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How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)
- argd678 8y agoI could have sworn there was an effort to release the tax laws codified in Python libraries by the IRS or another official government agency. I wonder now if it was a dream, I can’t seem to find the article now.
- tastyfreeze 8y agoI have never looked into why the US hasn't moved towards government prepared taxes like many other countries. I just want to say fuck Intuit! Wasting thousands of hours of time for corporate profit. Absolutely disgusting.
- maxxxxx 8y agoThere are also anti-tax activists who want to make tax filing as onerous as possible so people hate taxes.
- philipov 8y agoI would like to popularize a term for this kind of behavior: Political Terrorism.
- jlawson 8y agoAll terrorism is political. Also, I tire of the constant politically motivated attempts to inflate the usage of words to try to attach awful connotations to relatively innocuous things. Please stop.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWhat other term would you use for holding the country hostage through flagarant, unapologetic cronyism and regulatory capture? Edit: None of these replies really captures of the gravity of the situation IMHO.
- otterley 8y agoCorruption.
- gumby 8y agoabuse
- int_19h 8y agoPlutocratic oligarchy.
- tedunangst 8y agoEconomic water boarding, obviously.
- lallysingh 8y agoGovernment
- ada1981 8y ago#MAGA!
- derefr 8y agoYou'd think, if they were powerful enough to affect tax law, they'd lobby for getting taxes included in prices, the way they are in most of Europe. That'd make a lot of people hate taxes—especially the people who have to constantly re-tag merchandise.
- TomMarius 8y agoI'm European. What this does is that it hides the tax and people complain about price increases when the tax increases. Every single EU libertarian would prefer the US way. BTW what the heck are you doing with your tax rates that you'd have to constantly re-tag? That's completely a non-problem over here.
- freehunter 8y agoYeah if merchandise is sitting on a retail shelf long enough that the tax changes multiple times before it's sold, you need to rethink your stocking choices.
- enraged_camel 8y agoI don’t see why we can’t have both. Have one price that is the grand total, and in a smaller font, display how much of that grand total is the tax. That way people know how much the thing will cost upfront, and also know the tax amount.
- TomMarius 8y agoIn the USA, I have no idea. In the EU, politicians don't want that because that'd surely lead to a revolution, especially in the east.
- joppy 8y agoSales tax in the USA differs across states, and even across counties. So it could change fairly regularly.
- 8y ago
- failrate 8y agoGoddamn Grover Norquist.
- sbuttgereit 8y agoI'm largely in the anti-tax camp and I don't want that. Perhaps I'm just not in that martyrdom mindset enough to want such a thing... but even so it would be more of a gimmick than an argument. I don't like these kinds of stupid made up controversies when they come from people and groups I oppose and like them even less from my side of whatever political point is at stake. As others have mentioned, I do think there should be transparency. So, for example, the employer portions of payroll taxes (in the U.S.) is not usually visible to the employee on who's behalf it is paid; an employee doesn't see the full weight of taxes that ultimately derives from their labor... that to me is hiding, in a fashion, what my real gross pay is and what amount of my earnings is being taken.
- rayiner 8y ago> I'm largely in the anti-tax camp and I don't want that. I’m in the pro tax camp and I kind of like it. I enjoy paying my taxes, but I don’t think the government should take half of peoples’ paychecks without people having to think consciously about it every year.
- Hello71 8y agoWho exactly pays an average income tax rate of 50% in the United States? You'd have to be making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, at which point you don't get it as a check, you get it as a wire transfer from your investment bank, because with the exception of certain athletes, nobody makes that much money in salary.
- sbuttgereit 8y agoIf you're only looking at federal income taxes, sure. But now add in state income taxes, local taxes, property taxes, sales and use taxes, special fees and assessments, and other mandatory charges and that bar starts to move down the great chain of being rather rapidly. I assure you, I'm not making hundreds of millions of dollars and I'm pretty sure that I'm in that 50% range of dollars consumed by government takings per dollar earned.
