[renholder]

>Every year, I have to dig up receipts for what we spent on daycare, what we spent out of our HSA accounts, etc. The government doesn't track any of that.

Aside from the daycare costs (as an aside, creche in Ireland is quite decent[0]), isn't all of that is still reported to the IRS? Your HSA isn't sitting in some dark corner that the government doesn't know about, ever since the Patriot Act, yeah?

I'm fairly certain it is reported to the IRS because Americans find getting bank accounts overseas quite cumbersome because your government strong-arms agreements that demand that Americans' overseas bank accounts are reported to the IRS. Surely, more domestic reporting shouldn't come as a surprise or shock.

>I guarantee you that if you make false statements using Ireland's online system for claiming tax credits, you're under penalty of perjury as well.

What do I get for a broken guarantee[1]? :)

This batering back and forth really only arrives at the conclusion that I originally posited:

Those of us in the PAYE system[s] would abhor having to do things the American way and this wasn't meant as an affront (and I apologise if anyone may have taken it that way).

Our tax agencies are responsible for keeping track of these things and the only things we're responsible for is reporting status changes and/or providing receipts for other proofs of burden (such as Independent Contractors who file as Directors of Umbrella Corporations and need to write-off business expenses).

[0] - https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/pre_school_e...

[1] - https://www.revenue.ie/en/personal-tax-credits-reliefs-and-e...

[patio11]

The IRS does not in the ordinary course receive informational returns about people's bank accounts. They do receive informational returns about interest generated by bank accounts (and other places), but they don't get e.g. transaction lists by default. Google "1099-INT example" to see one of these informational returns. They're minimalistic and they are minimalistic precisely because a large portion of the US polity hates the notion that the IRS would have arbitrary read access to people's financial lives.

You can reasonably assume that the IRS can use subpoena power to compel a US financial institution or foreign financial institution to surrender records to it. This is an oppositional process and they use it relatively rarely next to the total universe of taxpayers and accounts, generally only after they already have evidence of hinkiness and want to quantify unsurveilled amounts and/or locate assets.

These are not secret facts about the world; the operations of the IRS are exhaustively public (trust me, I have weird hobbies). People on a programmer-dense message board should have more weight for "While I understand that X would be accomplishable via an API if it existed, it is possible that that API does not factually exist" than they often do.

Also, the number of times someone in the financial industry typed in git commit -m "tldr Patriot Act compliance" is orders of magnitude below the number that HN comments routinely predict.

[tptacek]

No, your day care does not make itemized reports of potential deductions for all its clients to the IRS.