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Justice Department is scrutinizing takeover of Credit Karma by Intuit
- dwighttk 6y agoDang it where will I go for actually free tax prep next year? CreditKarma has worked well for me the past two years. I have W2 and 1099s and K1s and they never asked me to upgrade to handle additional forms. I think I used tax act before that and always had to pay something To unlock those “weird” forms.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoReally amazing we haven’t created an open source tax software yet.
- the_arun 6y agoTax preparation & downloading forms to print is free. All these products charge customers for electronic filing.
- istjohn 6y agoAnd you can even electronically file with the IRS's Free Fillable Forms.
- tacomonstrous 6y agoThat's explicitly not an IRS product, though the IRS does a lot to obscure this fact.
- woobar 6y agoCK Tax doesn't charge you for Fed or State eFile.
- dwighttk 6y agoAs far as I can tell credit karma makes money by referring people to credit cards and other financial instruments. Their emails are easy enough to ignore.
- sdinsn 6y agoTax law is complex and change frequently, it would have to track 50 states + federal tax law.
- triceratops 6y agoNot at all. Open source software usually falls under 2 categories: 1. Passion projects by passionate individuals 2. Released by companies to burnish the rep, improve recruiting, or reduce maintenance costs by sharing them Laboriously writing tax rules for 50 states + federal the government can't possibly be any programmer's idea of fun. And the software has economic value so a company wouldn't write and open-source it, unless you can find a complement[1] to tax-prep that's even more profitable. 1. https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoYou forgot: 3) created by people to automate repetitive or expensive tasks for themselves. I’d be interested in supporting the project because I do my taxes every year and it’s a laborious process. No reason to capture 100% of the tax code. An 80/20 solution would be great.
- triceratops 6y agoDepends on what the 80% covers. Tax prep is something that you have to get right because of the legal consequences.
- HeavenFox 6y agohttps://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver/ although I never tried it myself
- chias 6y agoI've been a big fan of CreditKarma for a few years now, but they dropped the ball for me in a big way this year with some flagrantly incorrect behavior. I used https://www.freetaxusa.com/ https://www.freetaxusa.com/ and it was fantastic. The interface is a little bit clunky, but the value is there. They charge $7 for "deluxe support" which was easily the best $7 I can remember spending. --- Edit: re-reading this comment I see how it reads very much like I'm making the whole thing up and shilling for Free Tax USA, so some more detail on the CK incorrect behavior I experienced -- CK kept listing my K-1 partnership income as income from rental properties, which in turn caused the interface to be broken if I tried to click into the rental properties section where it valiantly tried to show me the zero rental properties that contributed to the number from my partnership income. I contacted support, and they told me they didn't support K1 partnership income. I asked what it meant to not support K1 partnership income if they had K1 partnership forms to fill out. They said they'd get back to me by email. They emailed me a few days later (after the filing deadline) with a generic link to partnership income documentation. By then I had already filed with Free Tax USA.
- owenversteeg 6y agoThanks, it's always good to hear about the alternative options. Yeah, HN instinctively goes after anything that sounds vaguely shill-y but don't worry, I trust that you haven't been here 7 years just to shill for freetaxusa :)
- dwighttk 6y agoHuh. Handled my K1 fine the past two years. (Thanks I’ll check freetaxusa out if CK goes under)
- skellera 6y agoI always say this when I can, Credit Karma’s support is terrible. I would never recommend them. Great if nothing goes wrong but you’ll regret it if you need them for something.
- dwighttk 6y agoGood to know. I wonder how their audit defense works if regular customer service sucks.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoFill out the forms yourself. Most people's tax situation doesn't change significantly from year to year. Just crib off the previous years return and alter the numbers where appropriate.
- dwighttk 6y agoMine tax situation is very shifty. Though my w2 job increasing to more than 50% of my income should settle things out a bunch, I’ve always had multiple 1099s and the k1 is quite different every year.
- ianhawes 6y agoForget tax prep, Credit Karma was our only hope of a competing product to the 3 credit bureaus. A sort of augmented credit report, if you will.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIn my opinion, credit reporting agencies don't need more competition, they need more regulation. Free access by consumers at any time (instead of the stingy once per year per CRA via annualcreditreport.com), free locks at any time with a very short SLA on locking and unlocking requirements (forcing automation and generous user control via apps and websites), as well as requirements making disputes as straightforward and painless as possible along with steep penalties for maintaining incorrect information on a consumer that negatively impacts them. EDIT because I'll get HN throttled writing too many comments quickly: @smt88 Regulation can and should require providing regulators with credit scoring algorithms, and the regulation of those algorithms (starting with Fair Isaac's/FICO scoring models). This is no different than recent conversations about requiring ML models be transparent to regulators. This is what legislation is for.
- smt88 6y agoThe regulations you mentioned don't fix their idiotic formulas for calculating your credit score. For example, shopping around for good terms on a loan could hurt your credit score. Or never having borrowed, despite having a great income, somehow meant you can't buy a house. As a lender, I'd want competition in formulas, not necessarily in the core data (the number of loans a person has now and their history of payments).
- djmobley 6y agoDo you have any evidence of the former example? My understanding was that this would generate soft searches, which should not impact your score. On the latter example, would you lend vast sums of money to someone who has never demonstrated their ability to manage and repay a loan?
- branweb 6y agoWould this even matter if the tax-prep industry hadn't successfully lobbied against a free government-prepared return system? https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-free-simple-hr-block-intuit-lobbying-against-it https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...
- toomuchtodo 6y agoProgress is happening. Note that ProPublic's reporting you link to was the genesis of the IRS' below decision to end their agreement to not compete against Turbotax. Progress, of course, should be moving faster to deprecate the need for third party tax preparation tools (as is the case in most other developed nations). Call your representative(s), tell them this policy matters to you. Each letter, email, and phone call is counted. Part of Intuit's $80 billion market cap depends on taxes continuing to be hard to file directly with the IRS. https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-reforms-free-file-program-drops-agreement-not-to-compete-with-turbotax https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-reforms-free-file-pro... (IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete With TurboTax)
- branweb 6y agoThat's encouraging!
- keenmaster 6y agoI thought that the Patriot Act episode on “why doing taxes is so hard” was a great summary on this subject. https://www.netflix.com/title/80239931?s=i&trkid=13747225 https://www.netflix.com/title/80239931?s=i&trkid=13747225
- bilekas 6y agoImagine how badly a Govmnt run system would be though. Tax rules change almost weekly sometimes more for states, this requires fast acting changes to the workflow engine, coordniation with IRS etc. I wouldn't want government anywhere near that. Especially when the government can shut down whenever theres a dispute. No thanks
- userpi 6y agoI recommend https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/ https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/ for links to free tax filing. Also go read the tax avoidance hall of fame.
- DangitBobby 6y agoHow is it even a conversation? Stop letting monopolies buy new competitors!
- isoskeles 6y agoI find the idea that there is a monopoly here a bit absurd considering Credit Karma bought out another company, AFJC Corporation, in 2016, to get its foot in the door on tax filing. There is nothing to indicate other startups won't exist that attempt to solve the same problem and take on Intuit in the future.
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