4 ms·

Absolutely, this misses the forest for the trees and mistakes a political problem as an economic or technical one. The problem isn't a lack of FOSS tax prep so

by duped 4y ago

Absolutely, this misses the forest for the trees and mistakes a political problem as an economic or technical one. The problem isn't a lack of FOSS tax prep software. The issue is the need for it, and the cause is Intuit bribing politicians to keep it that way.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Taxes were complicated before Intuit existed. What was the cause of that? Blaming Intuit really seems to oversimplify the situation. In reality there are many smaller variables but I think the single biggest factor is how regulation works. You hardly ever see all the rules thrown out in favor of a new system. It takes more buy in than you will ever get. Instead you can just add or remove a few things at a time. Over time cruft accumulates.
- Kye 4y ago
  They lobby to keep the situation as it is against numerous attempts to improve things. 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... https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=intuit https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=intuit
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    That says they lobbied to prevent free filing. There is free filing, so I guess they weren’t effective And don’t have some stranglehold on tax law.
- CivBase 4y ago
  The problem isn't that taxes are complicated. For most people, they're really not complicated. They're simple enough for most of us that - like OP suggested - the IRS really could just send you a bill calculated from the information they already have and you could just pay what you owe (or deposit what you receive). The minority of tax payers who have more complicated taxes would still have to file returns like they do now. But the overwhelming majority of those people are probably already going through professionals or using commercial software (like Intuit's) - not looking for FOSS tax software to do it themselves.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    For the typical person who has a W2 and maybe one of two 1099s, tax filing is really straightforward although the IRS could absolutely make it even more straightforward. And, as you say, most people with moderately complicated taxes where they can't just straightforwardly fill in some obvious boxes are arguably better off using a professional.
- belthesar 4y ago
  I'm glad you're calling out that the US in general has had a complicated tax situation well before the Intuits and the H&R Blocks of the world came into being. It's easy to look to a singular demon when the problem is complex and generational. However, the callouts for tax return preparation companies lobbying against simplification are still valid. It's also fair to advocate for changing the allocation of energy by the US's IRS from auditing underprivileged folks and slapping them with fines to assisting them in validating that they've met their tax obligations.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    But how do you simplify it? You get rid of things. The complexity comes from these different carved out exceptions. This will ultimately hurt some tax payers and they will fight it.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      That's not what we're suggesting. You get an email from the IRS that looks like so. The best option for you would depend on your circumstances, but you'd be strictly better off having the choice. Hello nonethewiser, We have filled proposed tax returns for you. You may either [Review and pay proposed return] [Submit your own return]
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Other countries have this figured out, but I guess it just must be impossible in the USA. Thank God we have Intuit to help us! No, Intuit's hands are not clean in this, and while corporate taxes might be intrinsically complicated (the information does have to enter the system somewhere), personal taxes are largely not.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    How would you simplify it? The complexity tends to come from rules that create opportunities not to pay taxes. I think any simplification will hurt some tax payers who will fight it out of their own self interest.