay less tax. You cannot avoid spending money in the place where you operate.

Yeah, it would "fix" this situation by just having them pay _less_ tax without needing a loophole. The percentage of income/wealth that someone spends decreases as wealth increases, so in other words the poor pay proportionally more under your tax scheme.

I think this is fundamentally a regressive idea. Currently the very poor pay zero (or effectively zero) income taxes. No matter how you structure the sales tax, you cannot go below zero. (I think negative sales tax is not actually realistic, nor particularly progressive.)

A system that only taxes spending fundamentally has problems in that the richer people can afford to save and invest.

Here in NZ we have a GST plus income tax - there are 3 tax steps, there are NO exemptions. Most people don't need to file a tax return, if you have only 1 job your employer will pay exactly the correct PAYE. If you have multiple jobs (or if you want to anyway) you can file online, it's 2-3 pages. If you don't do anything the IRD will run your taxes and if necessary send you a bill, or a refund (with interest).

I run a small business, I do my monthly PAYE in a simple spreads sheet - one line, type in the gross income out comes the numbers to include in the online filing web page including PAYE, and 401K equivalent. Doing the same in California was a nightmare.

We have no need for TurboTax or it's equivalent

> Here's my dream [...] The only tax is a Sales tax/VAT/GST.

Ok, I'll share mine: the only tax is on pollution and/or scare resource usage.

It's weird that we tax anything that's considered "good" in my opinion. Taxing housing, income from labour, consumption -- who came up with these shit ideas? Tax only, ONLY, what is considered bad (or should be reduced to a minimum), mainly: pollution. And the market will organize itself accordingly; optimize for all of us to survive a little longer on this planet (instead of exploiting it ASAP).

You can eliminate tax returns for most people by getting their employer to do it for them, which is effectively how the UK PAYE system works. Only those paid more than 100k, the self employed or others who want to claim certain tax incentives have to file what's known as a self assessment.

A wealth tax. All assets and cash need to be properly valued and then that value taxed. I agree with the sibling comment and also with past discussions where a wealth tax is the only non-regressive (not-keep the poor down) tax code.

> Won't this disproportionately tax the poor? - Firstly, the existing tax code already does.

I used to think this because it's often said, but learned it's not true. This sums it up:

The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent.

The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.9 percent).

The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 26.8 percent average individual income tax rate, which is more than six times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (4.0 percent).

https://taxfoundation.org/summary-of-the-latest-federal-inco...

Income tax itself isn't the complicated part of taxes. I encourage everyone to do their own taxes by hand sometime. There are like 4 boxes for wage income and income tax, and 100s of boxes for everything else. And besides the boxes you do fill out, there is all the reading and calculating required to figure out you don't have to fill in even more boxes (e.g. in order to know if you have to fill in the AMT form, you potentially have to do all the AMT calculations).

I think the biggest single thing that would simplify the tax code is removing the separate capital gains tax and just counting it all as income. There is significant complexity in the tax return to calculate everything independently and to show that your capital gains aren't really income. You could eliminate Schedule D, Form 8949 (which you have to up to 4 times), and the Capital Gains/Schedule D worksheets to figure income.

HSAs are also super painful. E.g. CA doesn't respect the tax-exempt status of HSAs, so you have to add the HSA back into your income so they can tax it. There are also a lot of bookkeeping requirements for relatively low amounts of money. In practice, they aren't very useful since the fees are high, the returns are low, and their function is redundant with insurance (i.e. paying premiums now to cover large future expenses).

In general, there are a ton of random little exemptions and extra taxes that you might qualify for and it just takes time to figure out if they apply to you. E.g. Form 8959 (Additional Medicare Tax) is a 0.9% tax for income over a certain amount. They should have just adjusted the income tax graduations in an equivalent way. Form 8960 (Net Investment Income Tax) has a similar problem. CA gives a $60 renter's credit if you make under certain amounts, which is just too insignificant to matter (e.g. 0.3% of $1500/month annualized).

It also creates a problem where you have countries who are close together people crossing the border to shop where taxes are cheaper and then the country where they live not getting those tax dollars (example Canada USA)

So, this is basically a tax on consumption.

Not a bad idea per se, but regressive, as many pointed out. However, in conjunction with a UBI it might make sense, and be progressive.

another con is: It's very hard to figure out how high your personal tax rate is if you don't track all your spending. I guess it's less of a problem for you guys over the pond, but at least in countries like Japan and Germany where at least 60-80% of all payments are done with cash it's near impossible to know unless you track your spending by hand.

