20 ms·

Good Riddance, TurboTax. Americans Need a Real ‘Free File’ Program

348 points by abawany 5y ago

luckywatcher 5y ago
The article is behind a paywall for me. I love the irony here.
- betaclass 5y ago
  Irony? Filing taxes is a government-imposed obligation for many Americans. Accessing content from a private company is neither an obligation nor a right.
  - badmadrad 5y ago
    I think the point was that using Turbo tax isn't an obligation. So criticizing something for not being free but charging for your own content seems hypocritical. You could use another tax service or file via mail. Seems to be a lot of choices here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers
- Barrin92 5y ago
  it seems a little bit strange to compare paying for journalism to paying for a piece of software that basically exists because of regulatory capture and lobbying.
- cable2600 5y ago
  https://archive.is/pQIly https://archive.is/pQIly
pokerhobo 5y ago
We need the IRS to simply file on behalf of the user and they just have to sign off.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  My understanding is that this is precisely how it works in many other developed nations - the US is a bit of an outlier in this regard.
  - refurb 5y ago
    A big part of that is the complexity of the tax code. Not sure how IRS is going to know how many dependents I have living in my house or whether I've lost my hearing and am now deaf.
    - Retric 5y ago
      None of that changes very often. For most Americans filling out tax forms or paying someone to do so is simply economic dead weight. The IRS could use easily use last years data plus what was submitted by companies to pre fill most Americans taxes accurately and people could amend those forms as needed with less effort than starting from scratch.
      - refurb 5y ago
        If your taxes are simple enough that the gov't can just fill them out for you, then the EZ file should work pretty well too?
        CiceroCiceronis 5y ago
        Sure, but then why not just roll it into the IRS’ own web portal instead of letting every service roll their own and potentially screw with it (like Intuit did when it prevented Google from indexing its Free File tier)? The result is far more consumer friendly and potentially allows for greater integration with and prepopulation from other government services.
        mellavora 5y ago
        So then the right question to ask is "why is the tax code so complicated?" Yes, EZ file should work for 99.9% of the US. But it doesn't, because the tax code is horrendously complex
cable2600 5y ago
I used Turbo Tax Home and Business for my income and small business. The federal part is free the state filing cost costs money. Does this mean I have to pay to file federal taxes then when I next buy Turbo Tax?
- chrismcb 5y ago
  I thought only the 1040ez version for individuals was free. The small business version always had a coat associated with it
- JonathonW 5y ago
  If you pay for TurboTax, you’re paying to file— the cost to e-file is included in the price of the software. Free File is a separate thing, and provides both free prep software and free filing for eligible returns. This is the program that Intuit left.
emptyparadise 5y ago
>In 2019, ProPublica reported that Intuit added lines of code to the free version of its TurboTax website so that the site would not appear in search results on Google. It's almost refreshing to see such an obvious "fuck you" move, without having it be covered by tons of PR and legalese.
rym_ 5y ago
In 2019 I filed my (Dutch) taxes on my phone, while I was on a bus somewhere in the north of Argentina after previously having traveled for 20 something hours. It took me about 15 minutes to check if the numbers from the government were correct (they were) and I was done. Americans are being duped by these predatory companies.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Here in the UK I don't need to file taxes at all as an employee.
  - consp 5y ago
    You employer doesn't know your deductibles in the Netherlands due to privacy concerns (and other rules as well), which you definitely want to file in most cases since you pay less money or get some back. You are also responsible for your taxes, if the employer screws up you should check it. This is probably different from the UK. It is not a "can't do" but more or less a "won't do". edit: so it's not that different, just a different method of doing so. Good to know.
    - wdb 5y ago
      I wouldn't know what I would be able to get tax relief for as an employee. What kind of deductibles? Guess, I could claim that £6 per week for Covid work from home stuff. Wish you could claim the cost of repairing your bike, or public transport costs.
      - maccard 5y ago
        Most of the big ones can be done without a self assessment. If you make a pension contribution for example, you can call hmrc and tell them and they'll adjust your tax code
        RHSeeger 5y ago
        Doesn't that more or less equate to doing your taxes, just in little updates for each thing, rather than one big update at the end of the year?
wesleywt 5y ago
I found submitting my tax in "Third World" South Africa so easy. Just log on to the website and submit. Most of the information is already there provided by the employer.
- pdinny 5y ago
  100% agree. The argument presented in many other threads seems to reason that the easy tax filing systems do not allow for custom deductions or are easy because the tax system is simplistic. I think that in the South African case the tax system isn't simplistic and I can add all kinds of details that might be specific to my tax requirements. I'm surprised by how many people seem to be defending the lack of a government provided system on the basis that somehow the citizen will get a worse deal as a result.
dmckeon 5y ago
The US taxpayers, thru their government, could just do a buy out of Intuit/TurboTax for under $4 billion, and make the software free to use as part of a transition process. Any Intuit employees who at competent at tax preparation could be employed by the IRS, which takes in 4-6 dollars for every 1 dollar it costs. Win/win. Would never happen.
- cpursley 5y ago
  I trust Intuit more than the US government to provide a service like that. Have you ever used a US government web form? Who do you trust more, UPS or USPS? Don't get me wrong, I don't support their monopoly. The only real solution is to move away from such a complex tax system and do things European style (no tax return).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - simlan 5y ago
    Well making nice forms and services costs money. If the agency does not have that no nice front end.
    - simonh 5y ago
      Dealing with botched tax returns, late filings and court cases also costs money.
  - jpmoral 5y ago
    Here in Australia (as in other countries mentioned in this thread) filing taxes on the government-provided website is super easy. Wait a few weeks to a couple of months after the start of the financial year and most of the fields will be pre-filled from employers, banks, investment accounts, and IIRC private health (if any). Just need to fill in deductions and hit Submit. I don't see any technical reason the US government couldn't build something similar.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Blocked by paywall, but I'm not asking for a workaround - I'm having trouble parsing the title because of the comma, so please answer me this question: Is the article expressing joy about Intuit getting beat, or about Intuit beating something?
