https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.39...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/turbotax-maker-s... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846884, but we've merged the threads)
Ok, so if they can do all that automatically for an "electronic audit" why am I filing a return, just run that thing and send it to me and I can file an exception if there is something on it I disagree with.
I think the answer has already been identified in several other comments here, a heavy lobby effort on the part of Intuit, H&R and whoever else to keep it tricky and complex so you have to buy their B.S> software or services.
Me: How much do I owe?
Gov’t: You have to figure that out.
Me: I just pay what I want?
Gov’t: Oh, no we know exactly how much you owe. But you have to guess that number too.
Me: What if I get it wrong?
Gov’t: You go to prison
Source: https://twitter.com/jordan_stratton/status/11181414550616719...
I dig this one up every April.
What they don't know is your income from sources like rental income or crypto. They also don't know deductions you are going to claim. In this case you will have to provide the details. Still free to lodge your returns online.
It’d be nice if my 1099s were electronically filed with the cost basis. But they’re not. So the IRS, every year, thinks I’m going to owe way more than I do.
The IRS also has zero idea about the $4000+ of sales tax deductions I’m filing for this year.
And finally, if you do get it wrong, you don’t go to jail. They send you a CP2000 letter. (Remember those 1099s? I forgot one one year.) You fix the problem or show them their error. They’ll even waive the penalties the first time. It’s a somewhat easy process.
it's also super easy to setup a payment plan online now if you really mess things up
Just send me a statement, you made this, you get this much deduction for the other crap or whatever.
No stupid W2, W4 1040, bunch of mumbo jumbo from the 1950's that a few companies are ripping us off over IMO.
Gov’t: You owe us money. We took the amount we want directly from your income.
Me: But shouldn't the amount be lower because of X and Y and Z ?
Gov’t: Send us all the right paperwork and we might give you back some of what we took if we agree with your claim.
I actually like this version better (and it's also what I am used to), but I'd see people being uncomfortable with that arrangement.
> Almost all participants said that they would opt to use the service the following year.
And yes, as you have said, the answer is lobbying.
> Tax preparation services strongly opposed ReadyReturn and have lobbied against its expansion.
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-was-exper....
EDIT: I can't find the podcast I heard this in, but pretty sure the tax professor that spearheaded this pilot got followed by people hired by Intuit.
Priceonomics wrote an accompanying article: https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...
This feels somehow like it should be illegal to willfully and knowingly make the common good worse in favor of your company. Perhaps via antitrust.
The only thing I need to manually add is the EUR value of crypto assets on Jan 1st of the preceding year (good luck figuring that one out, the exchanges are kinda shit), and any charity donations I may have done. (my dad will pettily write down any speeding ticket cost as charity donations)
But don't worry, the project started in 2009 to replace their COBOL mainframe systems is kinda, sorta on track for completion...in 2030.
- they fill out their taxes with rough estimates,
- the IRS helpfully corrects their errors, and sends the form back
- they sign the corrected form, send it back
- the IRS accepts the second round.
This is basically the same "pre-filled" workflow as every other developed country. The difference is that we have a first round where you put in a semi-plausible effort to placate the tax preparation lobby.
Has anyone with a normal job (not self-employed, regular paycheck from a company registered with the IRS) ever been fined etc for this?
Even if they can't tell me what numbers they expect when I file, it seems like they could at least let me know within a few weeks if they're pretty sure I missed a 1099. Heck, I typically file at least a month early. They could let me know before April 15 and I could have just fixed it! Ugh.
They could send me a monthly statement like my city government does. Instead, they wait a year to let me know I slipped up and then charge me interest. Guys, if you know I slipped up now you could have told me a year ago.
There was an interesting Planet Money episode about this [0].
Why? They think I sold a house and kept all of the gains. Like I didn't have a mortgage, and like it wasn't my primary residence.
