This kind of take is only true if you haven't given the tax system any thought at all and just want to dunk on the IRS to get upvotes
The govt only has an idea of what you might owe from "official" information (W2s), Since we don't live in a totalitarian society where the govt knows everything about you.
Filing taxes is the govt telling you to make sure to report anything they do not know about.
Also you do not go to jail for getting your taxes wrong, you go to jail if you fail to fix them after being audited or fraud.
But they could absolutely move to a system where the vast majority of filers could attest that the numbers IRS already has are all the income they have and be done with their returns. Then only the subset that has other income or adjustments would need to do a more involved filing.
These all apply here in Sweden. The information from the equivalent of those W2s is all available to me directly through the tax authority's portal though, so when I filed my taxes the other day I just logged in, checked the numbers looked sane, pressed a button, and the process was done.
It took about 5 minutes. It would have been more like 30 seconds if my Swedish was a bit better.
There's nothing we're doing here that you couldn't do in the US, you just don't.
Ah right, that's odd, wasn't aware I lived in a totalitarian society here in the Nordics. We literally just get a notification to check it, and because the state is neither trying to gotcha us or baby us, that's just the norm. The part that takes longest for me in the whole process is usually the 2FA.
The govt only has an idea of what you might owe from "official" information (W2s), Since we don't live in a totalitarian society where the govt knows everything about you.
Filing taxes is the govt telling you to make sure to report anything they do not know about.
Also you do not go to jail for getting your taxes wrong, you go to jail if you fail to fix them after being audited or fraud.