<p>“For millions of Americans, the IRS already knows most, or even all, of what it needs to know to enable you to complete your income taxes. Your employer reports how much it paid you in wages to the taxman; your brokerage firm reports how much stock dividend income you received; your bank tells the IRS how much you paid in deductible home mortgage interest.”</p>
<p>"What if the IRS filled it out for you? (Daniel Acker/BLOOMBERG)</p>
<p>So wouldnt it be great if you could log into IRS.gov and see a form with all that information already plugged into a 1040? You could then add or update any other relevant information (say, a charitable deduction that did not get reported), and hit send. For millions of people with relatively simple tax situations, filing annual income taxes would be no more punishing than paying a parking ticket online certainly not much fun, but not an onerous, soul-sucking experience, either.
There have been bipartisan proposals in Congress to create exactly such a program of return-free filing, including a 2011 bill proposed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Dan Coats (R-Ind.). It seems like the kind of sensible, modest thing the government can do to make peoples lives quite a bit simpler."</p>
<p>I had to reread this after reading some of the comments on this thread.</p>
<p>Yeah…</p>