5 Minutes to Pay Your Taxes?

That was the claim in a newspaper article this week.  Trying a short-cut search brought up this article in The Economist, which has a more reasonable estimate:

Estonia’s approach makes life efficient: taxes take less than an hour to file, and refunds are paid within 48 hours. By law, the state may not ask for any piece of information more than once, people have the right to know what data are held on them and all government databases must be compatible, a system known as the X-road. In all, the Estonian state offers 600 e-services to its citizens and 2,400 to businesses.

 As a bureaucrat I love the idea.  The reality for the US though is we're always going to trade efficiency for what we see as privacy and freedom.