> 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.
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.