- ftyers 5y ago
  Do you have JavaScript turned on? No paywall here.
badmadrad 5y ago
Good Riddance, Tax. Americans Need Real Freedom. https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers If you can't figure out how to choose one of the above, I don't know what to tell you.
smitty1e 5y ago
I contend that Americans need to rise up and require a government that makes federal legislative and tax "code" visible through a read-only fossil[1] repository. Maybe a state can lead the way. For non-classified matters, the fact that we are paying customers and aren't privy to the who/what/where/when/why of these important decisions is just last-century. [1] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
moosebear847 5y ago
TurboTax recently tricked me using some dark UI patterns into spending 30+ minutes painstakingly filling out my tax forms in a way that made it seem like it was for the free filing. Only at the very end, did they reveal that it was in fact for the paid version, with no way to change it to the free version and also keep the work. Essentially holding my work hostage. So I had to redo it again in the hard-to-find free version. I am now anti-TurboTax for life.
- willis936 5y ago
  The same thing happened to me a few years ago. I wanted so badly to stick it to them on principle, but I didn't want to waste anymore of my time. I put my tongue to their boot and paid them for the privilege of getting scammed. Real 1984 shit.
  - deregulateMed 5y ago
    I'm a vocal anti advocate. Hope you do too.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    > Real 1984 shit ??? Hypothetical scenario - Real 1984 shit would be to get a tax bill prefilled from the government to get you to sign on a dotted line. If you want to contest it, you'll need to hire lawyers but most refuse to work with you. Average citizen is left to defend themselves which is an impossibility. Sign on the dotted line or get arrested. Folks, we need to go towards an open source route. Not put more power in the hands of a massively incompetent government.
  - orwelly 5y ago
    1984? People throw that reference around that have never read the book. What do a private company's payflow dark patterns have to do with mass surveillance by a totalitarian state? Everything slightly dystopian isn't "real 1984 shit."
    - zingplex 5y ago
dustymcp 5y ago
this is crazy..
CrendKing 5y ago
What I don't understand is, if I make a mistake (e.g. missing a schedule or wrong number) in the form 1040 and send it to IRS, I'll be guaranteed to receive a CP notice from them later asking me to pay the missing tax and penalty. Clearly IRS has their own algorithm to calculate everything based on what they got (which is exactly the same as what I have, W-2, 1099, etc., for most Americans) anyways. If IRS already know precisely how much tax I owe, and whatever I "claim" has no power, why do I need to play the game of "cat and mouse", every year? Why not just send me a pre-filled 1040 that their internal algorithm calculates and ask for my approval, like those Europeans do? How is this more "prone to raise tax"?
- codeduck 5y ago
  In the UK it's possible to see a running estimate of your current tax position and the estimate for the end of the year. HMRC issues you a tax code which is used by your employer to determine how much tax they should be deducting each pay period. This means that in most cases you get no nasty surprises at the end of the year. I've always found the US tax system bizarre.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 1123581321 5y ago
  They don’t know everything. They automatically compare your return against information they’ve received from other parties (W-2s, 1099s, other tax returns’ dependents’ social security numbers, mostly) so you will get a notification if your return contradicts those in an obvious way. Beyond that, you need to be audited to get a notice. Audits range in their degree of inspection so most people just get a letter, but those kinds of audits usually just focus on one/two easy-to-discover issues. They certainly could develop the ability to do your return for you, but it would be an effort.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    They do not know everything here in Sweden either but they still give you prefilled forms with what they do know (based on what other parties like employers and banks have submitted) and then you can add the rest yourself plus add corrections if you disagree with them. Seems less work and less back and forth.
beaunative 5y ago
America's way behind in government digital services in comparison to Europe and China. It's almost impossible without a meeting. You'd have to make an appointment for anything, even though most of the time all you do is filing an document, and nothing else.
philjohn 5y ago
Shows how powerful lobbying is. In the UK, unless you're a special case (e.g. Lloyds Name) you simply file on the HMRC website. Then again, we can deduct far less, don't have state AND federal tax, so it's somewhat simpler.
nyc 5y ago
Planet Money/Pricenomics had a fascinating story about California's trial of a streamlined system that was incredibly well-received. However, Intuit's lobbyists teamed up with the small-government movement to sink it. https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-the-tax-lobby/ https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...
bbarn 5y ago
Didn't read the article (paywalled) but I'm commenting on the context of the title. People have been saying this for years, but Intuit has invested billions in fighting the idea off. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... Not only that, for a lot of people, Turbo Tax "feels like" a great thing. If you have a simple tax situation, it takes minutes to go through, you pay 10$ and get your refund very quickly. The free alternative is to fill out a 1040EZ and wait a few months. For the comparisons to Europe, I'm living in Iceland now, and the tax filing system is incredibly easy simply because the tax system is incredibly easy - there is only one tier of taxation, everyone pays the same percentage. That's the core of the problem. The tax code in the US is incredibly complex, and that's why software like turbo tax exists.
toastal 5y ago
Let's not forget the US and Eritrea are the only countries still taxing citizens abroad. You can escape the country and still have this tax bullshit, but now it's even more complicated because you're filing from abroad. Then a lot of the free options become unavailable strictly from filing from a non-US location.
- wil421 5y ago
  Every time this is brought up I will ask the same question. Has anyone personally had to pay taxes to the US while living abroad? Not talking about a stock sale or business sale. Talking about making income abroad and owning the US for it. I don’t want to hear about your friend of a friend, you personally. I’ve known people living in places like Costa Rica, China, and all over Europe. No one had to pay a cent ever.
