doomed to failure....
Any system the needs to monitor $PERSONS not $CORPS is doomed to fail.
Govts like control. There is a sane tax reform site here in the USA that makes the very good points that:
1) auditing businesses is easier than people
i )($CORPS << $PEOPLE).
ii) CORPS don't normally move.
2) illegal aliens (of which there are maybe 20,000,000?) usually don't pay any income taxes,
3) it can be made budget neutral
4) the IRS could be a lot smaller, and probably target the business that have the lawyers to put up a stiff defence, rather than the average citizen that doesn't.
The details are important, but it really needs discussing.
Put simply, Govts love complicated systems because WE pay for them. Once you realise you are paying for something, you should demand value for money. Taxes have been used for millenia to basically shift wealth around usually from the bottom up - the accumulators always exploit those at the bottom.
People make the world a better place. Businesses provide the mechanisms to generate the means of consumption. Not hard to see that they should administer the burden in accordance with their income... A person can be in debt, but still needs to eat. A business in debt, is just a messy piece of paper.
There is no magic bullet I am sure, but the more complex a system that scales with number of people, it is doomed to either failure or massive inefficiency.
I'm not at all sure which situation we have now...
P.