If I made any sort of money, or had any sort of portfolio, or any sort of dependents, I would probably care more about the tax season. But it’s really not a hassle for me at all. Besides being able to deduct the interest from my student loans, the tax process is pretty straight forward.
But it is redundant, and even though it’s a small inconvenience it’s still a huge waste of my time. I get my W-2 wage earnings, my 1099 taxable interest, and my 1098 student loan interest forms, printed on a piece of paper. I then copy the few salient figures from each page onto the 1040 PDF I downloaded several times and do elementary school arithmetic to add and subtract them. I also have to look in the back of the book for the appropriate state and federal tax amounts that I rightly owe. Then I print this out and send it to the IRS and someone else types all this information back into a computer again. Then they see if it matches their own idea of what either I owe them or vice versa.
So it goes computer to paper to computer to paper to computer. What a sick game of telephone. (Purple monkey dishwasher.)
What about e-file you ask? Oh I’m sure it’s great, except that you get charged to use it. If I’m saving not only my time, but the government’s time on paying someone for data entry, I don’t expect to shell out money for it. Every year the government offers free e-file through one or two select companies, but it’s never the same company two years in a row. First taste’s free, then you gotta pay!
I want a digital W-2, 1099, 1098, etc. that I don’t need to copy into a computer. I at least want a PDF form that will do basic arithmetic and fill in the proper tax amount so I don’t need Excel open at the same time to add these numbers up. Then I want to send this to the IRS electronically, for free, because I am saving them the cost of the postage, the booklet, the menial labor cost of someone reading my atrocious handwriting or my depleted ink cartridge, and the cost of negotiating a contract with TurboTax to get me involved with their service.
I don’t want the government sending a completed form with all these numbers for me to check off, though. Or rather, I don’t want them requiring me too, which is the bureaucratic thing to do. On the off chance that they screw something up, which statistically is low, but getting through the bureaucracy to fix it is prohibitively frightening. If my finances were more complicated, I’d still want to take electronic versions to a preparer, so they’d have an easier time.
This op-ed piece from the Times refers to some successful pilot programs in other countries, and some figures about how much time and money we could save.
A complete revamping is of course a lot to ask, but a PDF that at least does math for you is not. The government can put a man on the moon, and split the atom, but they can’t save us or themselves thousands of man-hours in pointless repetition that invites errors and destroys inconveniences our lives.
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