Simplifying Personal Tax Declaration

It is safe to assume that, globally, only one category of people enjoys the activity of tax reporting: accountants. For the rest of us, this usually represents a task we are not too fond of. The fact that there is even a market for pages as https://taxx.lu says a lot - so why can't the official tax declaration be simply, easy and fun to submit? This idea for administrative simplification goes even a step further. What if Luxembourg offered digital pre-filing of income tax, turning filing this yearly nightmare into an easy 5-minute operation? All information on a taxpayer and his/her taxable income, deductions and expenses that is available in the Luxembourg Government’s databases (and any other, if the taxpayer allowed) would be entered automatically into the income tax return, such as: * Bank account number and the bank account owner's name; * Taxes that have been paid by the employer on taxpayer’s behalf (e.g. payments subject to income tax and income tax withheld, unemployment insurance premiums, contributions to a funded pension, and so on); * Benefits (e.g. for company car or sickness pay); * Mortgage interests; * Pensions; * Training expenses; * Gifts and donations; * Pension insurance contributions and payments made; * Income accounted only for calculation of basic exemption; * Cost for cost of childcare (i.e. on base of Childcare service vouchers) and for nanny (based on the social security paid for household personnel). * etc. If some of the data, such as income from selling stocks is not on the declaration at first, it could be easily added in just a few clicks from the online bank, if the connection (API) to the tax declaration is established. Benefits * Higher compliance by citizens by avoiding mistakes or even consciously wrong data entries (which can often happen due to the multilingual environment in Luxembourg, e.g. filling out a declaration in German with attachements in French and English); * Time saved for taxpayers and tax administrations alike for submitting and checking tax declarations (i.e. no more manual filling of data, no more recovery of lost original annexes, no more misunderstanding of what which fields actually means); * Re-focusing of tax administrarions’ staff from auditing tax declarations to high impact tasks (e.g. instead of auditing tax declarations on the fight against tax fraud). * Faster payouts of returns; * Environmental impact and time savings, as income would be more and more declared electronically (instead on paper); * Fairer taxation: in theory, the Luxembourgish tax system is progressive. This means that the higher your income, the more taxes you have to pay. In reality, high income individuals affort tax consultants optimising tax declarations in a way low(er) income citizens can’t.