Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IRS can already calculate your taxes for you. In other countries you just have to confirm what the revenue department calculates as your liability and hit "submit". You have to do the calculations yourself because TurboTax et al., and accountants lobbied so taxes are complicated and must be completed by the filer (or their accountant).
From the abstract of NBER paper I mentioned [1]: > Each year Americans spend over two billion hours and $30 billion preparing individual tax returns, and these filing costs are regressive. To lower and redistribute the filing burden, some commentators have proposed having the IRS pre-populate tax returns for individuals. We evaluate this hypothetical policy using a large, nationally representative sample of returns f…
Order your tax “transcript of account” in late March and again in late August. It’ll be substantially more complete in late August.