I heard in a lecture that in Sweden the government revenue office is considered to have the best customer service and customer trust of any organization in the country. Can any Swedes confirm this?
The year I moved to the US I had a pretty complicated tax situation. My company paid for accounting help to get my taxes filed for that year as part of the relocation package. However, the accounting firm had some issues with my Swedish taxes, and told my company it would cost an extra $25k to fully investigate the situation to properly finish my Swedish tax return.
That dragged a bit, so I just called up the Swedish tax agency, explained my situation, and they told me which form to fill out and how, and which rules applied, all in a ten-minute free phonecall.
I'll take that over "APRIL 15TH OR ELSE!!!", which is all you get from the IRS.
It took me about 10 minutes here in the US. Log into Turbo Tax, have it pull my last year's information, update the income fields and click through a wizard.
It cost 30$, and I can see how you could argue the fact I paid a private company for a convience other countries get from their government for free is sad, but I'll take it since my quality of life would drop significantly at a comparable salary in Sweden due to the amount of taxation vs the ease of taxation. Relatives in Norway have expressed similar sentiments in reverse though, so I guess the grass is always greener on the other side?
It's only 10min [using Turbo Tax | Tax Act | Whatever] if you have a simple 1040/1040EZ. Even simple things like 1099-DIV or 1099-INT, capital gains & losses on investments (including employee stock purchase or options programs), and charitable donations can add many hours, especially if the software doesn't have an automated interface to your various financial accounts. I typically use Turbo Tax, too, and even pulling in the previous year's filing it still takes 1-2 full days to get everything roughly correct & complete.
I lucked out with the integrations lining up with most of my accounts this year(and personally I think the charitable donations wizard takes that long but I guess it depends on the nature of them), but even in years where it took days of slogging through wizards I still think about what the alternatives around the world are and I'm pretty ok with it.
Obviously given the choice of a comparable tax burden and simplified returns I'd take it, but I find that for the most part once your taxes are so complicated you have to pay someone to do your taxes, you still won't ever pay anything even remotely high enough to close the gap between what your tax burden in a country like Sweden would be and what it is here
And yet people somehow still manage to live happy, financially-secure lives in Sweden. There's a lot more to consider about livability than just "what would my tax burden look like?"
I would much rather pay more to a Sweden-/Europe-style system and feel like I was actually getting something for my taxes, vs. the current state in the US where I only feel like a small fraction of my tax bill actually goes toward expenditures I think are reasonable. And to top it off, this year my tax bill is going to an administration that actively hurts people I care about with its policies. Gross.
Geeze, no one is saying all there is to quality of life is a tax burden, and no one was talking about the Trump administration or how the government spends its tax. I don't support his administration but the whole dragging the Trump administration into everything on HN is getting old (taxes in the US have been messy for a while now)
I'm saying I in my current living situation feel I benefit from a lower tax burden and higher base salary more than ease of filing taxes would. In a few years that might not even hold true, and me benefiting more from the former doesn't mean I'm against the latter, they're tangential issues that happen to have a correlation in the US vs much of Europe (but obviously lack causation)
And to your point about reasonable expenditures, simpler tax structure won't suddenly change how the US government would spend money...
But the amount of taxation isn't connected to the ease of taxation. It's not an either-or.
Also, in the US, as other commenters have pointed out in this thread, implementing pre-filled returns would increase tax revenue, since it would reduce tax fraud considerably.