- ApolloFortyNine 8y agoThat majority of people could fill out the 1040EZ in 10 minutes and call it done. There's no way for the government to know what your work expenses were, what you donated to charity, and so on and so forth through many of the deductions. If you don't want to maximize your return, you can be done in less than 15 minutes. Even making more than 100k, with stocks through multiple brokers, a 401k, interest from multiple accounts, a house, student loans, and probably a few others I forgot to mention, it took me an hour and a half to do my taxes and cost me under $20 on freetaxusa (whatever the price for the state taxes they charged was low enough where I didn't care to figure it out on my own). The tax code is one of those boogeymen items that everyone attacks, but in reality isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
- hawaiianbrah 8y agoOkay, sure. But wouldn’t it be great if for some portion of the population, they really don’t have to do a thing (because they think the government got it right)? Isn’t that better than everyone having to spend at least 10-15 minutes?
- ghostofmycat 8y agoHow much taxpayer money will be spent compiling taxes for all working adults in the U.S.? I'm guessing this is more work than it's worth. I don't think filling out a simple form once a year is that much to ask, even if it takes as long as a few hours to do. Edit: Not sure why I have negative points here, I was just saying that the process of implementing a system to actually get people their taxes and accommodating all the edge cases and ensuring everything is perfect enough that people literally don't have to do anything is probably not worth it compared to doing a check of submissions against the IRS own findings. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, I'm all ears and not super knowledgeable on the system (obviously) EDIT2: Also, not implying that it can't be done, just that it's not worth it to the IRS to do something like that. Seems like otherwise it already would have been done?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
- m463 8y agoYou know, there was one line in there that gave me pause: > Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in taxpayers paying more money. Self-serving Intuit aside, I can't help but think this would be true. It would just continue what was started with automatic withholding, where the general population is psychologically disconnected with how much they actually pay in taxes. They got used to not having their money and being able to beg some of it back makes them happy when they get some. Too bad people thought Ron Paul was crazy when he talked about abolishing personal income ta.
- Mikeb85 8y agoCanada here... The government pretty much already does your taxes here, and will 'readjust' your taxes if they feel you made a mistake. I've never understood why they still make you go through the process. Such a waste of time.
- upofadown 8y agoEven more ridiculous is that you can do any corrections online. So you can pretty much send the Canadian tax agency any gibberish and then fill in any claims or deductions online later after they have fixed it. You just can't initially fill in anything so as to protect the business of the commercial tax preparation agencies.
- JMTQp8lwXL 8y agoThe tax code is complex because of many special interest groups that get their carve-out. Even if you completely ended all lobbying from the tax preparation industry, how much simpler would taxes actually get? If you want a straight flat tax (or a progressive one), you'd need to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction, charitable deductions, all these things to refine the tax calculation to a very simple formula. And you bet those special interest groups would never let that happen, even if the tax preparation industry didn't lobby.
- philipov 8y agoDon't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We can and must improve things iteratively. Just because we can't fix everything doesn't mean we shouldn't fix anything.
- cyphar 8y agoThe issue is that the reason why governments have tax cuts for certain groups is because that's how they win votes. Tax codes are so complicated in almost every democratic country in the world specifically because such complicated tax codes serve a purpose. The difference between governments is who is getting the tax breaks. Progressive governments give tax breaks and stipends to ordinary workers, while conservative governments give it to corporations and the wealthy. In order to gain or stay in power you need to make sure your key supporters are looked after. This is as true in dictatorships as it is in democracies.
- jpfed 8y ago>The issue is that the reason why governments have tax cuts for certain groups is because that's how they win votes. Isn't that an oversimplification, though? Governments also use tax cuts to shape behavior.
- cyphar 8y agoI would argue that shaping behaviour is another aspect of looking after your key supporters. If you put taxes on speculative trading, such traders won't vote for you -- but people who are against speculative trading will. If you give speculative traders a tax cut, the inverse happens. It also obviously will shape behaviour, but if that was the only purpose then the government wouldn't be fulfilling their primary purpose: trying to stay in power as long as possible so they can achieve whatever they set out to do.