  - valtism 5y ago
    I met someone running an AirBnB in London who was in the process of revoking his US citizenship because he was being taxed by the US despite not working there or having any business there. What blew me away is that he was having to pay thousands of pounds to _revoke_ his citizenship. From an admittedly naïve standpoint that seems like a real rort.
  - mattjaynes 5y ago
    Yes, I pay taxes living abroad. Any US citizen overseas that earns over $107,600 in 2020 (changes slightly every year) may be liable to pay US taxes (depending on what other deduction they may have, etc)[1]. There is the direct financial cost of paying US taxes when living abroad, but it is also a significant cost in time and energy to file taxes for 2 countries. It can get pretty complex, so many need to hire a tax service to handle it properly. Then there are the additional reporting requirements for any banks that you have accounts with, so some banks will not allow you to have an account with them because you are a US citizen. The point is that there are some real downsides to maintaining US citizenship when living overseas. There are many upsides of course, like being able to return to the US at any time and live and work there. If there were an emergency situation, I could probably count on the US embassy to help me evacuate if necessary. Overall, it's a cost/benefit evaluation. If you have citizenship in another advantageous country (or country in a powerful union like the EU) and significant resources, I can see why it would be tempting for some to drop the US citizenship. [1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figuring-the-foreign-earned-income-exclusion https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figu...
smudgy 5y ago
Brazil has a tax program that has always been multi-platform for well over a decade. This year, when filing my taxes, that there was also a simplified online/mobile version for folks without computers. To be fair, US's tax code is a wild collection of tax breaks and exemptions so it's very complicated but still...
benzayb 5y ago
Here in the Philippines, filing tax returns are not a problem. If you're an employee, your employer does it for you. The employer just deducts the tax owed by each employee, and pays it to the government every quarter. The total tax amount owed per month may vary from 10k USD (10 to 20 employees) to 20K USD (20 to 50 employees). But the catch is: If the taxman is corrupt (highly likely), and the officer-in-charge of the remittance of such withheld taxes is also corrupt (not improbable), do not expect that the full tax amount will end up in government's coffers. Both parties will pocket a "small" percentage of it, per quarter, every year. This scenario is highly likely for offshore companies, where the real owners are outside (e.g. US, Europe) and there's a "trusted" individual (or group of people) that does the "administrative" stuff for the company. Crazy.
analog31 5y ago
I wonder if it would be possible for the government to specify the logic of the tax code in computer readable form. (I would say "source code" but maybe there's a better way). A company like TurboTax could still exist, but could compete on the basis of their user interface and optimizations.
rbanffy 5y ago
The Brazilian government has been providing such a program for ages now. The last version I used (moved from Brazil 5 years ago) was a Java program that ran well on my Linux box. It advises on how to better submit your deductibles - either as a full all-things-counted or as a simplified model. There has been some constant pressure to provide it as open-source so we could improve it, but, last time I checked, the government was reluctant. There was one guy who reverse engineered the formats and wrote a GPL version that's compatible. I assume it's still maintained.
flerchin 5y ago
freetaxusa.com despite the funny name is what it says on the tin.
- ajyey 5y ago
  +1 for freetaxusa. Been using them for the past couple years and have had no problems
aurizon 5y ago
For years I have seen the USA grab taxes from lottery winners - yet they do not allow people to claim the amounts they pay to buy lottery tickets. The same for gambling. This is crooked on it's face, as we know the casino makes money and is taxed on that, so on the whole the bettors lose money. Same with the lottery. Strictly speaking the aggregate of deductions would exceed the winnings = zero tax due - but no, they tax one and not deduct the other. The US tax authority (IRS ~~= Inland Revenue in the UK) does this, yet the IR in the UK does not tax winnings or allow deductions of bets - this is simple fraud by fiat against the people, and the IRS has a huge infrastructure devoted to this. I suspect it is based on the so-called christian label 'evil' attached to lotteries/gambling?
NoblePublius 5y ago
Credit Karma (owned by Intuit) is totally free. FreeTaxUSA has been free for 15 years. There is no shortage of actually free ways to file taxes.
failrate 5y ago
Intuit is to blame for much of our current US tax fiasco, as are politicians, and key to the bs is this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
bane 5y ago
The way the U.S. tax system is setup is impossibly stupid. The government already should have on record all sources of possible income you could be making since pretty much all places you could be making money are required to send it in anyways. So it's conceivably possible for the IRS to pre-fill your returns for you and have you just double check and add anything in that they missed -- but it does get complicated very easy outside of the trivial "here in my country they just take x% of my income". I'm going to guess that almost all of those comments are made by people who's earnings come almost entirely from salary/pay, but have no idea that lots of people make lots of money in ways that are not salary/pay. In some cases it's possible to make most of your earnings in ways that external to salary/pay and in some cases figuring out what that monetary amount is isn't totally trivial. For example, this is all over the news right now, but suppose your company lets you drive a company car? If you only use it to drive from home to work or other business related meetings, you probably don't need to consider it "income". But what if you can use it for all manner of personal activities as well? Maybe then it needs to be considered for your taxes. So what's the taxable amount of the car? The MSRP x the percent you drive it to non-work activities which of course you keep dutifully and precisely logged? Why the MSRP? Most people try to negotiate car prices under the MSRP. Why not the Blue Book value? In the end, what does the government use to consider the car as income in order to tax you for it? In other cases, property ownership, and the layered governmental system in the U.S. also complicated things. For example, you might get Federal deductions for taxes paid to local governments on property you own. But what about locales that don't tax property? More importantly, how does the Federal government know you own the property at all? What if you own it, but then "loan" it out to somebody who uses it exclusively? You're the title holder, but should they count it as income a la