Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Bank reports mortgage, interest paid on deposits, mutual fund trades and such directly. Reporting stocks can require more manual work depending on broker / exchange. Arrangements exactly like HSA and IRA don't exist here, but if they did, I presume the service provider would report the details to tax authority.
National tax authority keeps track of applicable local tax code arrangements, but I suppose it must more complicated in a true federal state like the US.
I presume freelancing income, other expenses and stuff like charitable donations you have to declare yourself everywhere.
So why citizen needs to recreate the IRS calculation to submit the paperwork?
I addressed this in another comment - because when the system had been initially created, IRS wasn't supposed to have most of the information - at least not routinely, they could get a court order or such if they have reasonable suspicion you're cheating, but otherwise they wouldn't have the full picture. Since then, a lot changed, and now pretty much everything is reported to the IRS. But the system is still arranged as if IRS doesn't have the full picture, even though it does, and since now there are massive companies built essentially on tracking what IRS has and re-implementing it in a user-friendly way - and the IRS itself does not implement any user-facing interface to it - we have barriers to change. IRS would have to budget some investment (not large on the scale of federal government, but not insignificant in absolute numbers, probably tens of millions of dollars at least, maybe more) to implement a user-facing system that could be efficiently used by taxpayers, and the incumbents would lobby very hard against it, claiming this already exists as a private solution (which is true) and the feds squeezing out private business is unacceptable (which is usually true in general, but in this particular case is not, but they can make it look true).
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