I agree with you that VAT would be cool to have as the sole tax, though.

The reason that Taxes are complicated, is that the government wants them to be complicated. You can do without taxes (the government prints money, which is a tax on economic activity); or at a maximum print money + tax on big wealth accumulation which shouldn't affect the average guy.

The tax code is being used as a tool to funnel money through industries and as kickbacks to bureaucrats. A non-communist government can't force the population to do something (invest in this, build this, do that), but they can encourage/discourage it through taxes.

The tax code is not getting simpler any sooner.

Please enjoy your imminent crucifixion at the hands of the wokesters. It's what they do to people who use logic like that.

Do we really use that much time and money on tax prep? Sure, it seems like it during this time of year, but for the other 10 months I dont think about it.

And just forcing the bureaucracy into the businesses collecting a sales tax doesn’t reduce the burden, it just puts it out of sight for consumers.

> This is primarily not a "software" problem.

This is true.

> Unless we simplify our tax codes in the US, tools like turbotax will stay.

The two are linked because a lot for he lobbying comes from the same place, so its unlikely that one would get changed without the other, but there's less essential link other than shared lobbying interest than you seem to think: even with the complexity of the system quite a lot of the information is already in the IRS’s hands.

It's still excellent. I just did my taxes in FreeTaxUSA this year for the first time and it's not nearly as good as TT last year. FTU is like manually filling in the IRS PDF's except as webforms, whereas TT imports PDF's and parses everything correctly, leaving you to do a quick scan. FTU is free because it's just a light GUI layer over the 1040 and various Schedule forms.

Simplifying the tax code will require removing special exemptions for certain interest groups. This is often rephrased as "raising the taxes on [group]" which gets a lot of pushback. For example, raising the taxes on teachers, native americans, certain small businesses, public servants, antarctica scientists, students at for-profits, etc. It's hard to fight against that message.

TurboTax was sold to Intuit in 1993. Not sure why do you think it would get worse under Intuit, considering you liked it in 2009.

I know it's nice to have a corporate bogeyman to rail against but it's not that simple. For example, there have been all sorts of tax deductions over the years to incentivize things like home energy efficiency improvements, EVs, solar power, charitable contributions, etc. And the mortgage deduction was/is intended to promote home ownership. I could go on. Someone can disagree with some of the choices around tax rates and certain weirdly specific deductions. But most people wouldn't argue that, for example, encouraging people to donate to charities is a bad thing.

I didn’t see evidence in the linked article and the cited article therein that Intuit tried to prevent a simplification of the tax code. They just tried to stop the government from trying to build competitor software (partially paid for by Intuit and others in the tax accounting industry). Frankly, it sounds like a PITA to have IRS calculate your taxes with poorly written software, and then have to challenge it.

I think it’s unlikely that Intuit has the power to steer the complexity of the tax code. States like NY and CA, for example, oppose a standardization of tax law for “road warriors” because they make so much money from non-resident workers who step foot in their state.

US tax policy is about 70,000 pages (mostly regulations, bulletins, and case law). And that doesn’t include state and local taxes.

If you stop being an easy case, for example you want to claim FEIE within 5 years of spending > 30 days in the US, then the IRS tells you to get a lawyer to pay for a private letter ruling. This is because, where other countries don’t tax their citizens income worldwide, the US does and then gives a moderate exemption. AFAIK, US tax code complexity dwarfs that of any other country.

I find it hard to believe that it’s TurboTax’s fault, a day after reading about Sen. Warren’s plan for a wealth tax and a $100B to the IRS to help them calculate and enforce it...

I don't think that's true. The US has used tax laws as a way to effect policies since before Turbotax existed. I think the mortgage interest deduction goes back 100+ years

> The reason the tax code is so complicated is BECAUSE OF TurboTax.

People have been arguing about unnecessary complexity in the tax code since before computers, let alone before TurboTax, so it can't be that simple.

I've been using freetaxusa.com for years as an alternative, it only costs maybe 10-20$ to file state taxes if I remember correctly, and federal is free. It is much cheaper than Turbotax and the UI is essentially the same.

Interesting! I had no idea TurboTax was behind the latest electric vehicle rebate program!

Not Turbox, but Congress. They promise new credits and deductions every election cycle. Every couple decades there are weak attempts to weed out some of these such as for the Reagan and Trump tax reforms.

That would a) never happen in the current US political climate and b) provide enough ammunition to those against such a mode as to be extremely counter-productive towards other social programs that could deal with more government support.

