Reproducing toomuchtodo’s excellent rebuttal [0] in the sibling thread where you posted the same thing:
Login.gov does not provide a sufficient level of identity assurance (IAL2 [1]) to serve as the IDP for this pilot and IRS functions in general (ID.me liveness check and facial recognition). IRS is working with Login.gov to upgrade Login.gov to deprecate ID.me for this purpose [2] [3].
Would it make sense to not proceed with this pilot until this was ready? Certainly not; Login.gov will catch up and meet IRS in the future as Direct File expands next filing season. Very similar to when Social Security Administration (ssa.gov) transitioned from ID.me and their internal IDP to Login.gov.
(Login.gov partners with USPS to perform in person identity proofing for those who cannot perform remote proofing via a mobile device)
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. The call to action is to ensure, through pressure, that the desired outcome is reached. Are we on track? It appears so.
IDK. I've seen too much bureaucracy where a bad solution (with properties the bureaucrat likes) is implemented with promises to improve later (into something the petitioner wants). But after the initial solution is implemented, all they gotta do is procrastinate - and the whole time they procrastinate, they get what they want. Why change it? All the bureaucrat has gotta deal with is a bit of complaining.
The far more common problem with bureaucracy is that nothing ever gets done because every incremental step is met with "but this isn't perfect so you shouldn't do it!" from one faction or another, which ensures that no step is ever made, if given credence.
The other problem with bureaucracy: "We must do something! This is something. Let's do it." Just because it's important to get something done, doesn't mean we should be satisfied with something that messes other stuff up.
Again, the far more common problem is the one I described. Lots of people say the problem you're describing is the bigger problem, but I've spent a lot of time in the adult world now, and I conclude that no, that is not the bigger problem, at least in the US.
I'm very pleased to see dissatisfaction of the form "this isn't good enough; here are ideas for incremental improvements to it", but have totally lost my patience with the far more common "this isn't good enough; we should do nothing instead".
Well, I agree it's the more overt problem. But having spent some time in the adult world myself, I find that the larger problem is partial solutions piled on partial solutions, burying users in piles of steaming bureaucracy that take time and effort to wade through. Like good software, it requires principles and discipline to construct correctly and avoid 'technical debt' - though a quick&dirty solution will certainly work in the short term.
I've noticed as well, it's quite common that when a well-constructed solution takes much more time (and may be harder to identify) than an quick fix, proponents of the quick fix will claim that the 'do it right' folks are actually saying we should do nothing.
We'll have to just agree to disagree :) We simply have different philosophies; you're a perfectionist whereas I'm an incrementalist. We both have life experiences and probably personality traits that lead us to our differing preferences.
In my view, "partial solutions piled on partial solutions" is just life as a human being, where the alternative to that is not perfect solutions with no piling required, but rather no solutions. And yes, it is just like software, where incrementalism is also the better approach, in my view.
> proponents of the quick fix will claim that the 'do it right' folks are actually saying we should do nothing.
We don't think you're actually saying we should do nothing, just that it's the common end result, despite your best intentions.
And in the sphere of politics in particular, I think well-meaning people who really do want better solutions are often used by more cynical people who really do want to do nothing, for their own ends. Like the tax software industry lobbyists, in this case. Or like how old school environmentalists often find themselves aligned with fossil fuel industry lobbyists when it comes to building renewable or nuclear power generation, or transmission lines.
I don't begrudge people their dislike of partial solutions, I just don't subscribe to the same strategy.
Granted, I think I used a somewhat different sense of the word "perfectionist" than the usual one, in an effort to contrast it with "incrementalist". I'm not sure what the better wording to contrast those things is; "incrementalist" vs. "full-solution-ist"?
> Literally the only thing you have to change is some text.
The corollary to this is that the text is difficult to change for precisely the same reason that people dislike it: it holds legal baggage. If it were "just" some text, you could ignore it. But it's text that is related to contracts and agreements that would need to be renegotiated and audited and more I'm not thinking of.
Yes, that is the process we are talking about. It didn't suddenly become this hard when I voiced my criticism: it was the same level of difficulty from the beginning, and will not get any easier by simply ignoring my criticisms.
Progress must include work: otherwise it is no longer progress.
Not sure whether this is a criticism of or agreement with the parent comment. This seems like both an accurate summary of that comment, and the right path forward.
Don't make perfect the enemy of good. The rent-seeking of tax preparation businesses is a bigger problem than these privacy issues. That doesn't mean those aren't also a problem. (And I'd be shocked if Intuit has a less problematic set of terms with respect to privacy...)
