It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!
However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.)
The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant.
https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office...
There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.
The fact that TurboTax is cheaper than a local CPA does not change the fact that Intuit actively lobbies to prevent free tax filing.
In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or “your taxes are complex, please work with a tax specialist”. Also in a sane world this would be free and the government would be incentivized to simplify the tax code so that as many people as possible were in one of the first buckets. In our world the government is aggressively lobbied for complex tax codes and prevention of free tax filing.
> A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
Define “regular”. Per TurboTax, only 37% of people qualify for free filing.
I have never tried to go through the TurboTax free file route but based on my experience with the paid service, I imagine they aggressively upsell free filers with the exact same scare tactics you associate with CPAs.
Which is free for nearly everyone, but is only marginally better than paper filing your own taxes.
Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial.
I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.
As soon as the words “passthrough LLC” (or “farm” or “S-corp” or “itemize”) are on the table, it’s usually worth it to pay $1,000 for a professional, assuming your time is worth something.
You might run into similar problems.
