7 ms·

Just curious, is there any value to making a clone of H&R Block / Intuit and making it open source (with also hosted somewhere)? It probably takes only a weeken

by neya 8y ago

Just curious, is there any value to making a clone of H&R Block / Intuit and making it open source (with also hosted somewhere)? It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this and I'll be happy to do it if there is significant interest from my fellow HNers. Besides, fuck Intuit, never been a fan of them for the exact reasons mentioned in the article.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Ideally, you support potential candidates and existing representatives who will push public policy to enable the IRS (with help from the US Digital Service and 18F) to provide for tax filing directly to US taxpayers. This is the Path To Assured Success (public policy enabling and funding the IRS to directly support tax filing). I can't imagine anyone having the will and resources to write their own tax prep system and then providing ongoing support for it though. Gonna take deep pockets and someone who really hates the professional tax prep market. It isn't a weekend project. This is a long, thankless grind. https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-warren-leads-colleagues-in-reintroducing-legislation-to-simplify-and-decrease-the-costs-of-tax-preparation-and-filing https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senato... (Senator Warren Leads Colleagues in Reintroducing Legislation to Simplify and Decrease the Costs of Tax Preparation and Filing) These are the people you help get the bill passed: > United States Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) along with Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) today reintroduced the Tax Filing Simplification Act to ease the tax filing process for millions of American taxpayers and reduce their costs. Last tax season, American taxpayers spent an average of 11 hours and around $200 preparing their tax returns -- a cost equal to almost 10 percent of the average federal tax refund. Representative Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) is reintroducing a House companion along with Representatives Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), Katie Hill (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Please call your representative and ask them to support this legislation. That is their job; to support the legislation you want enacted. It will take you at most ~15 minutes, and every call is tallied by congressional assistants. https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/ https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/
rhizome 8y ago
I imagine that establishing the technical relationship with the IRS is one of the bigger challenges, particularly for open source. Gotta love the "HN Weekender" moxie, though!
- neya 8y ago
  Do I really need to deal with IRS? I know several softwares hand you over a filled out form that you submit online to IRS. Won't that be good enough for a alpha or v0.1?
  - spiznnx 8y ago
    >that you submit online to IRS Do you have pointers on how you do this? I cannot find any self e-file on the IRS website. I thought it was either use eFile enabled software, or print and mail.
    - huehehue 8y ago
      I believe you can only file certain forms, and even that varies based on whether you're filing for other people, whether you're self-employed, whether you make over $10M, etc. (https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/e-file-for-business-and-self-employed-taxpayers https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/e-file-for-business-and...) If you want to write e-file-enabled software for others I think you need to become an Authorized e-file Provider (https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/become-an-authorized-e-file-provider https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/become-an-authorized-e-...)
nostromo 8y ago
> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this The tax code is very complex, and nobody could replicate these systems in a weekend. And even if you did, it would be out of date in a year.
- neya 8y ago
  Can you give me a specific example of something that you think would be very complex? Just to make sure I'm not missing out on something obvious.
  - cdolan 8y ago
    What country are you in that you think tax software can be written in a weekend? Sorry if the tone of that sounds rude, I don’t know how to better word it, but from a US perspective, our taxes are way too broken for a 48-hour sprint to solve
  - tstrimple 8y ago
    Here's the spec. It's only 289 pages and changes almost every year. Good luck! https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p17.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p17.pdf
    - neya 8y ago
      Thanks, so I did over-estimate my ability here. Where I live, taxation works differently, so I never assumed it would be this complex.
      - OrgNet 8y ago
        Covering most of the population could possibly still be very easy
      - jefftk 8y ago
        For what it's worth it's even worse than this, since I count 629 references to other IRS publications in that guide.
_jal 8y ago
Solving this problem is much, much deeper than writing software. For absolute starters, think about what happens when someone gets audited after using your software. ( For the purposes of this exercise it doesn't matter at all "who's right".) Look in to laws related to offering tax advice, and then call a lawyer. Actually, call several...
TimTheTinker 8y ago
> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this Seriously? I know there are "10x" developers out there (I actually have worked alongside one extensively) but the PDF export of all the forms and IRS eFile integration alone seems like it would take a little longer than a weekend, even for an extremely prolific developer.
- gdulli 8y ago
  In my opinion what makes a 10x developer are things that are (ironically) not quantitative. It's the wisdom and experience to keep yourself from going down the wrong track. Not progressing down the same track faster or better. For example, the humility, if nothing else, that would prevent you from taking seriously an instinct that you could replicate a huge business so casually. That's more valuable than any technical skill.
