In Sweden, the vast majority of taxpayers don’t do battle with tax documents and fine-print questions about itemized deductions. They just get a document from the government with all the relevant information already filled out. Some even get a text message with their prepared tax information, and if they respond “yes,” their taxes are done. Andreas Hatzigeorgiou, a chief economist with the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, told PRI that individuals with more involved filings can always spend more time on their taxes, if they like. “If you don’t have any complicated things that you want to do”—like listing business expenses from a sole proprietorship —“it takes you five seconds,” he said.

In the United States, however, taxes are tortuous—for those who pay them as well as those who collect them. Compliance costs are 10 times higher than in most European countries. Poor Americans in particular suffer for the time and money it takes to fill out what are essentially redundant documents. "These taxpayers are just copying into a tax return information that the IRS already receives independently,” the economist Austan Goolsbee wrote in a Brookings paper.

In 2006, Goolsbee proposed a "Simple Return” that would pre-fill forms for workers with the most straightforward taxes. California tried something like this in 2004, when it sent 50,000 single taxpayers a European-style "ReadyReturn.” Ninety percent of users said it saved them time. The median cost of completion? Zero dollars.

The Simple Return could proceed in several steps. First, the IRS could start with a pilot program for the most straightforward tax returns: single, low-income taxpayers who don't itemize their deductions. There are about nine million such people in the U.S. They would get a document from the IRS early in the year showing total income earned and total taxes owed. They could check a box saying "Okay,” make changes, or—if they insist—burn the page, throw the ashes in the trash, and log onto TurboTax.

If millions of people seemed happy with the streamlined one-pager, the IRS could expand the program to the millions of people with the second-easiest returns, like married couples who don’t itemize their deductions. “We might never get everybody in the system, because some people’s tax situations are quite complicated,” Gale said. But step two of the Simple Return could still reach about 17 million taxpayers.

What’s stopping the Simple Return? There are three barriers, and appropriately, since the issue at stake is taxes, they are all fundamentally about money.

First, changing the tax-payment system for tens of millions of people would require resources for the federal government, and the IRS is already squeezed. Its budget has fallen in the last decade and Congress hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for making their jobs any easier.