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  > Taxes were complicated before Intuit existed. What was the cause of that? Well, people using the tax code to encourage certain moral and political views. Whether that's good or not depends on your political stance, and probably even various between particular deductions/credits. But I don't think it's relevant. The tax code is however complicated it is. The point is that the government already knows, more or less, all the right answers. Put that information, in bill form, down, and bill the taxpayer; the commenter above you is also attempting allow for adjustments (such as for things the government might not know about, perhaps like a donation) to permit for the cases the government already know about. The question still stands: why can that not be done, thus freeing most people (whose tax situations are simple) from the burden of needing to file using today's system? To your points about the rules, I think even in a scheme where the government sends a bill, the rules can quite easily change. Most of the rules today fall into either deductions or credits, or how we account for various sources of income. (E.g., normal income vs. capital gains.) That much could stay the same, and then the government can adjust its own accounting.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    You point to the nature of the complications. The complicated bits are opportunities to pay less on taxes. As such, simplifications will always hurt people. It’s not evil Intuit trying to inject complexity into the tax system. It’s lots of taxpayers (individuals and orgs) and acting out of their own self interest. Taxes are just controversial by nature. Every change that raises taxes is going to be opposed by those people who will be taxed more, and when taxes are lowered it will be opposed by a portion of the people that the reduction doesn’t apply to.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      We're talking about US taxes right? The US tax code has lots of places where the complexity is purely happenstance. I think Vox did a piece recently about some of the silliness that's not some loophole helping a few tax payers it's just what happens when a sprawling tax code is appealing to special interests.
    - function_seven 4y ago
- bluGill 4y ago
  For the majority of people taxes were not complex before Intuit. I did my taxes by hand before they were a company. Trump's tax reformed made taxes a lot easier for most people, and before that Regan's tax reforms made taxes a lot easier. At one time the rich in theory paid 90% tax rate, but via deductions that needed an accountant could get their real rate down to the mid 30%. Now most deductions are gone and their real rates are still in the mid 30% range. The rich needing accountants spread the idea that taxes were hard for most people when in fact with basic 4th grade math they were easy for most people. I do use software. while taxes by hand are not hard, the computer doesn't forget to copy line 13b from form 1234 to line 36d of form 9876 - as I did one time. The IRS caught that mistake, but then I had to redo my state taxes, and the whole thing was a pain - all caused by forgetting something a computer does automatically. Tax software makes it seem hard by adding a lot of waits while they calculate. In truth any 8 bit computer could do your taxes in less than a second once the numbers are entered - the rest is just artificial waits to make it seem like it is more complex than it is. That less than a second includes calculating all scenarios to see if you can save money with some deduction or not. The above applies to 90%. There are situations where you need help - but if you don't already have an accountant to help you with your books that isn't you, and taxes are easy.
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    Artificial waits in software are something I have to try hard not to think about, else I get really upset about them.
- jedberg 4y ago
  Taxes were complicated worldwide before Intuit came along, but then computers came along and made it possible to simplify. In the other countries they embraced computers and made it easy for the citizens. In the US Intuit embraced computers and then lobbied to keep it complicated for their profits.
  - zamalek 4y ago
    They also ran a very successful propaganda campaign, it doesn't take long for a "I don't trust the government to do my taxes" proponent to appear when discussing this (despite the fact that they don't have to).
- kelnos 4y ago