  - TimTheTinker 8y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but in my experience it's great to have both kinds of people on a team -- those who are extremely prolific in their output and those who focus on wisdom, product decisions, and the wider context. Seriously, working alongside a true "10x" developer is simultaneously humbling and astounding. The sheer quantity of quality output is beyond anything I ever thought possible (speaking as a senior developer myself).
- neya 8y ago
  Thanks for the advice, I didn't think it would be this complex when I posted the comment. Because, where I live, it's really a breeze to file taxes online. So, I had my mind setup ("How hard could this be?") until I saw another commenter's linked PDF that had about 200+ pages of spec.
  - dmoy 8y ago
    > 200 Heh you are off by an order of magnitude there. The linked pdf is only pub 17. There are numerous other publications you'd need to include to actually implement fully correct software for this. For one relatively trivial example, if we see page 255 of pub 17, it describes the tax computation work sheet. But wait, there's more! If you have dividends or capital gains, you need a different worksheet, which is in a different publication, Mario.
sithlord 8y ago
good luck getting even close to all the crosschecks written that would make it a valid filing in a weekend. You might could create the site where you can fill out forms online, but that would be no different than filling them out by hand.
chadash 8y ago
> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this and I'll be happy to do it if there is significant interest from my fellow HNers. I think you are underestimating by a long shot. Let's say that you forgo any UI and just make a command line tool that only developers use. And let's assume that you don't have tests, don't have any bugs, no any significant things that trip you up. To get something useful, you would need to: 1) Get a basic tool that handles the federal tax calculations for standard W2 income for single people and people filing as married couples 2) Handle common deductions and credits that are applicable without itemizing, such as child tax credits, Healthcare Savings account contributions, IRA contributions, self-employment deductions, alimony payments, educational costs for certain people, business expenses. Keep in mind that each of these has its own rules. 3) Handle multiple forms of income beyond W2, such as capital gains from investments (which are treated differently for people with different incomes and for short vs long term gains), income from dividends, bank accounts, gambling, etc. 4) OK, that's the easy stuff. Now, implement rules for handling state taxes. 50 different states + DC with 50+1 different sets of rules [0]. 5) OK, so now, maybe you have something basic working, but if you want to be even a somewhat complete solution, you need to handle cases where people itemize instead of taking the standard deduction. And everything that can be itemized has it's own set of rules. 6) To be useful for anyone except yourself, you'll need documentation, because a lot of these things need some explanation unless you are a tax expert. Oh, and here's the big thing. The rules can change every year. And they can change in every state and you need to keep it up-to-date. Having out-of-date tax software is worse than having no software at all. So this is definitely more than a weekend project, even if you only want to handle a portion of the above. This is why so many people use Turbotax [1]. [0] And because you can deduct a portion of your state taxes from your federal if you itemize, you really can't offer JUST federal and call yourself a complete product. [1] And even Turbotax doesn't do a great job if you are itemizing or have complicated business expenses. For example, say you work for yourself at a home office. Can you deduct your office? What if you have someone clean your house weekly and they also do your office? Your cellphone bill? What percentage of their work can you deduct? What if you didn't keep close track of some expenses or paid them in cash? What if you made a donation to your local church and got your business listed in their calendar... can that be deducted as a marketing expense? A lot of these things are very hard to automate and a good accountant will help you make a judgement call. Even if you are completely honest, there are some things that aren't black and white. Like how do you value items that you donated to a local thrift shop? Even if your goods were worth X, an accountant may not want to put the full amount down if it increases your risk of being audited.
broknbottle 8y ago
http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/
- adsharma1 8y ago
  This thing is: * Written in C * Hosted on SourceForge (why?) * Doesn't inspire confidence If you're looking for a hackable version that I wrote a few years ago in python: https://github.com/adsharma/tax https://github.com/adsharma/tax It's not that hard to come up with a basic version that handles the single w-2 with no deductions case.
  - adsharma1 8y ago
    Meant to add a link to code that wasn't easy to find: https://sourceforge.net/p/opentaxsolver/SrcCodeRepo/HEAD/tree/trunk/OTS_2018/src/taxsolve_CA_540_2018.c https://sourceforge.net/p/opentaxsolver/SrcCodeRepo/HEAD/tre...
Thrymr 8y ago
> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this and I'll be happy to do it if there is significant interest from my fellow HNers. Yes, please do this. I look forward to your Show HN post on Monday! (I can't even get my taxes calculated right the first time in a weekend...)
the_watcher 8y ago
Credit Karma already offers a truly free and competitive product.
- thedrake 8y ago
  it looks like CreditKarma registered the tax version Tax Karma https://taxkarma.com https://taxkarma.com (the WHOIS https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search/whois/taxkarma.com?searchTerm=taxkarma https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search/whois/taxkarma...)
huehehue 8y ago
I'm very interested in building an MVP that completes federal w/ appropriate schedules. Crowdsourcing state-level rules would be possible but you need some really passionate developers willing to do mountains of exceptionally boring work (imo) for free. Best to initially skip e-file and export PDFs users can cross-check and mail out on their own. The only thing working in your favor is that you're building against a fixed spec. Unfortunately the specification is deliberately confusing and you'll probably never be able to scrape or parse those rulesets programmatically.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by neya 8y ago

