Monday, April 16, 2007

If Google Managed the United States' Internal Revenue Service, or at least the forms...

Note to self:
Expound upon the idea* of how much we would all LOVE to pay our taxes if the IRS teamed up with the rock-stars from Google Labs and built a rich, Web 2.0 tax calculation platform to walk us through the process.

Think of aesthetically pleasing sites like LinkedIn, Ziggs, and BaseCamp, not to mention right here at Blogger.com. Soft (as opposed to harsh), pleasant, and actually encouraging, these sites INVITE you to offer information, holding your hand through a guided process.

The process seems to jive with intuition, and these sites even provide incremental, positive reinforcement for the task of data entry (see LinkedIn: "Your network is x% complete").

Whereas the tax forms I file every year seem patched, supplemented, caveated, conditioned, band-aided, and overridden by various labyrinths of conditions and clauses. You would need a whiteboard and a professor to help you through the logic.

*Interested investors and business partners contact me @ hcd@goldzeppelin.com. I'd also like to build a pay-to-submit, biz/social networking site multi-submit tool, if I can come up with a team and some cash to get started.

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