As an example in US government bureaucracy, government software teams digitizing forms at one point weren’t allowed to utilize features like autofill or automatically filling fields based on previous answers because it would relatively disadvantage users using paper forms.

Government capabilities do need to serve everyone, and from the perspective of the whole society that is beneficial, but they are often are of low quality to the individual consuming them for this very reason.

Let’s exclude taxes, because obviously many people would hate them under any circumstances. Does the government do a good job providing the other services people interact with regularly? Do people love their visits ti the DMV? Are they satisfied with their interactions with the police? Heck, in my town, just renewing a dog license is a pain.

I disagree with the argument that the US Tax Filing system meets the goal of:

> "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do."

It may do so for easy / common cases of W2 salaried employees but step a little outside of the norm (foreign sourced income, tax treaties etc.) and software gives up and shows you a PDF of relevant forms and requires you to become an expert in tax code and to keep your own multi year running calculation of carryovers and things to proceed. I'm glossing over all of the detail about how complex this really is but wouldn't expect the average, even very intelligent person to succeed in filing a correct return without a professional's help.