No, they would know exactly what they know now. Employers already report your earnings to both the federal and state IRS agencies and pay your withholdings automatically adjusted for your dependencies. So a simple form that says you made X and claimed Y dependencies. Click submit to confirm…

That would be simple enough for most people (1 job, 1 home, maybe some kids) and it doesn’t require the government to know anything additional.

In that most common scenario no tax accounting service should be needed. Honestly a 1040 isn’t that complicated in that scenario either, but is still too difficult for a good number of people and it’s just unnecessary.

There is so much more to filing taxes than earnings. Yes, if all I had was a W-2 this would be trivial.

And if all you have is a W-2 you don't experience most of the complexity of filing as it stands now anyway.

How exactly? Currently, you report your earnings, your employers report what they've paid you, and banks report specific transactions. How does simplifying/eliminating the deduction process (which is all that an accountant is doing) give the government more info about you?

This one government agency would need to know the superset of everything about you that could possibly be reported on any tax form. The simple case breaks down quickly. If taxes were redesigned to become overall much simpler, then sure, the reporting could be much simpler and more passive for the filer.

Nobody is suggesting they create a government super computer that does every single person's taxes perfectly.

They're suggesting letting the irs actually use the resources they already have to automate the vast majority of the people's taxes to save everyone time and money.

It doesn't have to be perfect to be a huge improvement.

Businesses paying people already file copies of the W-2s and 1099s that they send to their employees with the IRS, meaning that, for a very large chunk of Americans, the IRS already knows everything needed to fill out their tax forms.

Having lived in both the US and several European countries, America is already the privacy nightmare because all your data is with corporations who can do absolutely anything with it. European-style effortless automatic tax filing certainly wouldn’t make it any worse.

(Also it’s rather ironic that people who think like you have been voting for the party which is currently enabling Palantir to build Chinese-style surveillance in America. But as long as the data is owned by billionaires and they promise to only use it against the “others”, I guess it’s fine.)