the previous example and now two people are paying taxes on one piece of property? These kinds of scenarios are incredibly common and affect people in all socio-economic levels. These kinds of things extend to include retirement holdings, investments, cash transactions, different kinds of corporate bodies that can affect individuals, foreign business/income/investments/etc. and so on. What Intuit did is take advantage of this messy system, and provide some level of organization on it so that people would stop seeing and paying for CPAs to do their taxes and could do it themselves. They then fed on this like a cancer and the tax system started to reflect and assume Intuit was a public service. Part of this was the fractured and uncoordinated nature of the Federal IRS, State Tax Departments, and local county and city level tax systems that don't cooperate at all even though tax laws that affect one may affect the others. In effect, the IRS can't put out a complete tax system because the IRS can't process your local tax stuff - the locales need to. So the IRS has relied on external non-government organizations to do it for them.
todfox 5y ago
Not to cut Intuit any slack, but in my mind there already is a useful free file program. I've been totally satisfied with Free File Fillable Forms for many years. I wouldn't trust the guided programs even if they were free.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  It's probably worth noting in this context that Free File Fillable Forms is also run by Intuit, despite not being branded as an Intuit product.
z3ugma 5y ago
Use the government's official web app, https://freefilefillableforms.com https://freefilefillableforms.com It's the sketchiest URL ever
- kemayo 5y ago
  Link's broken because you need the www. It's one of those sites that doesn't auto-forward to it. (Again, not helping with the impression of the site.)
- kyrra 5y ago
  Correct link: https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ Yours doesn't load. For those wondering, you can find the link to this site on IRS's website. https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form... Reading some more, that site was created by Intuit. Checking the ToS: > These Terms of Service ("Agreement") is a legal agreement between you ("you", "your", "licensee"), and Intuit Inc. ("we", "our" or "us").
  - colpabar 5y ago
    I remember reading something recently that this site was designed to be ugly and scary so that people just go back to using turbotax.
- onefuncman 5y ago
  This is run by Intuit (and requires the www, https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ ) Looks like their AppDynamics RUM js config is leaking their internal hostnames in the page source too.
eightysixfour 5y ago
What would it take to develop a piece of Open Source software that makes it easy for accountants/tax attorneys to build TurboTax form equivalents? Basically a CMS for tax forms to be translated into plain english, and then the inputs to be put back into the correct places on the forms.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  A bigger question is: What does it take to update it constantly? The problem is that US Tax law is incredibly complicated and changes in impactful ways nearly annually (last tax year and next tax year in particular will require tons of updates, due to COVID-bill related programs). I think Open Source works well when the underlying work is fun and the software is somewhat timeless to minimize ongoing workload. Tax software by its very nature is none of those things. Honestly I think OSS is great but this is more fitting for the IRS to do itself rather than hoping that a bunch of lawyers/tax professionals/financial programmers suddenly decide they want to spend their evenings writing the most boring software imaginable.
  - eightysixfour 5y ago
    That’s why I suggested building the infrastructure for the tax tool (CMS) to make it easy and fast to build the questionnaire for the forms. Since the forms are going to change, what we need is to make it so that it takes very little time to build a TurboTax competitor each year. There is no way I am going to get a bunch of accountants and tax lawyers to write a ton of code each year for free, but ask them to build a plain English questionnaire for a form as easily as you would create a survey in SurveyMonkey? Maybe.
- onefuncman 5y ago
  https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes found via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330902 for an actual e-file it's a lot more complex, is called MEF https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-program-information https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-progr...
returningfory2 5y ago
I've use TurboTax before, but this year I used freetaxusa.com and it worked really well. I actually did my taxes in both of them to verify the numbers were the same (in TurboTax, you only pay to submit your return and by exploring the UI you can find a preview of your full return before paying). The numbers matched, so I submitted via freetaxusa.com for $0. I think the anti-TurboTax argument makes sense, but with a free alternative like freetaxusa.com the idea that the IRS should prepare on our behalf is slightly less compelling.
- maininformer 5y ago
  I went into freetaxusa this year from turbotax expecting clunky ui, but I was surprised how nicely it looked and worked. Moreover, there is this sense of they want you to succeed in filing and understanding your taxes versus bying the next tier.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Been using them for about a decade with no issues. Highly recommend them. I will also happily pay them the ~$14 for the State Income tax filing as well (Federal is free).
frenchman_in_ny 5y ago
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889618
perryizgr8 5y ago
Americans (and citizens of other countries) need a society where they don't have to spend any time worrying about how to navigate the byzantine maze of tax deductibles and special cases. The income tax code should be "pay x% of your annual income". Just one line is enough. All else is just introducing inefficiency and creates loopholes.
otsoa93 5y ago
I'm an American and finally told TurboTax to go f itself this past year. I was very happy to find https://www.freetaxusa.com https://www.freetaxusa.com on reddit. Great experience and it cost me $15
beej71 5y ago
Intuit is a middleman, pure and simple. Collecting taxes is 100% a government issue, not a private one. There's zero reason why the government shouldn't guide you through a government program. Except, of course, profits for the middleman. I agree that sometimes getting a professional to help is useful--I've hired people when my taxes were extra complex. But if your taxes are no more complex than W2+itemized deductions+home owner+passthrough LLC, you can easily do them yourself today. And if you're not sure what to do, ask an accountant and then you'll know for next year. What would make it trivial is if the government would set up a website to guide you through it. But for some idiotic reason (cough lobbyists cough) they haven't done it. Every time you pay Intuit, you're making taxes even harder for posterity and guaranteeing your own future expenses.

