>First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services?
This is the only part of your response that doesn't quite sit right with me. There could be many "highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions" out there that are working very well, you just don't notice because they work so well. There could be a selection-effect here.
Quality is a big deal for me[1]. But I think you're defining "quality" too narrowly in this context. "Quality" could also mean "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do." The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.
Oftentimes, broadly accessible services are lower quality than more personalized ones, to the consumer.
As an example in US government bureaucracy, government software teams digitizing forms at one point weren’t allowed to utilize features like autofill or automatically filling fields based on previous answers because it would relatively disadvantage users using paper forms.
Government capabilities do need to serve everyone, and from the perspective of the whole society that is beneficial, but they are often are of low quality to the individual consuming them for this very reason.
Let’s exclude taxes, because obviously many people would hate them under any circumstances. Does the government do a good job providing the other services people interact with regularly? Do people love their visits ti the DMV? Are they satisfied with their interactions with the police? Heck, in my town, just renewing a dog license is a pain.
> The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.
I disagree with the argument that the US Tax Filing system meets the goal of:
> "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do."
It may do so for easy / common cases of W2 salaried employees but step a little outside of the norm (foreign sourced income, tax treaties etc.) and software gives up and shows you a PDF of relevant forms and requires you to become an expert in tax code and to keep your own multi year running calculation of carryovers and things to proceed. I'm glossing over all of the detail about how complex this really is but wouldn't expect the average, even very intelligent person to succeed in filing a correct return without a professional's help.
my anecdata is that I have always filed manually by myself, but every time had a small adjustment made by the IRS... indeed filing a correct return the 1st time seems close to impossible.
