Still, he acknowledged, that’s a tall order. You could just play shamelessly to Americans' love of status. For example, the IRS building could be renamed each year after the person who paid the most in taxes, he said, as when corporations buy the naming rights to sports arenas. (What about when a businessman is paid to put his name on a building?)
Or, Statman said slyly, maybe Bloomberg LP could create a Bloomberg American Honors list, such as the Bloomberg Billionaires list. Those who pay a lot of taxes rank high on the list. The name plays on Queen Elizabeth's honors lists that comes out twice a year, Statman said. "Americans can’t be on the list, for constitutional reasons, but any designation that reminds people of royalty" is the next-best thing, he said.
(While everybody's thinking outside of the box, we interrupt this column to recommend "Would You Like the IRS If It Looked Like This? Three Top Design Firms Do a Rebrand.")
Just bribe us, already
What if you could designate where some of the money you pay in taxes would go—to education, maybe, health care, defense? Ariely and others have floated the idea. Pesky legal precedents raise an obstacle, Olson said. It's not quite the same, but during the Vietnam War some Americans figured out how much of their tax payments were going to the military, subtracted this from their payments, and wrote on their return that they were withholding it in protest, she said. They had to pay a penalty.
Ariely proposed a less-complicated idea in a 2010 blog post:
Let’s say that your 1040 came with a little extra stuff: maybe a container with an alcohol content, or perchance something of the chocolate persuasion. What if your tax forms arrived in a gift box with some financial documents on the side? What if the instructions for filling out the form told you to type in your personal information and take a bite of chocolate, type in your W-2 information and drink some of the alcohol, add your deductions and try some of the nuts etc?
Help. For God’s sake, help
The idea of the government pre-populating our tax forms hints of Big Brother for some of us. The IRS could still leave people in control, Morningstar's Wendel suggested, while making it all a lot easier by filling out the forms with the information it has and telling taxpayers, as he put it: “Hey, you don’t have to do all this work, but could you check that the numbers are correct and fill in anything that's missing?”
“You don’t get angry at an assistant for helping you do something hard," he said.
Well. You don't have to.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.