It's ridiculous. I can't explain how stressed out getting a $165k bill when that's practically my yearly income made me. I wonder how many wealthy people get these completely incorrect $165k bills and how often they come after the person with $10k in the bank.
State governments are not necessarily believing the same set of facts that the federal government does. I got caught in a multi-year cycle one time where the state government kept coming after me every year for the same thing, even though I had the federal return and the evidence that it was correct.
Each year I'd send that thing in, in response, and I'd never hear from them...until the next year, when they'd do it again.
Felt to me like each year somebody would receive my response, decide it was too much work to deal with, and then file it away in the "hit them again next year" pile.
I assumed they did that automatically for everyone -- does that mean that if I "forget" to attach a 1099 then they IRS won't know unless they do this special "electronic audit"?
Every year I get a reminder, log into an app with my government ID, click "next" a few times while checking the numbers and submit. It literally takes 2 minutes if you don't have anything to adjust.
does the US have a thing like DigiD?
Gods no, can you imagine the US having a national, universal, secure digital ID?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-s...
Be sure you have a copy, either scanned or electronic, of all documents on your computer. Ditto all tax return filled in forms. Use the fill-in pdf’s the IRS provides.
Do not miss a filing date. File a tax return missing important documentation if necessary, but file. Similarly, pay the tax you owe, or estimate you owe on time. The penalties for late filing and owed taxes are severe. You will not make a serious error if you work from the income transcript.
And I've filed taxes in countries with simple tax codes where the government pre-fills out the forms. Guess what? You still need to go and double check everything because the information comes from your employer. I've found mistakes before. So I pretty much "do my taxes" myself to make sure what the govt sends isn't wrong.
The gain is that we can make "doing your taxes" a non-issue for most Americans. Sure some people will still need accountants for complicated situations but in one swoop we can eliminate hundreds of millions of hours of useless work every year for basically no downside -- it's pure gravy.
That's how it worked for me in France when I was an employee. As a freelancer there is a bit more work, but nothing like the puzzle that tax declaration seems to be in the US.
This is how it works in Australia. Taxes are filed online with the government authority (ATO), and everything is pre-filled. You just need verify it's correct and make any claims you want.
The feds have no idea how your deductions (and to a lesser extent, your income) have changed from the previous year. They don't have a full picture of your finances, but you do. In the abstract, with those constraints, the system of "tell us everything we need to know, pay us, and you get in trouble if you lie so egregiously that you get caught" works pretty well.
Note that there's a whole lot of countries that send you a prepared tax return that you adjust if necessary, and most people don't need to. There's no fundamental reason we couldn't do this here.
Indeed, California even did it for a couple years: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-was-exper...
Yeah, it doesn't work for everyone. So they could offer it to you, and you have the choice to click "ok", or to click "add additional income and deduction". If your situation is so crazy that neither of those options work, you can then do it the classic/hard mode way with an accountant.
It's how it works in plenty of countries. The US is a bit unique with one of the more complex tax code in the world, but it would still work fine for a large portion of the population.
basically how it works in Sweden
People should definitively understand how much taxes they are paying so that they demand some accountability for their money.
How do you accomplish that?
Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!
How does the project plan to keep up with that? Will it require volunteers?
Right now, we're focusing on tooling to make onboarding new tax forms simpler and require a lower threshold of project understanding to allow a larger, less technical group of people to contribute
Last year I used http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/
It did the job, mostly, but had some quirks and didn't quite get everything right with the rounding when I set it to use whole dollar amounts, so I had to correct a few totals that ended up being $1 off, which was annoying. Probably won't use that one again.
But the freefilefillableforms supported by IRS rounds all input and then does addition based on that. For now we just maintain all cents and do math with the precise numbers, then round at the end when the numbers need to go into the forms. We have some work in the pipeline now to make that user-configurable too.
I'd like to contribute, but don't feel like building someone's business for free.
Can any free app do all of this?
