Yeah, I agree with you that the general population shouldn’t have to do their own taxes with the technology that basically everyone now has.
The only 2 reasons I can think of to keep it this way are 1) people doing their own taxes results in at least some of them reporting random self-income and results in a non-trivial amount of extra tax dollars, or 2) tax preparation companies have captured legislators’ votes and the tax prep companies would lose shitloads of money if tax prep was a government responsibility.
Yeah, I agree with you that the general population shouldn’t have to do their own taxes with the technology that basically everyone now has.
The only 2 reasons I can think of to keep it this way are 1) people doing their own taxes results in at least some of them reporting random self-income and results in a non-trivial amount of extra tax dollars, or 2) tax preparation companies have captured legislators’ votes and the tax prep companies would lose shitloads of money if tax prep was a government responsibility.
¯\(ツ)/¯
It’s (2), and (1) is just a bonus for them.
It’s number 2.