348 points by abawany 5y ago

luckywatcher 5y ago

The article is behind a paywall for me. I love the irony here.

betaclass 5y ago
Irony? Filing taxes is a government-imposed obligation for many Americans. Accessing content from a private company is neither an obligation nor a right.
- badmadrad 5y ago
  I think the point was that using Turbo tax isn't an obligation. So criticizing something for not being free but charging for your own content seems hypocritical. You could use another tax service or file via mail. Seems to be a lot of choices here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers
Barrin92 5y ago
it seems a little bit strange to compare paying for journalism to paying for a piece of software that basically exists because of regulatory capture and lobbying.
cable2600 5y ago
https://archive.is/pQIly https://archive.is/pQIly

pokerhobo 5y ago

We need the IRS to simply file on behalf of the user and they just have to sign off.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
My understanding is that this is precisely how it works in many other developed nations - the US is a bit of an outlier in this regard.
- refurb 5y ago
  A big part of that is the complexity of the tax code. Not sure how IRS is going to know how many dependents I have living in my house or whether I've lost my hearing and am now deaf.
  - Retric 5y ago
    None of that changes very often. For most Americans filling out tax forms or paying someone to do so is simply economic dead weight. The IRS could use easily use last years data plus what was submitted by companies to pre fill most Americans taxes accurately and people could amend those forms as needed with less effort than starting from scratch.
    - refurb 5y ago
      If your taxes are simple enough that the gov't can just fill them out for you, then the EZ file should work pretty well too?
      - CiceroCiceronis 5y ago
        Sure, but then why not just roll it into the IRS’ own web portal instead of letting every service roll their own and potentially screw with it (like Intuit did when it prevented Google from indexing its Free File tier)? The result is far more consumer friendly and potentially allows for greater integration with and prepopulation from other government services.
      - mellavora 5y ago
        So then the right question to ask is "why is the tax code so complicated?" Yes, EZ file should work for 99.9% of the US. But it doesn't, because the tax code is horrendously complex

cable2600 5y ago

I used Turbo Tax Home and Business for my income and small business. The federal part is free the state filing cost costs money. Does this mean I have to pay to file federal taxes then when I next buy Turbo Tax?

chrismcb 5y ago
I thought only the 1040ez version for individuals was free. The small business version always had a coat associated with it
JonathonW 5y ago
If you pay for TurboTax, you’re paying to file— the cost to e-file is included in the price of the software. Free File is a separate thing, and provides both free prep software and free filing for eligible returns. This is the program that Intuit left.

emptyparadise 5y ago

>In 2019, ProPublica reported that Intuit added lines of code to the free version of its TurboTax website so that the site would not appear in search results on Google. It's almost refreshing to see such an obvious "fuck you" move, without having it be covered by tons of PR and legalese.

rym_ 5y ago

In 2019 I filed my (Dutch) taxes on my phone, while I was on a bus somewhere in the north of Argentina after previously having traveled for 20 something hours. It took me about 15 minutes to check if the numbers from the government were correct (they were) and I was done. Americans are being duped by these predatory companies.

onion2k 5y ago
Here in the UK I don't need to file taxes at all as an employee.
- consp 5y ago
  You employer doesn't know your deductibles in the Netherlands due to privacy concerns (and other rules as well), which you definitely want to file in most cases since you pay less money or get some back. You are also responsible for your taxes, if the employer screws up you should check it. This is probably different from the UK. It is not a "can't do" but more or less a "won't do". edit: so it's not that different, just a different method of doing so. Good to know.
  - wdb 5y ago
    I wouldn't know what I would be able to get tax relief for as an employee. What kind of deductibles? Guess, I could claim that £6 per week for Covid work from home stuff. Wish you could claim the cost of repairing your bike, or public transport costs.
    - maccard 5y ago
      Most of the big ones can be done without a self assessment. If you make a pension contribution for example, you can call hmrc and tell them and they'll adjust your tax code
      - RHSeeger 5y ago
        Doesn't that more or less equate to doing your taxes, just in little updates for each thing, rather than one big update at the end of the year?

wesleywt 5y ago

I found submitting my tax in "Third World" South Africa so easy. Just log on to the website and submit. Most of the information is already there provided by the employer.

pdinny 5y ago
100% agree. The argument presented in many other threads seems to reason that the easy tax filing systems do not allow for custom deductions or are easy because the tax system is simplistic. I think that in the South African case the tax system isn't simplistic and I can add all kinds of details that might be specific to my tax requirements. I'm surprised by how many people seem to be defending the lack of a government provided system on the basis that somehow the citizen will get a worse deal as a result.

dmckeon 5y ago

The US taxpayers, thru their government, could just do a buy out of Intuit/TurboTax for under $4 billion, and make the software free to use as part of a transition process. Any Intuit employees who at competent at tax preparation could be employed by the IRS, which takes in 4-6 dollars for every 1 dollar it costs. Win/win. Would never happen.

cpursley 5y ago
I trust Intuit more than the US government to provide a service like that. Have you ever used a US government web form? Who do you trust more, UPS or USPS? Don't get me wrong, I don't support their monopoly. The only real solution is to move away from such a complex tax system and do things European style (no tax return).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- simlan 5y ago
  Well making nice forms and services costs money. If the agency does not have that no nice front end.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Dealing with botched tax returns, late filings and court cases also costs money.
- jpmoral 5y ago
  Here in Australia (as in other countries mentioned in this thread) filing taxes on the government-provided website is super easy. Wait a few weeks to a couple of months after the start of the financial year and most of the fields will be pre-filled from employers, banks, investment accounts, and IIRC private health (if any). Just need to fill in deductions and hit Submit. I don't see any technical reason the US government couldn't build something similar.
- arcticbull 5y ago

