4 ms·
It depends. There’s 1 federal return (albeit with many different forms) and 50 states (each with their own system). TurboTax, H&R Block, and CreditKarma keep tr
by colejohnson66 7y ago
It depends. There’s 1 federal return (albeit with many different forms) and 50 states (each with their own system). TurboTax, H&R Block, and CreditKarma keep track of all the changes for you.
And if you make a mistake in your software and the user gets audited, you can bet you’ll be sued by the user eventually.
- selectodude 7y agoAnd all of the documents that you need are free online. I can’t imagine there’s much more to it than a time investment.
- manquer 7y agoIt is recurring investment though, every year tax codes keep changing, you need to keep it all updated . That’s an enormous cost and relatively unique to this kind of application.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI suppose the solution is to just keep donating to and enabling candidates running for federal office who support providing the IRS with the legislation and technology support to do their job (streamline tax processing) and break Intuit’s pseudo monopoly. On the plus side, it’s a lot harder to buy someone with morals than a VC backed startup.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bmm6o 7y agoI don't know about "enormous cost"... if we're assuming that you can handle taxes this year, the changes to support next year have to be comparatively minor. It's definitely true that you need to keep current or the value of your service crashes to zero. But nobody is arguing that governments shouldn't update their tax codes.
- nkozyra 7y agoMinor point, but not all fifty states collect income tax.
- astura 7y agoAnd some non-state entities have income tax (DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.)
- throwaway2048 7y agoI doubt all this costs 7 billion dollars