toomuchtodo 8y ago

Ideally, you support potential candidates and existing representatives who will push public policy to enable the IRS (with help from the US Digital Service and 18F) to provide for tax filing directly to US taxpayers. This is the Path To Assured Success (public policy enabling and funding the IRS to directly support tax filing). I can't imagine anyone having the will and resources to write their own tax prep system and then providing ongoing support for it though. Gonna take deep pockets and someone who really hates the professional tax prep market. It isn't a weekend project. This is a long, thankless grind. https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-warren-leads-colleagues-in-reintroducing-legislation-to-simplify-and-decrease-the-costs-of-tax-preparation-and-filing https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senato... (Senator Warren Leads Colleagues in Reintroducing Legislation to Simplify and Decrease the Costs of Tax Preparation and Filing) These are the people you help get the bill passed: > United States Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) along with Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) today reintroduced the Tax Filing Simplification Act to ease the tax filing process for millions of American taxpayers and reduce their costs. Last tax season, American taxpayers spent an average of 11 hours and around $200 preparing their tax returns -- a cost equal to almost 10 percent of the average federal tax refund. Representative Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) is reintroducing a House companion along with Representatives Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), Katie Hill (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Please call your representative and ask them to support this legislation. That is their job; to support the legislation you want enacted. It will take you at most ~15 minutes, and every call is tallied by congressional assistants. https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/ https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/

rhizome 8y ago

I imagine that establishing the technical relationship with the IRS is one of the bigger challenges, particularly for open source. Gotta love the "HN Weekender" moxie, though!

neya 8y ago
Do I really need to deal with IRS? I know several softwares hand you over a filled out form that you submit online to IRS. Won't that be good enough for a alpha or v0.1?
- spiznnx 8y ago
  >that you submit online to IRS Do you have pointers on how you do this? I cannot find any self e-file on the IRS website. I thought it was either use eFile enabled software, or print and mail.
  - huehehue 8y ago
    I believe you can only file certain forms, and even that varies based on whether you're filing for other people, whether you're self-employed, whether you make over $10M, etc. (https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/e-file-for-business-and-self-employed-taxpayers https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/e-file-for-business-and...) If you want to write e-file-enabled software for others I think you need to become an Authorized e-file Provider (https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/become-an-authorized-e-file-provider https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/become-an-authorized-e-...)

nostromo 8y ago

> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this The tax code is very complex, and nobody could replicate these systems in a weekend. And even if you did, it would be out of date in a year.

neya 8y ago
Can you give me a specific example of something that you think would be very complex? Just to make sure I'm not missing out on something obvious.
- cdolan 8y ago
  What country are you in that you think tax software can be written in a weekend? Sorry if the tone of that sounds rude, I don’t know how to better word it, but from a US perspective, our taxes are way too broken for a 48-hour sprint to solve
- tstrimple 8y ago
  Here's the spec. It's only 289 pages and changes almost every year. Good luck! https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p17.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p17.pdf
  - neya 8y ago
    Thanks, so I did over-estimate my ability here. Where I live, taxation works differently, so I never assumed it would be this complex.
    - OrgNet 8y ago
      Covering most of the population could possibly still be very easy
    - jefftk 8y ago
      For what it's worth it's even worse than this, since I count 629 references to other IRS publications in that guide.

_jal 8y ago

Solving this problem is much, much deeper than writing software. For absolute starters, think about what happens when someone gets audited after using your software. ( For the purposes of this exercise it doesn't matter at all "who's right".) Look in to laws related to offering tax advice, and then call a lawyer. Actually, call several...

TimTheTinker 8y ago

> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this Seriously? I know there are "10x" developers out there (I actually have worked alongside one extensively) but the PDF export of all the forms and IRS eFile integration alone seems like it would take a little longer than a weekend, even for an extremely prolific developer.

gdulli 8y ago
In my opinion what makes a 10x developer are things that are (ironically) not quantitative. It's the wisdom and experience to keep yourself from going down the wrong track. Not progressing down the same track faster or better. For example, the humility, if nothing else, that would prevent you from taking seriously an instinct that you could replicate a huge business so casually. That's more valuable than any technical skill.
- TimTheTinker 8y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but in my experience it's great to have both kinds of people on a team -- those who are extremely prolific in their output and those who focus on wisdom, product decisions, and the wider context. Seriously, working alongside a true "10x" developer is simultaneously humbling and astounding. The sheer quantity of quality output is beyond anything I ever thought possible (speaking as a senior developer myself).
neya 8y ago
Thanks for the advice, I didn't think it would be this complex when I posted the comment. Because, where I live, it's really a breeze to file taxes online. So, I had my mind setup ("How hard could this be?") until I saw another commenter's linked PDF that had about 200+ pages of spec.
- dmoy 8y ago
  > 200 Heh you are off by an order of magnitude there. The linked pdf is only pub 17. There are numerous other publications you'd need to include to actually implement fully correct software for this. For one relatively trivial example, if we see page 255 of pub 17, it describes the tax computation work sheet. But wait, there's more! If you have dividends or capital gains, you need a different worksheet, which is in a different publication, Mario.

