It’s this time of the year. I filed the return Saturday at 4pm. The message that it was received and accepted by the IRS was sent less than 8hrs later. Same message regarding the state the other morning. An example of American pragmatism. I think they didn’t even look at the return. Within my income range you can’t really do any damage to a federal tax revenue of the size of the USA. So why waste time. This is a wild guess, but I thought to illustrate how you can see it: The 100 wealthiest people and the 100 most important firms produce 80% of the tax revenue. My contribution is among the peanuts. It’s more or less irrelevant if your annual taxes are $5000 or $10000. I know the saying that they control hard exactly these little people. But if you think of a federal agency with hundreds of employees collecting every day tens of thousands of returns: a bureaucratic nightmare if you would audit every single one of them on accuracy in all details. That’s why they are happy if your return fits the average range and nobody needs to look at it any further. Maybe they draw a sample out of every 10.000 or so. But generally I would say everybody with a taxable income of less than $100.000 is scanned out. And that’s why it didn’t even take a day to process. Imagine they would print it out, put it on the pile, take it one day, go through it carefully…it would take them days, weeks, probably months…