  > Taxes were complicated before Intuit existed. [...] Blaming Intuit really seems to oversimplify the situation. Having a complicated tax code certainly makes things difficult in general, but has very little to do with the issue at hand. The IRS could send you an email in March every year, where you click through to their tax portal. It would show you a list of all the income and deductions and other miscellaneous things they know about. If you have extras, or if any data is incorrect, you can click around and add and change things. It might also start with a short questionnaire to ask if any tax-relevant things have changed about your life (change in dependents, change in marital status, etc.). For the vast majority of US taxpayers, they won't have to change a thing, and it would take them minutes to finish up. Yes, there are a lot of rules in the US tax code that can make things complicated. But -- critically -- these things do not apply for the vast majority of taxpayers. For those for whom it does, yes, they will have more work. But it's still going to be less work than the current regime, and none of this precludes having a CPA take care of it for you if you'd prefer that. I suspect even many of us tech-job types wouldn't have much extra to do. The main thing we'd have to fill in ourselves would be cost basis adjustments for RSU vests. (But really, law should be changed so that brokers are required to report that info to the IRS as well; so dumb that it isn't the case.) The IRS could easily keep track of capital loss carryover, AMT credits, etc., over many years if necessary. It feels like the argument is often "this won't 100% work for 20% of taxpayers, so we should make the other 80% suffer... and make the 20% still do more work than they'd otherwise have to do". There are still really just two main reasons we have to do our own taxes: 1. Companies like Intuit who lobby to make it illegal for the IRS to do it for us. 2. Buttholes like Grover Norquist who actively convince people that it's necessary to feel the pain of filing taxes, lest the government slip in new taxes that we don't notice (largest eye-roll in history).
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >The main thing we'd have to fill in ourselves would be cost basis adjustments for RSU vests. The cost basis thing used to be a nightmare. At one point with some old stock that got converted to another company's stock with an acquisition, I just threw up my hands and put in a plausible number. (It wasn't a huge amount of money in the scheme of things.) But these days, the only time I've had to manually provide a cost basis to my accountant was when I was donating some stock.
- wwweston 4y ago
  > You hardly ever see all the rules thrown out in favor of a new system. It takes more buy in than you will ever get. Probably for the same reason that it's rare to see entire codebases scrapped and rebuilt from scratch (and that when you do, it's often the case that you end up with something that isn't an improvement). The judgment behind it has a lot in common with "look at all this terrible complicated code, this could be way simpler, let's just rewrite it." Which also sometimes is hard to get buy-in on, and thank goodness the industry has learned some Chesteron's Fence lessons. The tax code (like other forms of regulation) does stuff, it's a tool for policy as well as revenue, it creates and reshapes incentives. Criticisms of specific things it does or how it does them make sense. Vague criticisms like "cruft" or "complicated" should be for people who don't have a technical or systems mindset. And that's before we get to other points. Like the facts that for most people with some W2 income and a few investments, taxes aren't complicated, the system for filing them is, and the reasons for this are some specialized interests combined with partisans who suppose an advantage to making filing aggravating. And where taxes do require professional involvement, that has as much to do with the complexity inherent in situational judgments as proliferation of rules.
jksmith 4y ago
All this above. Dystopia for you: Track digital exchange or currency at the Fed level, but they still mandate you file a tax return. It's a control mechanism. That and some taxco maybe has a nice condo in the Bahamas for use by friends. It's a whole accounting industry, not just apps. Have to start somewhere I guess, but it won't matter.
freitzkriesler2 4y ago
What's stopping someone from making an app that creates a printable 1040 that you can mail to the IRS? You don't have to digitally submit a tax return.
- mminer237 4y ago
  There are multiple of those. The IRS even provides such itself: https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form... FreeFileUSA lets you e-file your federal taxes for free even. The problem is that most people don't know about such things and don't feel comfortable filling in the needed data anyway. Plus most states have the same requirements and make filing even harder.
dudeinjapan 4y ago
Let's not blame the Inuits.
theonlybutlet 4y ago
A FOSS alternative might break paid software's stranglehold on US congress. Less money = less lobbying or change of focus for these companies, allowing space for actual change later on.