- gamerDude 8y agoDoes anyone know the true cost of lobbying? Salaries + whatever other expenses are involved. It would be interesting to see a kickstarter style company for hiring lobbyists for more public interest causes.
- Kye 8y agoThese exist. They're called nonprofit organizations.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWould they matter? If representatives ignore the good of their citizens (in preference of lobbyists providing campaign contributions), you might have to find alternative methods to bring about positive change.
- DogOnTheWeb 8y agoMy partner runs an advocacy non-profit and they definitely influence policy. Lobbying isn't just greasing palms. Most of the work is showing up at public hearings, meeting regularly with politicians, and organizing people to support your position.
- rcpt 8y agoThere's a strong argument that lobbying is more of a "legislative subsidy" than it is vote buying or persuasion. The idea is that most of the information governments need to craft policy is only provided by lobbyists and that government staffers are typically less informed about a given field than expert lobbyists. Congressional staffers don't make a ton of money and typically aren't PhDs. One way to reduce the impact of lobbying would be to offer very high salaries to staffers so that we could attract world experts to our side of the table. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/lobbying-as-legislative-subsidy/AE4B5D8AB9C2487BB78C2A51BB53E03F https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
- deleted 8y ago
- lnyng 8y agoIs distributing free tax filing software illegal? i.e. some web app similar to Intuit that help you fill forms but not filing for you. For general public that do not have many special deduction items I think this would not be very hard to do. For special deductions, I guess the app can just point the user to possible forms they should look at.
- everythingswan 8y agoYou can already file for free if you make under $66k: https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f... Edit: I don't think I addressed your question, sorry!I agree that a simple tool could be a great help if it doesn't already exist!
- u801e 8y agoYou can even do it if you make more than that with the free fillable forms option.
- objektif 8y agoTechnically may be easy but tax returns have very sensitive private data. Need to do a lot of work to convince people. Its is still possible though.
- thesausageking 8y agoNot at all. For example: https://www.creditkarma.com/tax https://www.creditkarma.com/tax
- kazinator 8y agoThis year for my taxes I used a little DSL I hacked up in TXR Lisp, where I you can declare each line on a tax form, along with its description and its value (or else how it is calculated from other lines). A bit like cells in a spreadsheet: reactive programming, basically. There is a function to produces a report of all the lines and their values, grouped by form, sorted by line. If I change a value, as in (set (line 42) 123.32), then re-run the report, it will indicate all the lines that have changed, showing the old and new value side by side. I have some nice things in there, like handling groups of conditional lines that vary by tax bracket and such. All of the data is in a nice text file that is just (load ...)-ed, together with the module that provides the logic, and that file is checked into git. If the government did these calculations, I'd still want the option to do it myself; I wouldn't want to be forced into dealing with entering numbers into some web crap.
- nabeards 8y agoThis sounds incredibly useful! Care to share? I could see building off of this to find optimal deduction paths, zeroing out liabilities, etc.
- curiousgal 8y ago> I'd still want the option to do it myself "Taxpayers would have three options when they receive a pre-filled return: accept it as is; make adjustments, say to filing status or income; or reject it and file a return by other means."
- musicale 8y agoWhat's puzzling is that the IRS seems to calculate your taxes anyway; if there's a disparity, then they send you a correction a few weeks later. Why can't they do this beforehand so you have the option of just clicking "OK" and being done with it?
- rcfox 8y agoCanada more-or-less has this.
- craftyguy 8y agoAnd some European countries (Finland I believe, for example).
- rayiner 8y agoMany other European countries do things like require you to register with the government within a week whenever you move to a new place. They track much more information about you.
- craftyguy 8y agoEven in the US you eventually need to basically 'register with the government' (usually in the form of getting your ID/drivers license updated, and notifying USPS of mail service change).
- rayiner 8y agoYou only need to update your drivers license when you change states, not when you change residences. (And if you don’t drive you don’t need to do that either.) And you don’t neee to notify USPS of your mailing address.