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Blocked by paywall, but I'm not asking for a workaround - I'm having trouble parsing the title because of the comma, so please answer me this question: Is the article expressing joy about Intuit getting beat, or about Intuit beating something?

ftyers 5y ago
Do you have JavaScript turned on? No paywall here.

badmadrad 5y ago

Good Riddance, Tax. Americans Need Real Freedom. https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers If you can't figure out how to choose one of the above, I don't know what to tell you.

smitty1e 5y ago

I contend that Americans need to rise up and require a government that makes federal legislative and tax "code" visible through a read-only fossil[1] repository. Maybe a state can lead the way. For non-classified matters, the fact that we are paying customers and aren't privy to the who/what/where/when/why of these important decisions is just last-century. [1] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

moosebear847 5y ago

TurboTax recently tricked me using some dark UI patterns into spending 30+ minutes painstakingly filling out my tax forms in a way that made it seem like it was for the free filing. Only at the very end, did they reveal that it was in fact for the paid version, with no way to change it to the free version and also keep the work. Essentially holding my work hostage. So I had to redo it again in the hard-to-find free version. I am now anti-TurboTax for life.

willis936 5y ago
The same thing happened to me a few years ago. I wanted so badly to stick it to them on principle, but I didn't want to waste anymore of my time. I put my tongue to their boot and paid them for the privilege of getting scammed. Real 1984 shit.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  I'm a vocal anti advocate. Hope you do too.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  > Real 1984 shit ??? Hypothetical scenario - Real 1984 shit would be to get a tax bill prefilled from the government to get you to sign on a dotted line. If you want to contest it, you'll need to hire lawyers but most refuse to work with you. Average citizen is left to defend themselves which is an impossibility. Sign on the dotted line or get arrested. Folks, we need to go towards an open source route. Not put more power in the hands of a massively incompetent government.
- orwelly 5y ago
  1984? People throw that reference around that have never read the book. What do a private company's payflow dark patterns have to do with mass surveillance by a totalitarian state? Everything slightly dystopian isn't "real 1984 shit."
  - zingplex 5y ago

dustymcp 5y ago

this is crazy..

CrendKing 5y ago

What I don't understand is, if I make a mistake (e.g. missing a schedule or wrong number) in the form 1040 and send it to IRS, I'll be guaranteed to receive a CP notice from them later asking me to pay the missing tax and penalty. Clearly IRS has their own algorithm to calculate everything based on what they got (which is exactly the same as what I have, W-2, 1099, etc., for most Americans) anyways. If IRS already know precisely how much tax I owe, and whatever I "claim" has no power, why do I need to play the game of "cat and mouse", every year? Why not just send me a pre-filled 1040 that their internal algorithm calculates and ask for my approval, like those Europeans do? How is this more "prone to raise tax"?

codeduck 5y ago
In the UK it's possible to see a running estimate of your current tax position and the estimate for the end of the year. HMRC issues you a tax code which is used by your employer to determine how much tax they should be deducting each pay period. This means that in most cases you get no nasty surprises at the end of the year. I've always found the US tax system bizarre.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
1123581321 5y ago
They don’t know everything. They automatically compare your return against information they’ve received from other parties (W-2s, 1099s, other tax returns’ dependents’ social security numbers, mostly) so you will get a notification if your return contradicts those in an obvious way. Beyond that, you need to be audited to get a notice. Audits range in their degree of inspection so most people just get a letter, but those kinds of audits usually just focus on one/two easy-to-discover issues. They certainly could develop the ability to do your return for you, but it would be an effort.
- jeltz 5y ago
  They do not know everything here in Sweden either but they still give you prefilled forms with what they do know (based on what other parties like employers and banks have submitted) and then you can add the rest yourself plus add corrections if you disagree with them. Seems less work and less back and forth.

beaunative 5y ago

America's way behind in government digital services in comparison to Europe and China. It's almost impossible without a meeting. You'd have to make an appointment for anything, even though most of the time all you do is filing an document, and nothing else.

philjohn 5y ago

Shows how powerful lobbying is. In the UK, unless you're a special case (e.g. Lloyds Name) you simply file on the HMRC website. Then again, we can deduct far less, don't have state AND federal tax, so it's somewhat simpler.

nyc 5y ago

Planet Money/Pricenomics had a fascinating story about California's trial of a streamlined system that was incredibly well-received. However, Intuit's lobbyists teamed up with the small-government movement to sink it. https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-the-tax-lobby/ https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...

bbarn 5y ago

Didn't read the article (paywalled) but I'm commenting on the context of the title. People have been saying this for years, but Intuit has invested billions in fighting the idea off. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... Not only that, for a lot of people, Turbo Tax "feels like" a great thing. If you have a simple tax situation, it takes minutes to go through, you pay 10$ and get your refund very quickly. The free alternative is to fill out a 1040EZ and wait a few months. For the comparisons to Europe, I'm living in Iceland now, and the tax filing system is incredibly easy simply because the tax system is incredibly easy - there is only one tier of taxation, everyone pays the same percentage. That's the core of the problem. The tax code in the US is incredibly complex, and that's why software like turbo tax exists.

toastal 5y ago

Let's not forget the US and Eritrea are the only countries still taxing citizens abroad. You can escape the country and still have this tax bullshit, but now it's even more complicated because you're filing from abroad. Then a lot of the free options become unavailable strictly from filing from a non-US location.

