I paid my taxes this evening. I was disappointed to lose thousands of dollars, but I’d say this was emotionally overshadowed by my disappointment at the web interfaces I had to navigate to lose it.
Which is partly because I’m lucky enough to not be personally much harmed by the former, but also: it’s one thing to reallocate a chunk of every second person in the country’s money, and another thing to burn a chunk of each of their time. The former serves good purposes, if debatably well; the latter serves nobody and feels like such a pointless waste.
To be clear, I’m not so much upset about my own twenty minutes—if I imagine even a fraction of Americans find it as unintuitive as I do, the scale of the destruction feels breathtaking. How many other eyes have peered at these words and numbers today? Could whoever made these pages not have considered what it would be like for another person who is not at least a casual tax hobbyist to use them? Couldn’t they have tried it out a few times on other people? (Am I being unfair, and this is a hard problem somehow?)
I realize actually sending money to the government is the last tiny step in an obscenely wasteful annual cremation of time. That is of course even more awful, but the last step struck me in particular because it feels so avoidable—changing the whole tax system may be tricky, but improving the payment pages feels plausibly solvable by a single person.
Is the harm really breathtaking though? Let us calculate extremely roughly:
How many personal tax returns are filed in the US? It looks like very roughly 160M per year lately (e.g. here, here)
Apparently very roughly a quarter of their filers owe money, rather than getting a refund
Let’s just compare the current system to a good payment interface, rather than to, for instance, the government just remembering your bank details from year to year and charging you the amount that they know you owe. I guess a smooth interface would take very roughly ten minutes less.
Let’s conservatively guess that only a tenth of people find this difficult (the rest just know to ignore the first couple of pages of text and that ‘run of the mill tax return’ means ‘Apply payment to Form 1040 - Income Tax’ for the reason of ‘Balance Due or Payment Plan/Installment Agreement’ and not for instance ‘Estimated Tax’ or ‘Extension’ even if they are filing an extension)
So we have 160 million tax returns filed * 25% having to send money * 10 minutes * 10% having trouble = ~40 million minutes
Is that a lot? Well, it’s 76 years, which is coincidentally the male life expectancy in the US. Taxation may or may not be theft, but its practical realization appears to be distributed manslaughter. Is someone held accountable for things like this?
Image by krystianwin from Pixabay
You can blame Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, for this nightmare. For most people, the government already has all the information it needs to complete your tax return for you automatically, but the tax-preparation companies don't want them to do it. There's a good Planet Money episode about it: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/episode-760-tax-hero
Also covered in this article: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california-tried-to-save-the-nation-from-the-misery-of-tax-filing-then-intuit-stepped-in
Incidentally, and for unclear reasons, the UK interface for paying self-assessed taxes is extremely well-designed. And they have people you can call for free to work through tax questions, who tend to be helpful and responsive. Strange!