- cgriswald 8y agoIn every state, you must notify the DMV of a change in residence, typically within 30 days.
- Simulacra 8y agoAny business that has a captive or semi-captive market is going to do all is can to dissuade others from participating in the market. It's the basis for most licensure laws.
- dang 8y agoBig discussion from two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150 And back in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203
- wmeredith 8y agoI’ll bookmark this page so I can link to it in 2021 when we’re complaining about the same thing again.
- faitswulff 8y agoThis comes up on HN basically every year. I'll put a different spin on it than "big bad company ruins America": America was broken before Intuit got to it. There will always be bad actors in society. Ideally government officials have the temperament, wisdom, and intelligence to act in the public's behalf. Unfortunately, that seems to be largely not the case in the US.
- rongenre 8y agoAnd that's why I do my taxes using Credit Karma.
- charlescearl 8y agoI was tempted to but a bit worried that tax return information would be shared with their partners.
- rb808 8y agoI'm pretty sure the real reason its complicated is because politicians are all trying to get deductions or special rules for their favorite special case. I thin its simplistic to blame tax preparers. Actually simplifying tax is one good thing Trump has done. Hopefully will continue.
- zanderz 8y agoI already hated TurboTax before that story broke because of the horrendous DRM that blocks legitimate use. I had kept DVDs for each of several years I filed, then once when I went back to re-install a previous year to open the file, it wouldn't work. I even found the amazon sales email from that year and TurboTax support said there was still no way to use it, despite having original media and a sales reciept! NEVER AGAIN. I use FreeTaxUSA now.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago> horrendous DRM In case anyone thinks this description is excessively dramatic, you should know that the DRM scheme in question works by writing its activation key to a particular sector of your boot drive that probably didn't contain anything important.
- p1mrx 8y agoAt least they're being honest about it. It's not TurboTax's fault if lobbying is legal and cost-effective. The only way they'll stop is if we make that kind of lobbying illegal, and good luck with that.
- branchless 8y agocouldn't we lobby for it? /s this is not okay, it's not okay to take money from normal people "because you can and if you didn't someone else would do it".
- _robbywashere 8y agoIt 100 percent is their fault. They are manipulating elected members of government intended to respresent the PEOPLES best interest. This is where capitalism fails
- mrunkel 8y agoWouldn’t the fault lie with the representatives and the people that keep re-electing them?
- akanet 8y agoUh, I mean, partly? It's a pretty strange argument to say that no one can be culpable of a bad thing so long as that thing is currently legal.
- chronolitus 8y agoImagine that murder was not illegal. Imagine that instead of making it illegal, we complained to murderers that what they are doing is bad and they ought not to. Then, we'd wonder why the crime rate isn't going doing. The argument isn't about assigning blame. It's about criticizing society for not solving the problem. Complaining about lobbyists doing bad things is not an effective solution. Doing so shifts the dialog away from law implementation (solution-oriented and practical) towards what is "right" and "wrong" (vague, subjective, and doesn't lead to improvement).
- Zarath 8y agoAt least having to file your own taxes maintains some pretense of financial privacy.
- thewhitetulip 8y agoI'm glad that Indian tax system is great. They already do everything & if not, they have Excel document written formulas which you can download & enter amounts and it does calculation
- cmurf 8y agoIt isn't just Intuit, and it isn't just their $5 million in legal bribes. If it were simple to do income taxes, it would be tens of thousands of accounting industry jobs that would be cast aside. I suspect the lobbying money comes with that as part of the message. Leona Helmsley, as quoted by her housekeeper: "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." She believed that and I suspect we have no idea the extent of this corruption, and very well could also be why the system is the way that it is. Corruption and tax avoidance is a right for the privileged, secured as a product they can buy. If this is all easy peasy and automated, how do you do clever obfuscation so you're avoiding taxes?
- TimJRobinson 8y agoIs there a non profit out there lobbying and working to make tax filing free and simple? I'd be happy to donate to them. We the people need to build more nonprofits to fight back against corporate greed.