But what the IRS is doing here is the correct prioritization of problems to attack.
> The rent-seeking of tax preparation businesses is a bigger problem than these privacy issues.
> But what the IRS is doing here is the correct prioritization
I read this as: "saving money, and keeping it out of unscrupulous hands, is more important than preserving our privacy and freedom". I don't agree with that, and you shouldn't assume that others agree with your take.
It's worth comparing to the status quo here, which is...TurboTax, which is not a better steward of your personal info.
The government saying "we are being more scrupulous than TurboTax" from the start, with a clear plan to improve is really only net gains. And the normal objections about things being worse because government don't really apply, since the IRS ultimately needs and has this information anyway, the risk is just them sharing it.
The status quo for this level of filing is free fillable forms which AFAIK turbotax made under a restrictive contract that prevents them from involving data brokers and involving other private ventures.
There's no justification for the IRS needing higher security than free fillable forms or normal turbo tax to deliver a similar self prepared efiling, so they are repeating the same crime the next level down, choosing a private system to provide something that benefits the IRS and is of negative value to the tax payer themself.
Yes, you read it correctly. We have an honest disagreement on this. I'm not sure what makes you think I am assuming others agree with my take. I'm just describing and arguing for my view on it.
Indeed, I assume my take on that trade-off is the less popular one amongst the commenters, and perhaps also the readers, of this thread. But I do think it is the far more popular view among the population at large. And part of the reason I'm commenting here is to point that out.
Only reason I thought you were making that assumption was this line: "But what the IRS is doing here is the correct prioritization of problems to attack." It comes across as more than a personal opinion.
It's one of these frustrating things where I already feel like I add "in my view" and "in my opinion" and "I think" and "I feel like" to too many of my sentences, but then inevitably someone will read a statement of opinion as an attempt to state as fact something that is central to the dispute at hand. I've never been sure how to square this circle.
They literally have an alternative that they've already rolled out. And they've stated the reasons they can't use the more modern IDP yet. What's so hard to understand about a v1?
> Login.gov will catch up and meet IRS in the future
Do you have any evidence they're even working on this right now? Last news I heard was 2 years ago when they promised ID.me was a temporary solution for that tax season, but it sure looks like that was to make the public happy, and ID.me is here to stay.
Note: This isn't an argument against releasing the tax tool, I'm just commenting on the login.
> Login.gov does not provide a sufficient level of identity assurance (IAL2 [1]) to serve as the IDP for this pilot and IRS functions in general (ID.me liveness check and facial recognition).
IRS functions in general when conducted via paper or electronically via existing third parties also do not have to this level of identity assurance, so its kind of hard for me to believe that this is a hard minimum for the function. That justifies compromising privacy.
That's your prerogative, but you're doing a disservice to anyone less technical to yourself who you advise to do the same. This pilot is, in its current form, better than what the vast majority of people use to file their taxes. If you're already super-privacy-sensitive in your choice of tax-filing software, then great, you do you, but I'd wager that upwards of 99% of taxpayers don't know or care about this and definitely aren't choosing their tax-filing solution based on it. Maybe some of those people are getting better privacy than this, incidentally, but if so, it's not because they are seeking that out.
I'm not advising anyone else about how they deal with their taxes, so I'm doing nobody a disservice.
If not wanting to have my data exposed to yet another data broker makes me "super-privacy-sensitive", then so be it. As currently implemented, this program is simply a nonstarter for me because of the use of id.me.
I am immensely disappointed because I really want to be able to file my taxes in the way this program is aimed. Well, what I actually want is for the IRS to compute my taxes for me and send me a bill, but this would be better than nothing.
It does indeed make you "super-privacy-sensitive". It's hard to see that from within our bubble here, but this is absolutely the case. I'm also "super-privacy-sensitive", though less than you and others here, merely by virtue of being aware of this kind of issue at all, and strongly agreeing with the general sense here that people should care about this. But people broadly just ... don't ... care about this, regardless of what we think.
I'm also disappointed that I can't use this this year, because I'm not in one of the pilot states. But that's what makes it a pilot program! It's explicitly not intended to be used by everyone at this stage.
If this were to become required for everyone, and still leaked tons of data to a third-party at that point, then I would be right there with all of you that it's unacceptable. But we're far from that point.
