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The entire "tax filing software" industry shouldn't exist. The IRS should be required to maintain its own online filing system, and provide it to all Americans

The entire "tax filing software" industry shouldn't exist. The IRS should be required to maintain its own online filing system, and provide it to all Americans without charge. That costs money? They're literally the revenue service, I'm sure we can find some money for them. That's really the crux of this entire issue. Companies like Intuit have lobbied an industry into existence, and boy oh boy it's lucrative. Pointless "administrative courts" be damned, I like watching Intuit squirm.

idontwantthis 3y ago
Thanks to Biden they are getting $60 billion to modernize. And Republicans have done everything they can to take it back from them.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  60 billion? They need to send a rocket to mars or something?
  - idontwantthis 3y ago
    You can read all about it here https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444
  - raybb 3y ago
    I don't think it's known exactly how the money will be spent but it also includes hiring 87,000 new IRS agents. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/with-new-agents-heres-who-the-irs-may-target-for-audits.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/with-new-agents-heres-who-th...
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      So modernization means adding more human machines in 2023?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - thedufer 3y ago
        The original comment was confusing - they're getting $60B, and also have a mandate to modernize. Only a minority of that money is actually being spent on the modernization. Most of it is being spent on additional auditing of tax returns - it's well known that every $1 spent on audits brings in more than $1 of additional revenue, and we're nowhere near the breakeven point. It's expected that the additional auditing will pay for itself several times over - even if you count the modernization spend against it as well, the government will see a large ROI on this $60B (they're expecting additional revenue of over $200B from the extra auditing).
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    The vast majority of that money will go to hire more staff to pursue multi-millionaire tax dodgers, not to modernise the tech, so the previous comment was pretty misleading. The tech modernisation is supposed to cost about $2.5 billion over a decade or so. Just for rough numbers that's about what 1,000 developers would cost. That sounds like a lot but the IRS claims they need to rewrite 600 different applications, most of which are at least 20 years old. And the Individual Master File (IMF) is 60 years old. No idea what the systems are and I doubt each one of those 600 will take the full 5+ years. But you could see how they could pretty quickly get to needing hundreds and hundreds of developers for years at a stretch. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3744.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3744.pdf Looking over their tech modernisation plan ("Objective 4") in Publication 3744 they have a lot of work so the number is high but not like insanely impossibly high.
    - idontwantthis 3y ago
      I didn’t mean to sound like it’s $60 billion on tech. They are getting $60 billion, and they will modernize. Also projected to earn $200 billion over the same timeframe thanks to finally having the resources to catch cheating millionaires.
- knubie 3y ago
  $60 billion is a lot of money. How much do Americans actually spend on tax prep per year?
  - idontwantthis 3y ago
    It’s $60 billion over several years and most of it goes towards enforcement so that the wealthiest Americans won’t be allowed to cheat on their taxes anymore.
    - firebat45 3y ago
      The way that the wealthiest Americans cheat on their taxes is by utilizing loopholes, not by breaking the law. You don't fix that with enforcement.
      - tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
        Often that "loophole" is making themselves too expensive or difficult to prosecute rather than finding an actual hole in the laws.
- thunky 3y ago
  The tax system will continue to get more and more complex. It's great news for Intuit.
TheGRS 3y ago
I don’t think logical reasoning is the problem in this situation, it’s a lobby issue.
andrewia 3y ago
It looks like the IRS is moving to test their own preparing/filing software for the 2023 tax year. Hopefully in 4-5 years, TurboTax and HR Block will only be needed for people with complicated tax situations, while the remaining 90% of the population can use the IRS's application. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/irs-moves-forward-with-a-new-free-file-tax-return-system-that-has-both-supporters-and-critics-mobilizing https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/irs-moves-forward-with...
- mgiampapa 3y ago
  No one with a complicated tax situation should ever consider H&R Block, it's almost monkey and a dartboard level of skilled tax prep. TurboTax at least you can drive and as a semi-educated tax payer do it right. Everyone is looking forward to the IRS providing a baseline service except the tax industry.
ekianjo 3y ago
> The IRS should be required to maintain its own online filing system, and provide it to all Americans without charge. Sure but if you let the government do it you can be 100 % sure it will be the worst software ever designed. They have no incentive to make it good. You know the drill.
- Vanit 3y ago
  The one the govt made in Australia isn't half bad, though mygov was rough when it launched.
  - jalapenos 3y ago
    Yeah I remember the days when their e-filing system was you had to download that year's desktop app. But it was still decent. The purely online based one now is very decent.
  - mianos 3y ago
    You used to be able to make small business filings on their portal as well. Then it got too hard when they spent a few years making many many more rules. They then mandated you use a third party to file things like employee payments saying there would be free or cheap software to do this and listed a few. Over time the free or low cost became more and more costly for something you have to submit to them by law. It is a difficult issue as most of the government IT are straight up incompetent. (Just last week they gave up on a project after spending $2 Billion AUD). The private industry would likely do a better job but then some people get rich, as opposed to a whole bunch more getting paid for what ends up in the bin.