Better yet is there a free app that can log into my Turbotax account, fetch all the data and then generate the forms and file them?
Not only is it cheaper, more importantly, you’re not giving money that’s going towards maintaining the tax code that prevents the government from “competing” with TurboTax.
Obviously the Government already has what it needs to pretty much do all of your taxes, and they already must do this anyway. They could ask you like 5 short questions and your taxes would be done…they already have all your info.
Stop paying the lobbyists to continue lobbying against your interests. Start getting in the habit of calling or emailing your reps around tax time.
Fuck these companies.
I'm not mad about owing the money, but what annoys me is if they have enough information to know that I underreported, then why am I part of this equation to begin with? Clearly they have enough of my tax data to know I screwed up, so why don't they just send me a bill once a year? I don't see why Intuit (or HR Block or TaxAct or Jackson Hewitt etc) need to be part of this transaction at all.
[1] It was an honest mistake on my end, I forgot to report a sizeable stock sale I did in 2020.
I stopped using them last year because it was just too much. I can easily see how someone could end up with a multi-hundred dollar bill from them. Many of the popups are tailored to look like you need to say yes.
I personally use it because my taxes are too complicated to do it myself on paper.
I hope they are correct, I honestly do a good faith job but it's too complicated.... the pdf download for 2020 was 426 pages... that includes state. and it will be even more next this year about to file my 21.
way too complicated I only own a small s-corp (technically 2) and do some really small level investing with active trading.
The sad part: she didn't think anything of it, and thought that's how it was. The reason for the screenshot is because last year, her daughter's dad basically stole her child tax credit. So she was celebrating getting her return accepted before he could pull the same thing.
For reference, her return was also five figures. I'm guessing these companies aim for a % of the total return. So perhaps a "$149" upgrade was $249 because of her return size. Like how online retailers bump up the price for goods based on zip code. I'm speculating though.
Keep in mind that every service worker is terrified of an audit. The cost is much higher when you don’t have resources.
EDIT: I think I didn't phrase this very well. My point was that the average service worker is trained to be terrified of the IRS. These people are already usually paying hefty fines because they missed their returns in prior years. That's why they take the path of least resistance, and just pay someone else as a shield against this.
So it's not particularly surprising that TurboTax has swindled this person out of $600 with their upsells. Nor should she be condemned as a fool. If you were in her shoes, you might do the same thing.
Being audited isn't much of a concern if your only source of income is a typical W2 job. The average service worker isn't throwing money around in stocks, crypto, blackjack, and corporate entities.
The vast majority of the people who qualify for free tax filing have nothing to audit. The government makes enough money off their deductions, not to mention what they generate having to spend >50% of their income to stay afloat, to overlook a few unreported tips or sneaker sales.
Like with your health system, a lot of us are slightly baffled by how broken things are in the US.
It might be different in the US, but in Canada I file my taxes using the CRA's data directly. TurboTax even fetches it directly from their website. What's the point? They have my T4, my T2202 (studies) and everything else. Just send me a letter telling me how much money I owe/I am owed and that's it.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Citizen's United was a group that made a political-advocacy movie and the FEC wanted to treat it as regulated political activity.
Is it really necessary to "encourage" me to dislike taxes? Is not the money leaving my pocket sufficient?
I've also heard Republicans claiming that IRS-provided tax bills/refunds is equivalent to a tax. I guess the implication is that the government is going to intentionally charge you more.
Having to use TurboTax or someting like it is equivalent to a tax, but it's paid to a corporation instead of the government. If I had to choose between my money going to the government and Intuit, I'd choose the government.
Pretty sure it's just run-of-the-mill lobbying and corruption unfortunately. A typical "think of the jobs!" type of thing.
What annoys me now is that if you want a paper booklet you have to request one in advance if you did not use one previously but otherwise there is no free to everyone option to do it. You either request a paper booklet or use 3rd party software.
If you have some amounts you want to regain from losses, etc., you can still do your taxes manually.
