But in the United States, filing taxes is painful by design. The tax-collection system as we know it is the outcome of three forces: corporate lobbying, a stubborn resistance to borrowing good ideas from other Western nations, and the Republican Party’s decades-long campaign against taxation itself.

Mark Mazur: Taxpayers are very confused

In the Netherlands, the procedure is simple. First, you look over the form the government sends you with your taxes already calculated, and you check it. Second, you sign it and send it back. Third—well, there is no third. That’s the entire process. Dutch citizens can file their taxes in minutes.

This is the case in country after country. In Japan, Sweden, Estonia, and Great Britain, people don’t have to file their taxes. They are spared the high-stress homework assignment that Americans face every year. Citizens of these countries do get the opportunity to check the government’s arithmetic if they like, but in most cases, taxpayers seem to think the calculations are reasonable. In Denmark and Spain, the proportion who ask for their returns to be adjusted is less than a quarter, and in Sweden, 72 percent of taxpayers say filing taxes is easy.

Nothing is keeping the United States from copying these countries. More than two-thirds of American households do not itemize their returns—and estimates are that after the 2017 tax law, which raised the standard deduction, this number will rise to 90 percent. So on both the income side and the deductions side, the calculations are straightforward for the government. Some scholars suggest that for perhaps 40 percent of taxpayers—those who receive income from only one source, have only one bank account, and do not itemize—the government could simply calculate what is owed. There will always be some taxpayers with complicated financial situations and a large number of deductions, and some whose situations have changed since their last return (for example, because of the birth of a child). And there will always be some who simply prefer to do their own taxes. But since it’s lower- and middle-income Americans who have the least complicated financial situations, and higher earners who have the most complicated situations, making tax returns easier to file would be a progressive reform.

Read: The golden age of rich people not paying their taxes

Even reducing the costs of tax filing by one-third would save time, money, and aggravation. Americans spend about 2 billion hours collectively preparing for and filling out taxes, or about 12.5 hours per taxpayer, and spend billions of dollars out of pocket on tax-preparation costs. Having the government fill out taxes would completely remove the fear of making a mistake and getting audited, and the trauma that can arise from that. It would also reduce the rate of errors in submitted returns, some of which are substantial. For example, about 20 percent of people who qualify for the earned-income tax credit don’t receive it.