sithlord 8y ago

good luck getting even close to all the crosschecks written that would make it a valid filing in a weekend. You might could create the site where you can fill out forms online, but that would be no different than filling them out by hand.

chadash 8y ago

> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this and I'll be happy to do it if there is significant interest from my fellow HNers. I think you are underestimating by a long shot. Let's say that you forgo any UI and just make a command line tool that only developers use. And let's assume that you don't have tests, don't have any bugs, no any significant things that trip you up. To get something useful, you would need to: 1) Get a basic tool that handles the federal tax calculations for standard W2 income for single people and people filing as married couples 2) Handle common deductions and credits that are applicable without itemizing, such as child tax credits, Healthcare Savings account contributions, IRA contributions, self-employment deductions, alimony payments, educational costs for certain people, business expenses. Keep in mind that each of these has its own rules. 3) Handle multiple forms of income beyond W2, such as capital gains from investments (which are treated differently for people with different incomes and for short vs long term gains), income from dividends, bank accounts, gambling, etc. 4) OK, that's the easy stuff. Now, implement rules for handling state taxes. 50 different states + DC with 50+1 different sets of rules [0]. 5) OK, so now, maybe you have something basic working, but if you want to be even a somewhat complete solution, you need to handle cases where people itemize instead of taking the standard deduction. And everything that can be itemized has it's own set of rules. 6) To be useful for anyone except yourself, you'll need documentation, because a lot of these things need some explanation unless you are a tax expert. Oh, and here's the big thing. The rules can change every year. And they can change in every state and you need to keep it up-to-date. Having out-of-date tax software is worse than having no software at all. So this is definitely more than a weekend project, even if you only want to handle a portion of the above. This is why so many people use Turbotax [1]. [0] And because you can deduct a portion of your state taxes from your federal if you itemize, you really can't offer JUST federal and call yourself a complete product. [1] And even Turbotax doesn't do a great job if you are itemizing or have complicated business expenses. For example, say you work for yourself at a home office. Can you deduct your office? What if you have someone clean your house weekly and they also do your office? Your cellphone bill? What percentage of their work can you deduct? What if you didn't keep close track of some expenses or paid them in cash? What if you made a donation to your local church and got your business listed in their calendar... can that be deducted as a marketing expense? A lot of these things are very hard to automate and a good accountant will help you make a judgement call. Even if you are completely honest, there are some things that aren't black and white. Like how do you value items that you donated to a local thrift shop? Even if your goods were worth X, an accountant may not want to put the full amount down if it increases your risk of being audited.

broknbottle 8y ago

http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

adsharma1 8y ago
This thing is: * Written in C * Hosted on SourceForge (why?) * Doesn't inspire confidence If you're looking for a hackable version that I wrote a few years ago in python: https://github.com/adsharma/tax https://github.com/adsharma/tax It's not that hard to come up with a basic version that handles the single w-2 with no deductions case.
- adsharma1 8y ago
  Meant to add a link to code that wasn't easy to find: https://sourceforge.net/p/opentaxsolver/SrcCodeRepo/HEAD/tree/trunk/OTS_2018/src/taxsolve_CA_540_2018.c https://sourceforge.net/p/opentaxsolver/SrcCodeRepo/HEAD/tre...

Thrymr 8y ago

> It probably takes only a weekend for me to do this and I'll be happy to do it if there is significant interest from my fellow HNers. Yes, please do this. I look forward to your Show HN post on Monday! (I can't even get my taxes calculated right the first time in a weekend...)

the_watcher 8y ago

Credit Karma already offers a truly free and competitive product.

thedrake 8y ago
it looks like CreditKarma registered the tax version Tax Karma https://taxkarma.com https://taxkarma.com (the WHOIS https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search/whois/taxkarma.com?searchTerm=taxkarma https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search/whois/taxkarma...)

huehehue 8y ago

I'm very interested in building an MVP that completes federal w/ appropriate schedules. Crowdsourcing state-level rules would be possible but you need some really passionate developers willing to do mountains of exceptionally boring work (imo) for free. Best to initially skip e-file and export PDFs users can cross-check and mail out on their own. The only thing working in your favor is that you're building against a fixed spec. Unfortunately the specification is deliberately confusing and you'll probably never be able to scrape or parse those rulesets programmatically.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]