They only refund the amount you gave them over what you had to.

You gave them a free loan.

They refund the part you paid, but didn't actually owe. Fill out your W4 to have less money taken out and keep what's yours throughout the year instead of giving the government an interest free loan every year.

You only get refunded when you paid them more than you are required to by law.

By default when people have an employer take their money directly out of their check it tends to be "too much" so you get some of that money back. Because it's the law.

The government isn't giving everyone *all* of their tax money back. It's giving some people some of their money back.

This seems to operate under the incorrect assumption that tax refunds are equivalent to taxes paid.

They are not.

When filling out income tax forms at work you can set how much is taken out of a paycheck and paid to taxes. The amount can vary on a lot of things like marriage status, disabilities etc.
If you set the amount too high and paid more in taxes than you owed, then you get a refund.

If you did not pay enough, then you would owe more money during tax time.

So why are we filing our own taxes when the government already knows what we owe?

So if you do it wrong they get to fine you for more money.

To prop up TurboTax and H&R Block. It's a scam

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Well, they know at the end.

A classic example would be if you take a take a deduction for auto-expenses or mileage, the government won’t know how much less to take if you don’t calculate the deduction at the end.

Or let’s say you don’t take the standard ~$13k deduction but instead want to do itemized, they have no way of knowing your itemized deductions unless we were to go full tilt with the government having a profile for every person and tracking every single transaction they make.

Or, you don’t need to contribute any more to Social Security once you hit a certain amount, but you have to contribute a higher % to Medicare once you hit a certain amount; if you have more than 1 job, how would either job know how much you are making in total (including any other sources of income)?

If US taxes were simplified, then yeah, having each worker file every year would not be needed.

Just want to chime in amd say that this is absolutely true. Tons of other nations don't require anything like this. I can do my taxes by simply logging in on a government website, read the report they've got, and if I see nothing wrong, be done with everything by clicking "send". Takes a whole 2 minutes for most salaries people.

97% of the time, all my deductibles are already there and correct to the last cent.