In other words, think back on all the talk of Democrat being "socialists" over the recent years and imagine the field day conservatives would have if any national figure mentioned this as an idea out loud, and how that might be used to shift the balance of power such that other meaningful programs that could deal with additional governmental support and regulation (healthcare) get set back.

I disagree that it's nonsensical for it to work this way since that unemployment benefit is being granted after your parents are claiming that they are supporting you - so essentially they're getting a big tax deduction on their income for your costs but then the unemployment benefit is being claimed to make sure for a lack of them covering costs - in a simple world one might make the other ineligible but that could result in some folks being put through unreasonable financial hardships due to poor planned or ill-intended returns from their parents so this allows that benefit to be given while also recognizing that something going on here is double dipping.

If you are financially independent then you should make sure your parents aren't claiming you as a dependent, if you aren't then you should be receiving those covering funds from your parents since that's the sort of dependency the dependent class is all about.

By “and a student” do you mean claimed as a dependent by someone else?

From what I can tell, the system in the US is significantly more complicated for individuals (mortgage interest deductions, 43 different state income taxes, “alternative minimum tax,” gift tax, estate tax...)

> This does not exist in the US the highest levels of government have no incentive to provide it.

This is a valuable podcast episode to listen to to learn more about this: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/epis...

To be fair: Filing your taxes in the US is free. No one is going to force you to pay someone to do them for you, which is what TurboTax and the like are doing, usually through software.

If you don't understand the tax forms, though, or can't figure out the codes, you are stuck paying someone. The IRS won't give definitive answers if you call them.

You’re imagining an army of tax accountants to continually keep a system up to date to put themselves out of business?

There's atleast one Show HN every year that does that and promises support for the more complicated cases "in a few months".

Interesting take. If it really comes to pass, will Apple be preferable to Intuit?

Or for that matter, would Google or Robinhood enter the industry?

Hong Kong's top bracket is 17%. Of course it's simple because the gov't doesn't collect much tax so doesn't need a bunch of exceptions and rules for tax relief.

What if we rewrote the tax code with code? There are many high level languages (especially functional ones) which could address this problem domain really well if we had the courage to start completely over.

Imagine a legal document that is written using terminology that is ultimately just a series of higher-order functions. A human could make sense of it with some training, and a computer could directly execute it with determinism.

You mean for free file forms you don't like getting an email with some incomprehensible language? Oh, don't worry they provide a tool. Just copy the _entire_ email they send you and paste in some tool.

Genuinely it is a horrible experience, but I suppose it is better filing by paper and waiting a few weeks for a small correction.

These projects seems to come at tax policy from very different directions. US Taxes helps you fill out the specific form needed to file your taxes in the United States. OpenFisca helps you model a country's tax policy overall.

It would certainly be interesting to connect the two, but I suspect that you'd do that after finishing US Taxes. Specifically, you could take a completed return from US Taxes and transform it into an input for an OpenFisca model of the USA tax code.

As it stands, nobody has developed a USA model on OpenFisca. Perhaps that could be a next step, pursued in parallel with the US Taxes effort.

> please don't use this software to file your taxes for the 2020 / 2021 tax season.

I wonder if there is a PR that Intuit filed to add this to the readme.

Seriously, I wonder how much money Intuit has spent to terrify people into using their software. Each year, I look around for alternatives so I can avoid giving them money, and each year I find some reason to grow fearful of an IRS audit and go with the company that has convinced me they are less risky than anything else. I wonder if that is truth, or if I've been programmed to think that.

Is it possible to FOIA the IRS tax-computation code itself?

If the government wanted to help people do taxes more easily, they would just simplify taxes. Lobbies (from TurbTax and competitors) are standing in the way.

And TurboTax's lobbying is why you will never see that.

The ProPublica report linked in the OP:

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

Ooh ToS/privacy policy diffing service alerts as a service ha

Grover Norquist has had Republicans sign "the Pledge" opposing tax increase since 1986. Reportedly, he also wants filing taxes to be painful so you hate the government and he opposes these measures.

In 2005, California had a pilot program called ReadyReturn where they mailed you prefilled forms. It was popular. TurboTax lobbied against it and it died.

Couldn't the legislators just... not do what the lobbyists want? Are they really all that corrupt?

And that would be a good thing

Does anyone have any idea what these lobbyists actually say? What excuse (however lame) that they actually give for blocking simplification etc?

That's what they're system would be in essence, you'd get a piece of mail saying this is what you'd pay taking what we know and using the standard deduction. If you want you could calculate any itemized deductions and resumbit.

That's how it works here, in Norway.