That means logging into the free MEX IRS platform, which shows all your tax info preffilled. Most likely the stuff you want to input is already there (all invoices in mexico are signed by private/public keys through the IRS system).
So you just enter your bank account to get your money back. Or get your reference to pay your taxes.
The system is really beautiful.
I'm not a fan of Trump, but the Trump tax changes made it so it doesn't make sense for me to do itemized deductions, because I won't beat the standard deduction unless I have a lot more things to deduct than I normally do, which greatly simplifies my tax filing and record keeping. Since I know I won't be deducting donations, I don't need a receipt when donating them, and that saves paperwork.
…but man, this was a particularly egregious example I came across this year.
You can pay for TurboTax using your refund…with an additional $39 processing fee. That is just wild.
(I might be a bit off on the price, but not enough to change the result. TurboTax's loss if the debtor here "defaults" somehow is … what, even?)
I mean, ideally the buttons would be immediately below the corresponding content.
But if both buttons are going to be at the bottom, I can see arguments for either order.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? Having a complicated tax system makes it harder to find out how much you're paying. If things were simpler it would be much more apparent.
I never have to think about calculating or filing tax, but I always see it and know exactly how much it is.
The argument I've heard is that so righteous indignation over the "staggeringly high" taxes "stolen from the hardworking American people" or whatever. This is one of the same arguments as to why sales taxes shouldn't be included in the shelf price of an item or service.
Except it doesn't work. People can be mad about taxes regardless of whether they're easy or hard to file. (Paying taxes is straightforward; the vast majority of us have it done for us from our paychecks every interval.) And where I live, public votes to raise the sales tax for various projects, often public transit, rarely if ever fail.
It seems to me just to be an excuse to not actually deal with our busted as hell tax collection system because that system benefits people who themselves have an excuse to rile people up about taxes.
> Except it doesn't work. People can be mad about taxes regardless of whether they're easy or hard to file.
"that can't possibly be a fair representation of that ideologue's position, there's huge gaps in the logic!"
look, positions way out on the fringes don't have to make coherent sense to the rest of us. PETA runs kill-shelters that euthanize millions of animals every year, sometimes multiples of other kill shelters. It makes sense to them, they have their own logic why that's good.
Making Americans hate every aspect of taxes - the amount, having to spend a couple quality hours with a tax program every year, getting sales tax rolled on top of advertised prices, everything - is the goal here. Just make taxes suck so that people hate them. Because then people will oppose taxation.
I think this would provide the transparency that conservatives want, along with the simplicity that liberals want. My only concern is that the data would be fudged, like the social security “statements” are.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
I'm ready to go back to doing my taxes by hand and mailing them in. (I'm old enough to remember doing that - it is faster than doing it on the computer except for the one year I forgot to copy line 13 of form 1234A to line 56b of form 9876B) So many dark patters where the software is pretending to take time doing a complex calculation that takes a computer a couple nanoseconds, not to mention all the time to skip over things that don't apply to me.
Here's a page describing forms and situations it does not handle [1].
One thing that might annoy some people is that to login to the Cash App Taxes website you must use their mobile app. The website shows a QR code which you scan from the mobile app.
It uses the approach of asking you various questions in order to figure out what forms it thinks you need to file, which is an approach that some people do not like.
If there is a form you know you have to do that it missed or you have a 1099-something that it has not asked you to enter it took me a little while to figure out how to deal with that. What you do is type the name of the form into the help search box. One of the results will be a link to take you directly to the page that deals with that form.
[1] https://taxeshelp.cash.app/s/article/Forms-and-situations-Ca...
I know this is where we’re supposed to decry the system of which this is symptomatic, and talk about campaign finance and such. And all that stuff is true, sure. But Intuit has been such a consistently abusive actor that they’re normalizing regulatory capture, with enormous financial, time, stress, and legal repercussions for the entire population.
