Of course they don't want to make it simple, it would destroy their business. A friend who was a CFO at the time use to refer to Intuit as "The Devil" in the way they were always putting themselves into your business and then holding you hostage later. The tax industry produces nothing of value and should be replaced and the billions of dollars and millions of people put to better use. It wouldn't be hard. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion the huge tax industry works to get some of it back based on rules so lengthy, complex, and open to interpretation that no one person can understand them all anymore let alone apply them fairly. If you can afford the guns you can shoot your way out but for everyone else you just keep paying out. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a business that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special and refund all year long and then all have all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. Everyone would have to keep all these records for years just in case. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today and the industry that thrives off of it. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone, just the memory of how ridiculous it used to be.