What "bullshit"? Giving you a better and more privacy-preserving system than is currently available via any other means? I truly can't understand the level of entitlement and off-kilter worldview that leads to a statement like this!
I will never participate in facial recognition to file my taxes. Never. I'd rather go to jail.
I've filed online in a foreign country and it was a breeze. California as well... breezy enough. Neither required privacy invasion by a malicious third-party.
It's time to ask yourself, what exactly are you rooting for here? Your creepy insults come off as very self-serving.
To answer your last question: I'm rooting for launching a pilot of a public system that is better than the for-profit alternatives used by the large majority of people. What I want long term is for filing taxes to no longer be a difficult and error-prone process that everyone dreads doing each year. In order to achieve that, I believe it is necessary for it to stop being such a cash cow, with its profits used on tons of advertising to make people believe it's normal that it's so hard to do this and lobbying to maintain (or worsen) that status quo.
I'd ask you to consider how the companies with the dominant products in this space afford the "file for free" products that most people use. Perhaps it is altruism? Or maybe it's the normal way that companies offer free products that collect a lot of personal information, by profiting off that data.
I'm incredibly sympathetic to people here who don't want to personally use this until it is no longer using ID.me (I may well make the same choice if this were available at all in my state this year), but I'm incredibly unsympathetic to criticizing this pilot program for not waiting until this problem (which the vast majority of people don't care about) to be solved.
Preaching to the choir here, in your first two paragraphs.
It is available in my state but does not handle some detail (this year) I need. But still I won't touch it with a ten foot pole with F.R. etc, and not going to be chastised for saying so.
It's not like complaining here on HN is going to influence even one percent of the non-technical public anyway. And I learn things from others griping. :-D
TurboTax is not a "preparer", the preparer is the taxpayer themself.
For paid, professional preparers (who don't use TurboTax, but rather commercially available software designed for practitioners who prepare dozens or hundreds of returns), the security requirements are higher, even if not quite IAL2. The IRS has worked for a number of years now on a "Security Summit" in concert with all the pro software vendors to tighten up their security, resulting in drastically less filing fraud than in previous years. By "filing fraud" I mean filing returns using a false identity, not simply reporting wrong income or deductions.
Did you write this exactly backwards? Especially for a voluntary pilot, it makes sense to not wait to launch it until it is better than every other option in every way. That's a pretty big part of the whole "pilot" idea... that something is launched smaller and faster and then incrementally improved and expanded. It's a very good idea to do things in this way!
Of the 3 countries I have experience with, neither Norway, Sweden or Germany require a "liveness check" or facial recognition for delivering taxes online.
And I think it was possible to do it without that in US too?
I think it would have been better to work to remove those restrictions. Especially since there are a sizable portion of the population in the US who are very concerned about governmental control.
Add Finland to list. Did my taxes yesterday with essentially 2FA id provided by my bank. I could swear I had already filled all the info and they lost it, but mine are so simple not much time was lost.
> Login.gov will catch up and meet IRS in the future as Direct File expands next filing season
Are you confident login.gov will be caught up and avaialable by next filing season and if so based on what?
Your cite at [3] above (thanks!), is dated Feb 2022, and doesn't have a timeline, but also sort of implies that login.gov should be ready by the "next" tax season (Feb 2023), when it says "While Login.gov is not expected to be ready in time for use by taxpayers during the current tax season…"
So this is now the third tax season since then that login.gov is still not available. What leads you think it'll be available next filing season?
(Note: I am not saying it may not make sense to move ahead with the pilot in parallel anyway, instead of blocking on waiting for auth solution work. Certainly in a normal industry software engineering scenario, parallel development is often better than blocking. I don't really have an opinion here. I do wonder what the budget allocation to login.gov looks like and if it's really being considered a necessary component of this product or not…).
> You have to give up your privacy to even login to IRS.gov
I'm all for privacy, but isn't privacy the opposite of what is needed on IRS.gov
If you're logged into the government website to file your taxes (or get a refund), there should be strong KYC controls in place asserting with extremely high levels of assurance - the individual logged in is who they claim to be.
How can you do that, anonymously (in a private way)?
--
EDIT: it seems like folks are saying this is primary due to using a 3rd party biometric service for login.
The IRS announced over 2-years ago, they are transitioning away from that.
The problem isn't proving your identity to IRS.gov. The problem is allowing a third party to store and sell your personal information. If IRS.gov is going to use a third-party verification service their agreement should require that the collected information is used solely for providing the identification service and deleted after an appropriate timeframe.
