No Other Industrialized Country Asks Its Citizens To Jump Through So Many Tax Hoops

Tax returns are due Wednesday. In most countries, filing them is no hassle. "No other industrialized country asks its citizens to jump through as many hoops to calculate their taxes as ours. It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time... It is the private sector — specifically, the software company Intuit, which makes TurboTax, the most popular tax program in the country. ... A small group of tax experts have called on the government to create a tax preparation method that they say would vastly reduce the time and cost of tax-filing for most people. Intuit has been a primary obstacle to the effort." Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times.