wil421 5y ago
Every time this is brought up I will ask the same question. Has anyone personally had to pay taxes to the US while living abroad? Not talking about a stock sale or business sale. Talking about making income abroad and owning the US for it. I don’t want to hear about your friend of a friend, you personally. I’ve known people living in places like Costa Rica, China, and all over Europe. No one had to pay a cent ever.
- valtism 5y ago
  I met someone running an AirBnB in London who was in the process of revoking his US citizenship because he was being taxed by the US despite not working there or having any business there. What blew me away is that he was having to pay thousands of pounds to _revoke_ his citizenship. From an admittedly naïve standpoint that seems like a real rort.
- mattjaynes 5y ago
  Yes, I pay taxes living abroad. Any US citizen overseas that earns over $107,600 in 2020 (changes slightly every year) may be liable to pay US taxes (depending on what other deduction they may have, etc)[1]. There is the direct financial cost of paying US taxes when living abroad, but it is also a significant cost in time and energy to file taxes for 2 countries. It can get pretty complex, so many need to hire a tax service to handle it properly. Then there are the additional reporting requirements for any banks that you have accounts with, so some banks will not allow you to have an account with them because you are a US citizen. The point is that there are some real downsides to maintaining US citizenship when living overseas. There are many upsides of course, like being able to return to the US at any time and live and work there. If there were an emergency situation, I could probably count on the US embassy to help me evacuate if necessary. Overall, it's a cost/benefit evaluation. If you have citizenship in another advantageous country (or country in a powerful union like the EU) and significant resources, I can see why it would be tempting for some to drop the US citizenship. [1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figuring-the-foreign-earned-income-exclusion https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figu...

smudgy 5y ago

Brazil has a tax program that has always been multi-platform for well over a decade. This year, when filing my taxes, that there was also a simplified online/mobile version for folks without computers. To be fair, US's tax code is a wild collection of tax breaks and exemptions so it's very complicated but still...

benzayb 5y ago

Here in the Philippines, filing tax returns are not a problem. If you're an employee, your employer does it for you. The employer just deducts the tax owed by each employee, and pays it to the government every quarter. The total tax amount owed per month may vary from 10k USD (10 to 20 employees) to 20K USD (20 to 50 employees). But the catch is: If the taxman is corrupt (highly likely), and the officer-in-charge of the remittance of such withheld taxes is also corrupt (not improbable), do not expect that the full tax amount will end up in government's coffers. Both parties will pocket a "small" percentage of it, per quarter, every year. This scenario is highly likely for offshore companies, where the real owners are outside (e.g. US, Europe) and there's a "trusted" individual (or group of people) that does the "administrative" stuff for the company. Crazy.

analog31 5y ago

I wonder if it would be possible for the government to specify the logic of the tax code in computer readable form. (I would say "source code" but maybe there's a better way). A company like TurboTax could still exist, but could compete on the basis of their user interface and optimizations.

rbanffy 5y ago

The Brazilian government has been providing such a program for ages now. The last version I used (moved from Brazil 5 years ago) was a Java program that ran well on my Linux box. It advises on how to better submit your deductibles - either as a full all-things-counted or as a simplified model. There has been some constant pressure to provide it as open-source so we could improve it, but, last time I checked, the government was reluctant. There was one guy who reverse engineered the formats and wrote a GPL version that's compatible. I assume it's still maintained.

flerchin 5y ago

freetaxusa.com despite the funny name is what it says on the tin.

ajyey 5y ago
+1 for freetaxusa. Been using them for the past couple years and have had no problems

aurizon 5y ago

For years I have seen the USA grab taxes from lottery winners - yet they do not allow people to claim the amounts they pay to buy lottery tickets. The same for gambling. This is crooked on it's face, as we know the casino makes money and is taxed on that, so on the whole the bettors lose money. Same with the lottery. Strictly speaking the aggregate of deductions would exceed the winnings = zero tax due - but no, they tax one and not deduct the other. The US tax authority (IRS ~~= Inland Revenue in the UK) does this, yet the IR in the UK does not tax winnings or allow deductions of bets - this is simple fraud by fiat against the people, and the IRS has a huge infrastructure devoted to this. I suspect it is based on the so-called christian label 'evil' attached to lotteries/gambling?

NoblePublius 5y ago

Credit Karma (owned by Intuit) is totally free. FreeTaxUSA has been free for 15 years. There is no shortage of actually free ways to file taxes.

failrate 5y ago

Intuit is to blame for much of our current US tax fiasco, as are politicians, and key to the bs is this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist

bane 5y ago

The way the U.S. tax system is setup is impossibly stupid. The government already should have on record all sources of possible income you could be making since pretty much all places you could be making money are required to send it in anyways. So it's conceivably possible for the IRS to pre-fill your returns for you and have you just double check and add anything in that they missed -- but it does get complicated very easy outside of the trivial "here in my country they just take x% of my income". I'm going to guess that almost all of those comments are made by people who's earnings come almost entirely from salary/pay, but have no idea that lots of people make lots of money in ways that are not salary/pay. In some cases it's possible to make most of your earnings in ways that external to salary/pay and in some cases figuring out what that monetary amount is isn't totally trivial. For example, this is all over the news right now, but suppose your company lets you drive a company car? If you only use it to drive from home to work or other business related meetings, you probably don't need to consider it "income". But what if you can use it for all manner of personal activities as well? Maybe then it needs to be considered for your taxes. So what's the taxable amount of the car? The MSRP x the percent you drive it to non-work activities which of course you keep dutifully and precisely logged? Why the MSRP? Most people try to negotiate car prices under the MSRP. Why not the Blue Book value? In the end, what does the government use to consider the car as income in order to tax you for it? In other cases, property ownership, and the layered governmental system in the U.S. also complicated things. For example, you might get Federal deductions for taxes paid to local governments on property you own. But what about locales that don't tax property? More importantly, how does the Federal government know you own the property at all? What if you own it, but then "loan" it out to somebody who uses it exclusively? You're the title holder, but should they count it as income a la the previous example and now two people are paying taxes on one piece of property? These kinds of scenarios are incredibly common and affect people in all socio-economic levels. These kinds of things extend to include retirement holdings, investments, cash transactions, different kinds of corporate bodies that can affect individuals, foreign business/income/investments/etc. and so on. What Intuit did is take advantage of this messy system, and provide some level of organization on it so that people would stop seeing and paying for CPAs to do their taxes and could do it themselves. They then fed on this like a cancer and the tax system started to reflect and assume Intuit was a public service. Part of this was the fractured and uncoordinated nature of the Federal IRS, State Tax Departments, and local county and city level tax systems that don't cooperate at all even though tax laws that affect one may affect the others. In effect, the IRS can't put out a complete tax system because the IRS can't process your local tax stuff - the locales need to. So the IRS has relied on external non-government organizations to do it for them.