Seriously, fuck them.
They have your previous filings so switching to another provider can be a pain since you need to know last year income when submitting your filing. I always make sure to at least download the PDF's.
As a consumer we're always free to vote with our wallet and I've been happy with freetaxusa so far but I'm also waiting for the "rate hike" to come...
"File your taxes free! Oh, you have to file an HSA contribution? Sorry, you'll have to buy H&R Block DELUXE ($79.99) to do that!"
Kinda feels like blackmail, really. If I don't file my HSA contribution I'm technically committing fraud, right?
The IRS will send you a corrected tax return, you sign it and mail them a check and you'll hear nothing from them again. Maybe you didn't get the form, or didn't understand the software, etc, etc. There are lots of honest ways to screw up your taxes. The IRS isn't going to assume fraud unless you refuse to pay them when they point it out.
I've screwed up my taxes a lot of times. Not maliciously, but not having all of my forms, I've had clients report paying me a different amount than they told the IRS, forgot stock trades I made, etc. Every time, they've sent a letter asking to pay a balance, plus maybe a small fee, and all is good.
As long as the job of Congress is to kiss the ass of every powerful industry lobby, we won’t have good things.
You say this like it's just a thing that people can do. But the people you're telling to "Just do this" have already been trained to be terrified of the IRS. Many of them are currently paying huge fines due to missing their returns in prior years. Any small mistake can hang you when you're impoverished, precisely because you don't have any room for error.
"Most Americans" is an umbrella that contains mostly service workers. The people that serve you food, bag your groceries, drive your amazon purchases, and so on. If you've spent a lot of time with people like this, I encourage you to ask them "Hey, do you pay someone to do your taxes, or do you do it yourself? Why?"
I'm pretty sure the conversation will go "I pay. I just don't want to worry about it." And that "worry" is because they've been hit hard in the wallet, because the (American) government is not friendly when it comes to messing up your taxes.
If I am mistaken about this, I would like to know. But this is true of my extended family, and I'm pretty sure it's true for most of their friends.
The problem truly is advertising, like you said. The government just cannot out-advertise companies that are doing $9 billion in revenue.
It isn't perfect since its a young project, but I've attempted to simplify and modularize the process of creating/maintaining forms to allow for that part to be crowd-sourced as much as possible (and I'd love your help!).
More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846884
Every piece of news in which Intuit gets slapped is good news to me. I just hope legislators start doing their jobs at some point and spare the taxpayer of this bullshit.
Most of my income is from W2 and some 1099 here and there. As others mentioned, America is backwards and the politicians and 1% keep fleecing it towards Romes fate.
I love seeing those on the top get fleeced for a change, unfortunately this will just be a slap on the wrist.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/epis...
Really? There are some TurboTax ads where every word spoken is the word 'free.' ;)
1. https://www.tvcommercialad.com/watch/XosLKPV
So there wouldn’t be this problem with Intuit if the government got their shit together. Why not spend efforts to improve the system rather than litigation? The answer? Lobbying.
This is all in stark contrast to the system which exists in Denmark, where I live, where taxes are all filed online and the government automatically fetches most information so that you mostly only need to review it and add deductions.
[1] https://medium.com/@syastrov/us-tax-system-a-fractal-of-bad-...
Someday our descendants will have sane and automatic filing like the rest of the developed world; I can only hope to live long enough to see the death of this stupid industry.
Edit: I looks like they don't :(
Items Not Supported
Foreign employment income (Form 2555)
But few people actually do because it is a painful experience. The IRS' documentation isn't actually bad, it is just that the tax system itself is incredibly (and needlessly) complicated.
For example, you'd need to hand-enter every stock trade (even automated re-investments) even though your broker likely already electronically sent this information to the IRS. Using a digital solution they can often log into your broker and auto-import everything.