by duped 4y ago

nonethewiser 4y ago

Taxes were complicated before Intuit existed. What was the cause of that? Blaming Intuit really seems to oversimplify the situation. In reality there are many smaller variables but I think the single biggest factor is how regulation works. You hardly ever see all the rules thrown out in favor of a new system. It takes more buy in than you will ever get. Instead you can just add or remove a few things at a time. Over time cruft accumulates.

Kye 4y ago
They lobby to keep the situation as it is against numerous attempts to improve things. 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... https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=intuit https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=intuit
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  That says they lobbied to prevent free filing. There is free filing, so I guess they weren’t effective And don’t have some stranglehold on tax law.
CivBase 4y ago
The problem isn't that taxes are complicated. For most people, they're really not complicated. They're simple enough for most of us that - like OP suggested - the IRS really could just send you a bill calculated from the information they already have and you could just pay what you owe (or deposit what you receive). The minority of tax payers who have more complicated taxes would still have to file returns like they do now. But the overwhelming majority of those people are probably already going through professionals or using commercial software (like Intuit's) - not looking for FOSS tax software to do it themselves.
- ghaff 4y ago
  For the typical person who has a W2 and maybe one of two 1099s, tax filing is really straightforward although the IRS could absolutely make it even more straightforward. And, as you say, most people with moderately complicated taxes where they can't just straightforwardly fill in some obvious boxes are arguably better off using a professional.
belthesar 4y ago
I'm glad you're calling out that the US in general has had a complicated tax situation well before the Intuits and the H&R Blocks of the world came into being. It's easy to look to a singular demon when the problem is complex and generational. However, the callouts for tax return preparation companies lobbying against simplification are still valid. It's also fair to advocate for changing the allocation of energy by the US's IRS from auditing underprivileged folks and slapping them with fines to assisting them in validating that they've met their tax obligations.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  But how do you simplify it? You get rid of things. The complexity comes from these different carved out exceptions. This will ultimately hurt some tax payers and they will fight it.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    That's not what we're suggesting. You get an email from the IRS that looks like so. The best option for you would depend on your circumstances, but you'd be strictly better off having the choice. Hello nonethewiser, We have filled proposed tax returns for you. You may either [Review and pay proposed return] [Submit your own return]
jjoonathan 4y ago
Other countries have this figured out, but I guess it just must be impossible in the USA. Thank God we have Intuit to help us! No, Intuit's hands are not clean in this, and while corporate taxes might be intrinsically complicated (the information does have to enter the system somewhere), personal taxes are largely not.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  How would you simplify it? The complexity tends to come from rules that create opportunities not to pay taxes. I think any simplification will hurt some tax payers who will fight it out of their own self interest.
deathanatos 4y ago
> Taxes were complicated before Intuit existed. What was the cause of that? Well, people using the tax code to encourage certain moral and political views. Whether that's good or not depends on your political stance, and probably even various between particular deductions/credits. But I don't think it's relevant. The tax code is however complicated it is. The point is that the government already knows, more or less, all the right answers. Put that information, in bill form, down, and bill the taxpayer; the commenter above you is also attempting allow for adjustments (such as for things the government might not know about, perhaps like a donation) to permit for the cases the government already know about. The question still stands: why can that not be done, thus freeing most people (whose tax situations are simple) from the burden of needing to file using today's system? To your points about the rules, I think even in a scheme where the government sends a bill, the rules can quite easily change. Most of the rules today fall into either deductions or credits, or how we account for various sources of income. (E.g., normal income vs. capital gains.) That much could stay the same, and then the government can adjust its own accounting.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  You point to the nature of the complications. The complicated bits are opportunities to pay less on taxes. As such, simplifications will always hurt people. It’s not evil Intuit trying to inject complexity into the tax system. It’s lots of taxpayers (individuals and orgs) and acting out of their own self interest. Taxes are just controversial by nature. Every change that raises taxes is going to be opposed by those people who will be taxed more, and when taxes are lowered it will be opposed by a portion of the people that the reduction doesn’t apply to.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    We're talking about US taxes right? The US tax code has lots of places where the complexity is purely happenstance. I think Vox did a piece recently about some of the silliness that's not some loophole helping a few tax payers it's just what happens when a sprawling tax code is appealing to special interests.
  - function_seven 4y ago
bluGill 4y ago