That's actually exactly what happened when I failed to file for over a year one time. They sent me all the forms prefilled and asked me to review them and just send them back if correct. Sadly, they weren't.

> Right now, the system we have is pretty good.

Not compared to other countries it isn't. Not by a long shot.

Video with transcript below:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-s...

Get the heck out of here with your bull pucky

Most countries have their version of the IRS "file for you" without any of those difficulties. Everyone reports tax information to the central authority which determines how much you owe. Even complex things like 1099-B, 1099-Div etc. Which is how the current system works anyways, it just eliminates the hassle.

There's almost no scenario where the IRS cannot do this stuff. Think about this fact: your W-2, 1099 investments and most other financial information is already reported to the IRS. They have it already. Absolutely bonkers that people accept anything less than just being sent a bill or check once a year.

> Right now, the system we have is pretty good.

Yeah, big disagree there. If you've ever done taxes in another country you will realize how idiotic taxes are in the US. Australia is literally, 10 minutes per year, and even complex things like investments, stocks...

If you think the IRS aren't able to work out how much tax you need to pay... how do you think they're catching people who don't pay enough tax? They must already know!

I came here to write something along these lines. For the simplest cases, filing is free and really easy now. Everyone who needs TurboTax now would need something roughly as complicated until our entire tax regime is overhauled.

Adding to the types of really common situations where you do have to provide context the IRS doesn't already have:

- side-hustle contracting (IRS doesn't know what expenditures are for the business)

- stock sales (your broker may not know your basis)

- home improvements eligible for tax deductions

- sold a home (IRS won't know your basis or selling price)

- did you move for a job? IRS won't know whether you are eligible for tax deductions.

- crypto gains/losses

- inheritances (basis again)

I'm curious whether other countries have simpler tax codes that permit simpler filing?

>Most people qualify for free filing

For that matter, everyone qualifies for free filing--although in practice it gets too complicated for most past some point. I know it sounds like something savages would do but it's actually possible to just fill out the forms by hand if your taxes are fairly simple.

I use an accountant who I've been using for years but if you just have a W-2, a 1099 or two, and just use the standard deduction, it'ls likely pretty simple to just fill out a 1040 form and a state tax form.

I don’t understand the argument. You go from stating that in some cases, the ziRS can’t prefill your taxes correctly - sure, we all agree here, that’s the same in every other country. And then you go on to say that’s why you need TurboTax. Huh? Why not just have the same input boxes as TurboTax, but on irs.gov? That’s what pretty much every other developed country has

Democrats have the entire government now, President, senate and the house. Democrats had filibuster proof majority when Obama was president.

Why are you just blaming Republicans?

I don't suppose those lawmakers are voting to reduce their pay to $0, eliminating their government-provided pensions, or reducing the need for taxes by giving up any of their other benefits, are they?

Otherwise, legitimate or not, that money is going to have to come from taxes somewhere.....

Also, what does onerous have to do with legitimacy? It's like there's two orthogonal axes and they're trying to make taxes painful to convince the populace to dislike taxes, whether the taxation process is legitimate or not.

The IRS already has most of your income information and much of your deduction information. They already use this to validate if your return makes sense.

In effect, the IRS already does most of a taxpayer's paperwork. Since they do this, it might be nice to provide it to taxpayers for review and correction, rather than making us all start from zero each time.

In the UK vast majority of people don't do their own taxes. Your employer pays the tax on your behalf directly from your salary and updates the tax office as to how much you make. In turn, the tax office tells your employer how much tax to pay from your salary, without any input required from yourself.

In fact most people I work with don't even know there is such a thing as a tax deadline every year or anything like that, because....why would they? if you are a normal full time employee there is absolutely no need to file your own taxes. HMRC has all the information it needs to tax you year on year.

>>what you can deduce from it (expenses you had to do in order to acquire your income)

Well, at least here in UK there's practically nothing you can deduct from your taxes if you are a "regular" full time worker, so that solves that issue.

The government automatically doing it doesn't preclude from letting taxpayers be able to amend it. The vast majority of people have simple tax returns, and all that information is already electronically flying around with unique identifiers (social security number).

It's trivial for government to be able to automatically produce a tax return that's basically almost all done for everyone.

From what I remember in Switzerland, the forms were prefilled, just like neighboring countries. Your salary was automatically takes from your employer, any declared children are carried over year to year etc. Then all you have to do is correct and add any complex stuff

This isn't how most file.

Also, the way it works is that you still have the option of doing it yourself. But by default, done for you.

That's like saying someone in Google is analyzing your web searches in order to show you ads.