For how under-budget the IRS is and how bad the tax system is, they do ok, but the whole thing needs a massive overhaul but there is money in politics keeping it bad in order to profit private companies (plus there's a certain demographic that "hating taxes" is a political position that needs to be kept up with, essentially self-reinforcing-itself).
If you have deductions, stock sales, a nanny, a business, etc then you need the regular 1040 and various schedules, and those are all complex enough that you'd probably benefit from software. It's not absolutely required, but there are enough ways to do it wrong (like adding up the wrong lines) that the peace of mind alone is probably worth it to you.
Credit Karma has an option to do taxes that is completely free, but I tried it once a few years ago and didn't care for it.
I use FreeTaxUSA which offers free federal and $7 state taxes. Cheaper than a meal at Taco Bell.
Do them yourself. The IRS has guidance and resources for those who are interested [1].
[1] https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!
Sure, it's a bit tedious. But short of a privacy-preserving libre solution or just doing them manually with fillable PDFs, you'd have to do most of that isolation prepwork anyway. So fuck 'em.
P.S. The directions for modifying .NET assemblies to crack TurboTax are simple and easily followed by anyone with basic programming skill. So if you're fine trusting Intuit you could obtain the installation files from them directly, crack it yourself, and even have e-filing capability from what I understand.
That's why despite my bookkeepers protests, we moved to another accounting service and when they bought MailChimp I pulled my whole company out of that too.
I understand workplace is not always a place for activism, but I could switch with reasonable effort and it made me feel good not to fund this sort of behavior.
Biggest downside is no import from brokerage, so if you trade a lot it could be annoying to create your schedule D.
There is an institutional (mainly Republican) commitment to strangling the IRS here in the US. Filing taxes should be free and easy.
What my local IRS did is sensible default. Employment income are submitted electronically to my IRS from most employers. Deductions and reliefs are automatically factored in if it relates to other government services (e.g. reliefs for child).
What I love most is for information that they don't have information on, such as deductible expenses for rental income, they suggest a default of 15% expenses where we don't have to provide any proof or documentation. It is a 15% deduction over the rental income that's just given to you. Of course, we can challenge it if we feel we should have higher deductions, providing them with the necessary documents.
Here in the UK, the tax year runs from April to April. Your employer reports exactly your taxable earnings to the government every month. You can log in online and see exactly what you're taxed on. You do not need to fill out a self-assessment at all - it's all done automatically, except for under certain circumstances which don't affect most of the population, but roughly:
* You have earnings over £1000 a year from outside of your normal employment (e.g. from interest on savings, selling things on eBay, whatever). * You are earning above £50,000 per year but want to continue claiming child benefit (which phases out between £50,000 and £60,000, so some needs to be repaid). * You earn over £100,000.
First Intuit lobbies to prevent free tax returns by claiming that can provide their own (very sketchy) free service for that. Then they have the gall to opt out that very program which they used to prevent free tax returns in the first place.
I wish they would just go away.
It's not hard to collect income data automatically. Here in Singapore (as in many other countries) I get a message reminding me to check my tax data before the filing date. I just login and click "Submit". If I forget to do this, I may miss some deductions, but it goes through anyway.
Tax filing can be made simple enough that a layperson can do it without employing an accountant.
Dang - it might be nice to include this in the "Related" comment pinned to the top, it's just the "level up in the filesystem" above the courtlistener link you already have in it.
In the way there is a revolving door with the SEC, is there a revolving door at the FTC?
> Public Citizen found that just over 75 percent of top FTC officials (31 out of 41) over the past two decades have either left the agency to serve corporate interests confronting FTC issues, joined the agency after serving corporate interests on these issues, or both.
https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-...
If there's something you can't figure out, is risky, or a one-off, hire someone to do your taxes.
Then use that as a template for subsequent years to do it yourself.
Also, use the federal free fillable forms to e-file. They might be available for your state, as well.
1 https://twitter.com/frantzfries/status/1505942638704345094?s...