For the majority of people taxes were not complex before Intuit. I did my taxes by hand before they were a company. Trump's tax reformed made taxes a lot easier for most people, and before that Regan's tax reforms made taxes a lot easier. At one time the rich in theory paid 90% tax rate, but via deductions that needed an accountant could get their real rate down to the mid 30%. Now most deductions are gone and their real rates are still in the mid 30% range. The rich needing accountants spread the idea that taxes were hard for most people when in fact with basic 4th grade math they were easy for most people. I do use software. while taxes by hand are not hard, the computer doesn't forget to copy line 13b from form 1234 to line 36d of form 9876 - as I did one time. The IRS caught that mistake, but then I had to redo my state taxes, and the whole thing was a pain - all caused by forgetting something a computer does automatically. Tax software makes it seem hard by adding a lot of waits while they calculate. In truth any 8 bit computer could do your taxes in less than a second once the numbers are entered - the rest is just artificial waits to make it seem like it is more complex than it is. That less than a second includes calculating all scenarios to see if you can save money with some deduction or not. The above applies to 90%. There are situations where you need help - but if you don't already have an accountant to help you with your books that isn't you, and taxes are easy.
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  Artificial waits in software are something I have to try hard not to think about, else I get really upset about them.
jedberg 4y ago
Taxes were complicated worldwide before Intuit came along, but then computers came along and made it possible to simplify. In the other countries they embraced computers and made it easy for the citizens. In the US Intuit embraced computers and then lobbied to keep it complicated for their profits.
- zamalek 4y ago
  They also ran a very successful propaganda campaign, it doesn't take long for a "I don't trust the government to do my taxes" proponent to appear when discussing this (despite the fact that they don't have to).
kelnos 4y ago
> Taxes were complicated before Intuit existed. [...] Blaming Intuit really seems to oversimplify the situation. Having a complicated tax code certainly makes things difficult in general, but has very little to do with the issue at hand. The IRS could send you an email in March every year, where you click through to their tax portal. It would show you a list of all the income and deductions and other miscellaneous things they know about. If you have extras, or if any data is incorrect, you can click around and add and change things. It might also start with a short questionnaire to ask if any tax-relevant things have changed about your life (change in dependents, change in marital status, etc.). For the vast majority of US taxpayers, they won't have to change a thing, and it would take them minutes to finish up. Yes, there are a lot of rules in the US tax code that can make things complicated. But -- critically -- these things do not apply for the vast majority of taxpayers. For those for whom it does, yes, they will have more work. But it's still going to be less work than the current regime, and none of this precludes having a CPA take care of it for you if you'd prefer that. I suspect even many of us tech-job types wouldn't have much extra to do. The main thing we'd have to fill in ourselves would be cost basis adjustments for RSU vests. (But really, law should be changed so that brokers are required to report that info to the IRS as well; so dumb that it isn't the case.) The IRS could easily keep track of capital loss carryover, AMT credits, etc., over many years if necessary. It feels like the argument is often "this won't 100% work for 20% of taxpayers, so we should make the other 80% suffer... and make the 20% still do more work than they'd otherwise have to do". There are still really just two main reasons we have to do our own taxes: 1. Companies like Intuit who lobby to make it illegal for the IRS to do it for us. 2. Buttholes like Grover Norquist who actively convince people that it's necessary to feel the pain of filing taxes, lest the government slip in new taxes that we don't notice (largest eye-roll in history).
- ghaff 4y ago
  >The main thing we'd have to fill in ourselves would be cost basis adjustments for RSU vests. The cost basis thing used to be a nightmare. At one point with some old stock that got converted to another company's stock with an acquisition, I just threw up my hands and put in a plausible number. (It wasn't a huge amount of money in the scheme of things.) But these days, the only time I've had to manually provide a cost basis to my accountant was when I was donating some stock.
wwweston 4y ago
> You hardly ever see all the rules thrown out in favor of a new system. It takes more buy in than you will ever get. Probably for the same reason that it's rare to see entire codebases scrapped and rebuilt from scratch (and that when you do, it's often the case that you end up with something that isn't an improvement). The judgment behind it has a lot in common with "look at all this terrible complicated code, this could be way simpler, let's just rewrite it." Which also sometimes is hard to get buy-in on, and thank goodness the industry has learned some Chesteron's Fence lessons. The tax code (like other forms of regulation) does stuff, it's a tool for policy as well as revenue, it creates and reshapes incentives. Criticisms of specific things it does or how it does them make sense. Vague criticisms like "cruft" or "complicated" should be for people who don't have a technical or systems mindset. And that's before we get to other points. Like the facts that for most people with some W2 income and a few investments, taxes aren't complicated, the system for filing them is, and the reasons for this are some specialized interests combined with partisans who suppose an advantage to making filing aggravating. And where taxes do require professional involvement, that has as much to do with the complexity inherent in situational judgments as proliferation of rules.

jksmith 4y ago

All this above. Dystopia for you: Track digital exchange or currency at the Fed level, but they still mandate you file a tax return. It's a control mechanism. That and some taxco maybe has a nice condo in the Bahamas for use by friends. It's a whole accounting industry, not just apps. Have to start somewhere I guess, but it won't matter.

freitzkriesler2 4y ago

What's stopping someone from making an app that creates a printable 1040 that you can mail to the IRS? You don't have to digitally submit a tax return.

mminer237 4y ago
There are multiple of those. The IRS even provides such itself: https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form... FreeFileUSA lets you e-file your federal taxes for free even. The problem is that most people don't know about such things and don't feel comfortable filling in the needed data anyway. Plus most states have the same requirements and make filing even harder.

dudeinjapan 4y ago

Let's not blame the Inuits.

theonlybutlet 4y ago

A FOSS alternative might break paid software's stranglehold on US congress. Less money = less lobbying or change of focus for these companies, allowing space for actual change later on.