The Washington Times reports that the Bush administration is considering a handy new IRS feature in which the tax collecting agency will, free of charge, do your taxes for you. How convenient! John McCaslin writes:

No, we’re not joking.

The concept, called “Return-Free”–where the IRS automatically prepares income-tax returns of those taxpayers with the simplest returns and then sends taxpayers the bill– is being considered by the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.

….what are the chances that taxpayers will trust the IRS to find them the most deductions and biggest refund?

Um, what are the chances the IRS would actually do it? Here’s the punchline:

And believe it or not, under the proposal, the individual taxpayer– not the IRS–still will be personally liable for mistakes.

Summary: The government is offering you the conveninece of having the government prepare your taxes for you. Except that it probably won’t give you the refund you deserve, and if it accidentally gives you a refund you don’t deserve, you may go to jail. Which means that even if you take advantage of the program, you should probably go ahead and do your taxes on your own, anyway. Which means the entire program would be pretty much worthless. Which is why I’m guessing it’s likely to happen.

On a somewhat related note, did you know that if you call the IRS help line, ask for advice, take their advice, and that advice turns out to be wrong, you can still go to jail? It’s up to you to sort through the 10,000+ page federal tax code. Even the government in charge of enforcing it can’t always help you.

Local media personality Tony Kornheiser likes to say that the only advice he ever gives his accountant is, “keep me out of jail.” He isn’t really kidding. If you have any kind of vaguely complicated income these days, you hire a tax lawyer or a fairly high-priced accountant. Not to find loopholes and tax breaks. Those guys are too expensive. Today, you hire a pro just to keep you out of jail. When good people have to pay professional just to abide by the law, something’s gone terribly awry with the tax system.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 7:27 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.