Depends how intricate your taxes are. Perhaps 30 million people file Schedule C, which covers freelance income, gig income, etc.
The IRS will (mostly) know your gross income, but it won't know the exact details about claimable deductions such as business travel, business meals, supplies, etc.
The only way it could know that would be to peer inside your credit-card statements, bank statements, etc. and make judgments about what was work related and what wasn't.
I'd rather do the tallying myself -- which is a chore -- rather than have IRS software make guesses that are a) awfully nosy and b) bound to disadvantage me.
You're right. The IRS emphatically does not have everything. Please accept my deepest and humblest apologies for implying in any way, shape, or form that they do.
In addition to hundreds of millions of W-2s, the also IRS has 1099s and 1098s of various sorts. For the majority of Americans, the IRS already has the majority of their tax data. And the infrastructure already in place to provide this to them. Why not present it along with the opportunity to amend it? Or tally from zero yourself, if you prefer. This is what I intended to communicate earlier, and I can see I failed to be clear.
You're absolutely right. The IRS in no way has everything! Do you think it's maybe worth considering that it might be possible to make many people's lives easier for a very small marginal cost by letting people see what data the IRS already has about them? It might not work for every single person every single time, but it might work for a lot of people a lot of the time.
The IRS will (mostly) know your gross income, but it won't know the exact details about claimable deductions such as business travel, business meals, supplies, etc.
The only way it could know that would be to peer inside your credit-card statements, bank statements, etc. and make judgments about what was work related and what wasn't.
I'd rather do the tallying myself -- which is a chore -- rather than have IRS software make guesses that are a) awfully nosy and b) bound to disadvantage me.