1. Because large-scale fraud is vastly easier with electronic filing versus mailing paper around, so it justifies higher security
2. Higher security with your tax information is a good thing, and we shouldn't avoid it because some other systems aren't capable of it or haven't integrated yet
Does the auth flow for id.me go through that domain on the ccTLD or do they use a different gTLD for the auth flow?
If the auth flow for a government service goes through a foreign nation's ccTLD, that's a terrible, terrible precedent to set. Hopefully the US is on good terms with Montenegro, now and forever.
Montenegro and Domen D.O.O. Podgorica, the company that runs the .me domain, can redirect the domain as desired, without effective repercussion or recourse. Domen's and the Montenegro government's beneficial owners are not publicly known. One would hope that the security relationship between the IRS and ID.me would be effective enough to defeat such an attack, but we don't know who the beneficial owners of ID.me are either, or anything about its infrastructure and supplier security... But one expects they would happily sell that information anyways.
I'm genuinely baffled by this, why are the tax filing options in the US so fragmented? Here in the UK there are probably some situations in which you can't use the online, government provided, free service. But I'm going to stick my neck out and say they're fairly niche.
Having lived in the US I know things get complex when you start mixing in state taxes, but this is federal taxes right? Or wrong?
The answer is a bit complicated, but there are two major parts to it:
1) The tax filing prep companies spend ridiculous amounts lobbying to ensure both that the tax system remains complex, and that they are the only way to deal with that complexity. Fortunately, the effectiveness of this has been gradually waning, leading to things like the new service the article describes.
2) Taxes in the US are genuinely quite complicated, for some good reasons, many bad ones (including the aforementioned lobbying), and even more neutral-but-complicated ones. Both major political parties have a tendency to add extra complexity to the tax code for their own ideological (and often purely political) reasons.
(But despite what many people like to propose in response to this, a flat tax wouldn't actually make things better, because progressive taxation is very important for mitigating the staggering inequality in our current system, and is not even the primary cause of the complexity. The primary cause is the difficulty of agreeing on exactly what constitutes "income", combined with many often-conflicting attempts to incentivize or disincentivize various things through the tax code.)
Taxes are genuinely quite complicated in many countries (Germany's patchwork of feudal church obligations, diffuse taxing authority spread over multiple layers of government, and "temporary" taxes lasting over a century has some fun surprises, e.g.), and almost nobody ever voluntarily reduces the tax code's complexity.
What really sets the US apart is 1, very few other countries manage to witness so much criminal energy getting put into legislation without simply collapsing.
Federal taxes tend to be even harder than state taxes. There's usually more that goes into whether or not you qualify for exemptions and what sort of deductible you should take.
But the reason it's a mess is really really simple, lobbying. Tax prep companies have lobbied against a government solution for a long time now. Requiring everyone to spend $100, $200, or more per year is their subscription model and they like it that way.
Federal Taxes tend to be easier than state taxes. First of all, there is no nonsense of partial residencies to consider, which gets even more messy when you and your spouse have spent time in two different states.
Additionally some states (I am looking at you CA and NY) are absolutely rabid when it comes to coming after you for what they deem is their share. They will keep hounding you for years after you have moved away from the state. NY in particular enforces a withholding on additional income that's more than the maximum state tax rate, which effectively means that they get millions of dollars of interest-free loans from their taxpayers.
Plus community property laws make calculations even more messy.
I think it's a result of legacy stuff (i.e. "it's worked like this forever, why change?") and a historical and cultural distrust of the government which is far more pronounced and has had a much larger impact on how people interact with the government than in other countries. People in America tend to distrust the government by default in a way that can be baffling to people from other countries. They want to do a lot of stuff themselves.
Also, for-profit tax filers have aggressively lobbied to combat simplifying the process for decades.
Germany is a federation and US tax filing is still a mess in comparison.
As often with US oddities, the explanation boils down to "the US is big enough to make corruption really attractive and wealthy enough to be able to just ignore it".
You'll be pleased to learn that most (if not all) Cantons (= states) in Switzerland, a federalist state, have a free online tax filing solution, that computes both communal, cantonal, and federal taxes.
The US is very diffuse in taxing power. The federal government only has the power to implement procedures related to federal taxes.
But the state/county/city and even other amalgamations of governments such as “metropolitan”, “transit”, or other special case governments have the ability to tax and their own jurisdiction for implementing how to collect it.
