Yeah, so everybody has to pay taxes by either studying our needlessly complex tax codes for months or by paying someone who has already studied to do it for you.

Machines have already automated away a lot of that complexity, but we've gone out of our way to not provide that as an official service. Instead billionaires have privatized those automation services and charge extortionate fees to use them. They lobby the government to maintain the exploitative system and try to remove any method of filing for free. They also bribe politicians comparitively small amounts of money to codify loopholes that often lead to them paying no taxes at all despite earning billions per year.

Once you submit your taxes, an automated auditing machine owned by the government can tell within a few minutes if you've lied or calculated your taxes incorrectly, leading to fines and punishment.

It's really a perfect system.

Senator Lucas (D) on reforms and capitalism: "It's stylistically designed to be that way, and you can't undo that, but we can diminish the effects of it."

tax bureau anywhere else: "here is your tax info, let us know if anything is wrong"

the irs: "we already know how much you paid us in taxes. but we're not gonna tell you. guess how much you paid us in taxes and mail it in to us. if you get it wrong you go to jail :)"