When I read these and the related stories I am thankful I live in a country where you don't even need to file taxes. Virtually all income is reported to the tax authorities, so they will calculate a tax rate for you and you rarely need to make adjustments if your income is stable and regular.

Only when I need to make some surprise deductions (e.g. purchasing work-related literature, deductible by law here up to some sum) or for some reason the payer of income is not reported to the tax authorities. Or when the income falls short of what was projected for that year (e.g. unpaid leave, getting fired, changing to jobs to a lower salary (it happens) etc.), or there is a surprise bonus and so on. Normally I do not need to anything.

Let’s say I rent a spare bedroom my home to someone; who’s going to report that income if not me?

If your income is actually fully reported to the IRS (W-2 or various 1099) filing taxes is a breeze anyways. Use one of the several free (as in beer) software to take a picture of your forms and it generates the right form that you can submit electronically to the IRS.

> When I read these and the related stories I am thankful I live in a country where you don't even need to file taxes. Virtually all income is reported to the tax authorities, so they will calculate a tax rate for you and you rarely need to make adjustments if your income is stable and regular.

Which country?

In my experience, Americans put a very high bar on governments, hence the multiple complaints you keep seeing, but the actual system is way simpler than most EU countries.

That's the neat thing, in the US virtually all income is reported to tax authorities. They just don't do anything with it.

It is a bit more complex because we have federal and state taxes but there really is no reason why we couldn't also have that system.