In my opinion, the complexity is at a point that it is a drag on national productivity. And on top of that, it enables lots of corruption where anyone can simply claim plausible deniability and pay a small fine well worth the low probability of being punished.
There are slightly different issues here: fragmentation and cost. You could have a mix of non-free and unified, or free and fragmented etc.
It's fragmented because states here in US have their own laws, taxes, etc. So do local municipalities. Some cities collect some types of taxes, some others and so on. When it comes to stuff like taxes it may be easier to think of US as the EU.
Non-free is because of lobbying by various tax prep companies. It's a large business and here in US there is thing about not wanting the US government to compete with companies. So all these parasites popped up and now are saying "you can't compete with us, it will destroy us!". They always say something how anyone can get paper forms and mail stuff in, so all the electronic stuff is not needed and is just a convenience.
You can take a step back to explain this in the "bigger picture" sense.
The US is a for profit country. Virtually everything is done with the intent of making profit, rather than to benefit citizens. This is different than other developed countries, and the reason the US is so rich.
Prisons exist to make money, not to rehab (or punish) inmates.
Higher education exists to make money, not to educate.
"Healthcare" exists to make money, not to heal people.
(The list goes on and on).
Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the government (money is speech, after all) to keep it this way.
So when it comes to filing taxes, the goal is to make money, not to provide a service to citizens that is convenient, easy, free, etc.
Anytime you see something weirdly punitive or backwards US citizens are dealing with, its because the incentives are structured to favor this outcome. In this case we have a multi billion dollar tax filing industry that is fighting tooth and nail to keep its cash cow around through lobbying (read: legalized bribery).
Oregon rolled out their system this year, and I think it worked really well.
The only thing it could have done better is some kind of integration with the federal return, since as it is, you have to manually enter the W2 and 1040 data, but that's not much hardship. Potentially error-prone, though.
I know they're working to improve it for next year.
I am excited that there is possibly a viable alternative to filing that can emerge over time (I am generally a TurboTax user, trying H&R Block this year) - but I also wanted to address the "why are taxes so complicated in the US" comment that unimaginatively pop up in all such threads.
At its core, most people in the US can file taxes very simply and for free. A typical guy or gal who works a normal job and doesn't own complex investments, gives to charity reasonably but not extravagantly, etc. can file 1040EZ on-line or on paper, and the equivalent state version, for free in a few minutes. I've done this in the first few years of my career.
Layered on that is a bit of "complexity" that occurs when you engage in activity that the government seeks to reward or discourage. EG if you start a business, or partake in equity, make more complicated types of investments, hire people, donate large (relative to your income) - then your tax work gets proportionally more complex.
According to the IRS, almost 90% of filers take the standard deduction - so you can take that as a rough proxy that only 10% of filers deal with more complex situations.
The fact that state taxes further complicate the situation is a small price to pay for the diversity of lifestyle that the US offers (kind of like the complexity of Unix is worth it for the freedom over the simple interface of IOS for many people.) I live in NY which is a very high tax state and therefore has complexities that are worth navigating if you're in that more complicated 10%. We could have chosen to live in a lower tax state and face a very different tax code (but also very different lifestyle in other ways) but I am happy to take on the complexity for the freedom of the choice. And as I said, for most people the state tax is a very straight forward calc/file.
There are some HIDEOUS situations, I got a taste of that when I worked in Connecticut but lived in NYC (which has its own tax on top of NY state) but that's so rare and again, the edge cases are worth the main case.
It makes sense that it’s limited by tax situation but why the limit on amount of income? Surely the math for $1499 interest is no different than $1501 interest.
> the math for $1499 interest is no different than $1501 interest.
This particular limit must be because once over $1,500 of interest, a Schedule B must be included with Form 1040, adding complexity they had to leave out of scope for now.
In general, the higher the AGI, the more complexity as various phase-outs start kicking in, requiring more forms or worksheets.
There are a couple of forms that you only have to file if your income is $200k or higher. 8959 (extra Medicare tax) and 8960 (net investment income tax) are examples. Child comments point out the schedule b for interest over $1500. So it higher income returns are more complicated.
Because most audits are done on income over that level.
Also, this is definitely the "MVP" version of this, and I would venture people with incomes totaling more than 250K have at least one other thing "not supported yet" and it makes for an easy filter.
healthcare.gov turned out alright for the most part.
Negatives:
There is still an unavoidable 20 clicks to select your health insurance, there is no way to get some .csv output or even chart to compare plans. Everything is clicking clicking clicking.