The usual proposed method would be the IRS calculates what you owe based on the standard deduction because they don't know about most donations or possible deductions.

They'd just assume you want to take the standard deduction--which isn't a bad assumption for a lot of people these days.

My taxes are admittedly at least somewhat complex but, even if I did them myself, I'm not sure how much effort it would save if I had to do a bunch of additions and corrections. Pre-filling would mostly be useful if you could just check your W2, maybe a 1099, some things like dependents, sign it, and file it.

They're already doing that

The US tax system is another one of those things about the US that looks utterly baffling to an outside observer from Europe. How on earth did it get into this state? How is this 'free'?

> It's a racket.

Yea, possibly (I agree with you). It is as much a racket as lots of other things. Doesn't excuse it being a racket, but TurboTax is not an anomaly.

> Government already knows how much you owe them.

This is false. If you aren't taking advantage of deductions, sophisticated tax-deferred vehicles for retirement or tax-advantaged accounts for other investments, you're giving the IRS more than you have to. If that doesn't bother you, that's fine too!

> So how about US government, like most modern countries, send you a form which says: "we think you owe us xxx$ (because of this and that), if not - provide extra information"?

Cool, sounds great. However, you're over-simplifying things and ignoring the complicated parts. For a lot of people, a simple approach like the above would be totally adequate and I personally completely support a system like that.

Seems like a really easy first step would be for Democrats to pass a bill allocating money for the IRS to build a What You Owe API that banks and companies can access. Then every bank on the planet can implement a "Click to pay your taxes" button.

Attack the problem at the source.

> Government already knows how much you owe them.

I don’t get why people think this is true.

Take a really simple example of donating to a charity.

How would the government know you donated without you telling them?

How is the government going to know exactly where you put all your money?

I completely understand what you're saying.

Paying someone who is more of an expert than me is still better than me doing it myself.

"Hey I did this in good faith and this company messed up, can we work this out without me going to prison?" vs "I didn't know."

I understand (and agree that it's a racket), but even so, it was worth something to me even when I was filing 1040EZs.

I don't know if I can answer that first question - it seems like if they position themselves as providing expert advice and competent filing, and then I pay for it, I should be guaranteed something. But the world does not really operate on SHOULDs.

If I used TurboTax, I would expect to find out they messed up by getting some notification from the IRS, or accidentally discovering later that I missed a deduction. If the IRS was reaching out, I'd engage a real accountant ASAP. If TurboTax missed a deduction, I'd vote with my wallet and use an accountant the following year :)

disclaimer: I use an accountant because my tax situation is complicated.

And/or you may be on the hook for paying estimated taxes over the course of the next tax year.

It's not quite that simple. There's a lot of popular political support for things that make a simpler tax season impossible, too.

For example, the existence of tax-advantaged savings vehicles such as IRAs and HSAs mean that the taxable portion of your income isn't settled until the deadline for making contributions for that tax year. Which is April 15. But I imagine there would be a lot of popular political backlash if Congress were to abolish IRAs in the name of sticking it to Intuit.

There's also that whole mess of expenditures that you can deduct from your taxable income, which doesn't kick in until the total of your deductible expenses exceeds the standard deduction. And a lot of people were worried when the standard deduction got increased a few years ago. It made a lot of people's taxes nominally easier to calculate, but people were worried that it might remove an incentive for charitable donations, or reduce the largess that the government gives to homeowners relative to renters, or alter the impact of tax incentives for people who put solar panels on their roofs, or whatever.

Long story short, we love to blame Intuit, and it is true that Intuit generally wants a nasty complicated tax code, but it's also true that, in the aggregate, so does America.

While that may be true, the reality is a lot of the complexity comes from deductions to handle people's "special" situations and needs.

They don't lobby to make the tax code itself more complex, they just lobby to be the only providers of such services: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

It's not like Turbo Tax is the only thing standing between you and not having to do your own taxes. The entire system top down would need to be redesigned and the withholdings concept done away with. That'd be such a sweeping piece of legislation it will most assuredly never happen.

There is literally a form you fill out for your employer to tell them this information so they how to much withhold from your paycheck: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf

This is incorrect. You have to file a federal tax return if your income is above the standard deduction, and there are other rules [1]. Anyone can use this IRS page [2] to determine if they are required to file a tax return.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/07/taxtipfederal.as...

[2] https://www.irs.gov/help/ita/do-i-need-to-file-a-tax-return

This is not entirely true. You have to file if your income is above a certain amount for your age and filing status. If you owe or get a refund from the federal or state government is entirely dependent on your tax obligation and the amount withheld from your paychecks throughout the year.