Intuit: OK.
Intuits exec to its employees: Make this free system, but hide it from the public. Provide links that are broken, make sure it doesn't show up on search indexes.
Scott Cook and all those involved should have all of their assets seized. About as slimy as you can get as a person. Made billions off of scamming United States citizens.
Lobbyists have way too much power.
Here’s Milton Friedman on the reason the tax code is intentionally complicated: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8
I wrote to both of the representatives in my state, let's see what I hear back.
Turbotax is the dominant player in an industry created by the government. Tax prep fees are just another tax.
IRS provides docs: https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/tax-year-2021-modernize...
but hides them from the public.
And they try to trick you at every step to "upgrade" to the paid version...
The outside was NOT DEDUCTIBLE.
The inner, smaller ring was DEDUCTIBLE.
The bullseye was DEDUCTIBLE UNTIL AUDIT.
So when will Intuit be returning all of the bait-and-switch money?
Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409523 - Feb 2022 (122 comments)
Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against It (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185484 - Feb 2022 (18 comments)
Killing TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330584 - March 2021 (662 comments)
Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138446 - Feb 2021 (219 comments)
TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102695 - Feb 2021 (306 comments)
TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26060414 - Feb 2021 (199 comments)
FTC Is Investigating Intuit over TurboTax Practices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24409093 - Sept 2020 (194 comments)
IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923220 - Dec 2019 (448 comments)
IRS Tried to Hide Emails That Show Tax Industry Influence over Free File Program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393758 - Oct 2019 (188 comments)
TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411 - Oct 2019 (447 comments)
TurboTax to charge more lower-income customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461169 - July 2019 (81 comments)
Congress Scraps Provision to Restrict IRS from Competing with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119916 - June 2019 (18 comments)
TurboTax Uses a “Military Discount” to Trick Troops into Paying to File Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19994118 - May 2019 (42 comments)
Listen to TurboTax Lie to Get Out of Refunding Overcharged Customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870242 - May 2019 (44 comments)
TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19810981 - May 2019 (143 comments)
TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126 - April 2019 (262 comments)
TurboTax Uses Dark Patterns to Trick You into Paying to File Your Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718284 - April 2019 (274 comments)
Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725 - April 2019 (696 comments)
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673 - March 2019 (253 comments)
H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against Free and Simple Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18956883 - Jan 2019 (190 comments)
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751383 - Aug 2018 (424 comments)
Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16844458 - April 2018 (23 comments)
H&R Block and Intuit Lobbying Against Simpler Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16841449 - April 2018 (232 comments)
H&R Block and Intuit Are Lobbying Against Making Tax Filling Free and Easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922482 - March 2017 (234 comments)
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150 - March 2017 (439 comments)
TurboTax Takes Aim at Smaller Rival in Fight for Filers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11150694 - Feb 2016 (87 comments)
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381437 - April 2015 (150 comments)
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380232 - April 2015 (124 comments)
Filing taxes: It shouldn't be so hard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488084 - April 2013 (56 comments)
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203 - March 2013 (330 comments)
It's nuts. Intuit isn't worth that much.
If you're an eg. independent contractor, you have to fill out a full report (income, expenses, income tax already prepaid, benefits paid, etc.), but you also do it on a governments website and sign it using a digital certificate (that is free for citizens).
No 3rd party software, no paying anything (unless you have an accountant do that for you, but it's relatively simple to do it by yourself), and the most time-consuming task is calculating all the yearly earnings and expenses.
Not in a free society. An ineffective government is a conspicuous drain.
I like paying taxes to the State because that money goes to military and entitlements, and keeping the lights on. I do not agree with every military action, or every entitlement, but it's not my place to decide what direction the country goes in, it is my place to push.
I wonder how many orphanages Intuit runs, how much welfare they pay, where the bases they operate are, how many men they've put on the moon, to have the gall to demand taxes. That is an literally an act of sedition, literally a racket.