Most people probably don't need to compare 200+ plans, but by not having the UX the insurance companies win.
Positives:
Everything is explained in understandable terms. I don't think its possible to mess things up.
I know billion dollar websites are prob a bad idea, but if we can create over a billion in savings/GDP growth, it should be a no-brainer to invest in stuff like this.
HealthCare.gov is a decent large government big UX project. It turned out pretty good, all things considered.
IMO, I wish the government would have found and replicated (or contracted?) the service I had used before HealthCare.gov existed [0], and just bolted on the subsidies and other things they do. It is still functional today, and I've used it to get insurance since HealthCare.gov went live (specifically off-marketplace, but marketplace-compliant insurance), and it is my first stop anytime my HealthCare.gov insurance tells me the price is going up. I compare with eHealthInsurance, if eHealthInsurance is cheaper, I go with it instead.
Stop having the government use private contractors and instead employ critical infrastructure IT development inhouse.
It's not as if the government doesn't have experience employing software developers. When you introduce a private company into the mix you get a perverse incentive to jack up the price as much as said private company can get away with. And since uncle sam has an infinitely deep pocket book, you can imagine how easy delays and budget ballooning can be.
I'd much rather the government waste $1 million on 10 lazy devs that are hard to fire (because, government) then have them spend $1 billion dollars on garbage rushed work that probably cost the implementing contractors $30k to actually produce (So much of the initial work was simply outsourced) and who knows how much to go back and fix.
I tried to renew my passport and it looks like they tried to get an online renewal system off the ground, got lift for a few months, then shut it down indefinitely. From the country that brought you the internet, here’s a broken web form. Then again the state dept is pretty anti common person; poor people wait for months to renew their passport while rich people just pay extra to expedite it.
The tax filing system is being launched to a limited number of people in a limited number of states specifically to avoid these issues. They’re essentially smaller pilot programs aimed at the more simple tax cases, where they can learn and build on top of that.
The fact that this was not a thing until recently is mind blowing to me as someone who lives in the U.K.
Doing your taxes is so easy here - takes me 30 mins max, all online and there is even a mobile app to set reminders and give you updates on any rebates or messages.
As someone in the US, there have been numerous free options for filing your taxes for a long time (even officially endorsed ones), and for most people without complex tax situations, it is indeed quite simple and only takes a few minutes. The people who complain about taxes in the US either have uncommon situations, didn't understand the tax implications of an employment arrangement prior to tax season (e.g. became an independent contractor without realizing their responsibilities), or are simply unaware of the free and easy options that have existed for a long time.
Dependent care credit forms, interest/dividend income forms, independent contractor forms, student loan/home mortgage interest deduction forms, medical expense deduction forms.
And that is excluding state tax return, which most have to do too. A sizable group of American tax filers, maybe even most, cannot do their taxes in a few minutes.
I've heard you have to have some sort of registered person do or sign of your tax returns or something ridiculous like this. Something about an entire industry of tax return specialists or something that exist purely for taxes to be done correctly. Of course the US is massive so it might be some random state maybe or something.
Honestly I see America like a collection of large countries as groups of states almost. They are so different in so many ways.
There’s an entire segment of the legislature that tries to claw back bones tossed for the common person every day they show up to work. So many things can be fixed with a pen stroke, not just taxes. We already have a universal healthcare system, for example, you only get to use it if you live to 65 though (and ironically join the most costly age pool to insure).
A better example would be Conrail, the US owned railroad that took over the Penn Central. Although in this case Penn Central was completely bankrupt, and I'm not sure if the US government actually paid anything to Penn Central's shareholders.
The tax system is one of the most infuriating aspects of living in the US. For most people IRS _already knows_ how much you owe and why. If you make a mistake on your taxes and underpay they’ll send you a stern letter, and if you overpay they’ll send you a check (this happened to me once, though the refund was only several hundred dollars).
But they make you waste time and money on “filing taxes” instead of just sending you some automated paperwork to approve or contest. Why?
To give you the opportunity to pay taxes on money you made under the table (or get benefits from non-tracked donations you made charities). There are things they don't know about.
* Consent to the collection, use, and sharing of their personal information to third parties (i.e. data brokers).
* Agree to binding arbitration and a waiver of class action rights.
* Agree to limits on liability for any indirect, punitive, special, exemplary, incidental, or consequential damages.
* Consent to arbitrary termination of the account at any time for any reason.
Login.gov (https://login.gov/) is the obvious choice for a login service. Enough excuses.