todfox 5y ago

Not to cut Intuit any slack, but in my mind there already is a useful free file program. I've been totally satisfied with Free File Fillable Forms for many years. I wouldn't trust the guided programs even if they were free.

0xcde4c3db 5y ago
It's probably worth noting in this context that Free File Fillable Forms is also run by Intuit, despite not being branded as an Intuit product.

z3ugma 5y ago

Use the government's official web app, https://freefilefillableforms.com https://freefilefillableforms.com It's the sketchiest URL ever

kemayo 5y ago
Link's broken because you need the www. It's one of those sites that doesn't auto-forward to it. (Again, not helping with the impression of the site.)
kyrra 5y ago
Correct link: https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ Yours doesn't load. For those wondering, you can find the link to this site on IRS's website. https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form... Reading some more, that site was created by Intuit. Checking the ToS: > These Terms of Service ("Agreement") is a legal agreement between you ("you", "your", "licensee"), and Intuit Inc. ("we", "our" or "us").
- colpabar 5y ago
  I remember reading something recently that this site was designed to be ugly and scary so that people just go back to using turbotax.
onefuncman 5y ago
This is run by Intuit (and requires the www, https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/ ) Looks like their AppDynamics RUM js config is leaking their internal hostnames in the page source too.

eightysixfour 5y ago

What would it take to develop a piece of Open Source software that makes it easy for accountants/tax attorneys to build TurboTax form equivalents? Basically a CMS for tax forms to be translated into plain english, and then the inputs to be put back into the correct places on the forms.

Someone1234 5y ago
A bigger question is: What does it take to update it constantly? The problem is that US Tax law is incredibly complicated and changes in impactful ways nearly annually (last tax year and next tax year in particular will require tons of updates, due to COVID-bill related programs). I think Open Source works well when the underlying work is fun and the software is somewhat timeless to minimize ongoing workload. Tax software by its very nature is none of those things. Honestly I think OSS is great but this is more fitting for the IRS to do itself rather than hoping that a bunch of lawyers/tax professionals/financial programmers suddenly decide they want to spend their evenings writing the most boring software imaginable.
- eightysixfour 5y ago
  That’s why I suggested building the infrastructure for the tax tool (CMS) to make it easy and fast to build the questionnaire for the forms. Since the forms are going to change, what we need is to make it so that it takes very little time to build a TurboTax competitor each year. There is no way I am going to get a bunch of accountants and tax lawyers to write a ton of code each year for free, but ask them to build a plain English questionnaire for a form as easily as you would create a survey in SurveyMonkey? Maybe.
onefuncman 5y ago
https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes found via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330902 for an actual e-file it's a lot more complex, is called MEF https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-program-information https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-progr...

returningfory2 5y ago

I've use TurboTax before, but this year I used freetaxusa.com and it worked really well. I actually did my taxes in both of them to verify the numbers were the same (in TurboTax, you only pay to submit your return and by exploring the UI you can find a preview of your full return before paying). The numbers matched, so I submitted via freetaxusa.com for $0. I think the anti-TurboTax argument makes sense, but with a free alternative like freetaxusa.com the idea that the IRS should prepare on our behalf is slightly less compelling.

maininformer 5y ago
I went into freetaxusa this year from turbotax expecting clunky ui, but I was surprised how nicely it looked and worked. Moreover, there is this sense of they want you to succeed in filing and understanding your taxes versus bying the next tier.
cableshaft 5y ago
Been using them for about a decade with no issues. Highly recommend them. I will also happily pay them the ~$14 for the State Income tax filing as well (Federal is free).

frenchman_in_ny 5y ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889618

perryizgr8 5y ago

Americans (and citizens of other countries) need a society where they don't have to spend any time worrying about how to navigate the byzantine maze of tax deductibles and special cases. The income tax code should be "pay x% of your annual income". Just one line is enough. All else is just introducing inefficiency and creates loopholes.

otsoa93 5y ago

I'm an American and finally told TurboTax to go f itself this past year. I was very happy to find https://www.freetaxusa.com https://www.freetaxusa.com on reddit. Great experience and it cost me $15

beej71 5y ago

Intuit is a middleman, pure and simple. Collecting taxes is 100% a government issue, not a private one. There's zero reason why the government shouldn't guide you through a government program. Except, of course, profits for the middleman. I agree that sometimes getting a professional to help is useful--I've hired people when my taxes were extra complex. But if your taxes are no more complex than W2+itemized deductions+home owner+passthrough LLC, you can easily do them yourself today. And if you're not sure what to do, ask an accountant and then you'll know for next year. What would make it trivial is if the government would set up a website to guide you through it. But for some idiotic reason (cough lobbyists cough) they haven't done it. Every time you pay Intuit, you're making taxes even harder for posterity and guaranteeing your own future expenses.