If you had always wondered “What happens when you take the intersection of the two most broken large systems on the planet?” we now have the answer! See “800,000 Using HealthCare.gov Were Sent Incorrect Tax Data” (nytimes):
About 800,000 taxpayers who enrolled in insurance policies through HealthCare.gov received erroneous tax information from the government, and were urged on Friday to hold off on filing tax returns until the error could be corrected.
The incorrect insurance information is used in computing taxes. Consumers can expect to receive corrected data in the first week of March. With the new data, officials warned, some taxpayers will owe more and some will owe less.
Officials said they did not know why the error had occurred.
Will 2014 be the year that historians cite as the point at which the American government had created a system that was too complex for Americans to operate?
Related:
- Why can’t the IRS do our taxes for us?
- Most perverse things about the U.S. tax code?
- “The Bell Curve revisited” (the 1994 book, wrongly characterized by journalists as being primarily about race, about how a large percentage of Americans did not have a sufficiently high IQ to prosper amidst the complexity of American society and economy at the time)
I thought it was going to involve the Department of Defense.
How are you defining “most broken?” I would have thought that in terms of efficiency, the DoD is much more wasteful than the IRS.
We gave incorrect information to 800,000 tax payers out of about 240m? Would we have even noticed if they used the wrong information? I would have just let it go.
Colin: the Department of Defense may be broken but it is not “large” compared to health care (18% of GDP) or taxation (see http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history )