Really interesting podcast about a Stanford tax law professor and his effort to make paying taxes more like paying credit card bills, and the remarkable resistance he encountered from paid lobbyists for Intuit Inc. and from the Americans for Tax Reform.
The fear is that by making paying taxes very easy, we open the door for our governments to bury tax increases.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episode-760-tax-hero
Or, the fear could be that if paying taxes is too easy, we won’t need CPAs, tax attorneys or software. 😉
Haha, indeed. As it happens, the tax law professor mentioned in the story hired his own lobbyist for $35,000 in an attempt to counter the intense lobbying efforts of intuit. His comments were to the effect that, by making tax filing easier, it could destroy the market for Intuit’s Quickbooks and TurboTax products – another example of a big business resisting change rather than embracing and steering it.