- nly 3y ago
  The UK manage this and we're completely dysfunctional in many ways. Doing your taxes via self assessment is free and takes about 30mins to an hour online via HMRC. Most people also go their entire lives without "doing their taxes"
  - moomin 3y ago
jalapenos 3y ago
Amen. Australia is a good example. All online via their government website. Basically a glorified multi-page form, but it's autofilled with any data they've already received (e.g. salary paid and tax withheld by employers), and there's lots of guidance. On the otherhand, in Japan they're just in the early days of doing e-tax (borderline unusable and still easier to paper file). But for those who even have to file (most people don't), you can fill in a one page paper form and drop it in the mail. Whenever I see these articles about "turbotax" and whatever, I roll my eyes, same as whenever a discussion about "tips" starts up. It's completely OK to take the best ideas from other countries and make them your own. It doesn't take anything from your own culture, and in fact frees up resources to do more of your own culture.
- kahnclusions 3y ago
  The UK is also a pretty good example. For the vast majority of people paid through PAYE, their tax reporting, withholdings and refunds are completely automatic. You only start having to file a tax return when you earn above £100k, and even then you can do it online for free at the government’s website. Intuit as a business should not exist. Congress needs to make tax filing free and as automated as possible. I’ll be happy to see Sasan run out of business.
  - twic 3y ago
    Although given that the Australian version is "autofilled with any data they've already received (e.g. salary paid and tax withheld by employers)", it's definitely not as good an example as them. The UK system requires you to do a lot of working out yourself, including if you have crossed certain complicated thresholds related to pension contributions.
  - Amezarak 3y ago
    It is very easy to pay nothing for tax filing in the US. There are multiple genuinely free e-file providers and most people could easily file their taxes themselves on paper. That said, while I agree the IRS situation can be dramatically improved - move the Free Fillable Forms program to the irs.gov domain instead of just linking to it, for starters, or just buy out one of the extant free programs and incorporate it - takes like this miss a lot of important factors. 1. US taxpayers are filing federal and state taxes. The state tax revenue agencies are completely independent of the IRS. While free federal filing would be nice, you've only solved no-more-than 50% of my problem. (Many people have to file in multiple states.) 2. This is relatively well known, but the US tax code is generally more complicated than many other countries. This isn't so much of a problem except that US taxpayers are obsessed with making sure the government doesn't get one over on them. They are always on the lookout for deductions and credits, frequently that they may not even be actually eligible for. I personally know a lot of people who have illegitimately claimed commuting mileage on their taxes, for example. So the complexity is a desired feature, not something you can just remove without consequence. 3. Because of the US federal system and US privacy rights, most countries collect much more information about their citizens than the US federal government. The IRS and the US federal government do not even know where you live until you tell it; unlike many countries, there is no such thing as registering with the government when you move. They don't know what, if any, children you actually have living with you - which at $2000 tax credit per kid, is extremely important information when calculating your tax bill. Remember that even a national ID program was/is extremely controversial in the US. So to have automatic tax prep that's even close to correct entails collecting reams of information the government does not currently have. You could maybe make a start by re-using information from last year, sure...but that's going to be inaccurate in a lot of cases which will then cause it's own problems - people incorrectly not applying for credits they should have and you don't know to correct them, and people realizing they can probably get one over on the IRS. 4. This is an issue that mostly affects educated upper-middle class people, not lower income people. I have struggled to convince most lower income people to use free! tax prep software at all. Most of them are paying companies and individuals to do their taxes, convinced that some guy with an office has the power to arm-wrestle the IRS and get them more back on their tax refund than anyone else via secret loopholes that don't exist on the 1040EZ. (They are wrong, except to the degree the less circumspect filers definitely commit lots of tax fraud.) You will never, ever convince these people to use the IRS website to file their taxes - that's walking into the enemy camp, in their minds. On top of this, they are convinced that making a tiny mistake on their taxes will result in severe fines and penalties and possibly imprisonment, despite the fact the IRS generally is very amenable to working with you. (Mostly. One guy I know was forced to pay his taxes twice because the IRS refused to accept the payment they had on record as payment, because whoever processed it did so wrongly somehow.)
smitty1e 3y ago
Jonah Golberg notes: "Complexity is a subsidy." The U.S. tax code is a canonical example. It is astounding to compose this reply on a smart phone in a country with such a Byzantine train wreck of a tax system. The situation would border on acceptable if the tax system actually did a coherent job of funding the government. However, the arterial bleeding that is the government's deficit spending habit can only be said to have a notional relationship to the tax code. Rather, the tax code seems to exist as a means to sculpt societal behavior. Those who read HN and have some insights into stabile systems need to be thought leaders in reforming this mess. /rant
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Intuit has lobbied against policies that would simplify the tax code. They have enormous financial incentive to make people believe that taxes are hard and must be hard. Just look at the new "don't do your taxes" schtick they've been pushing since this lawsuit got off the ground.
  - smitty1e 3y ago
    This is a textbook example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Yeah, I realized a long time ago that all federal income taxes do is cancel out a portion of the money supply to keep inflation in check.
bdzr 3y ago
> Companies like Intuit have lobbied an industry into existence Did they lobby an industry into existence, or did they beat the government at providing value to their own esoteric system by 15 or more years, and then lobby to keep their standing? I don't doubt the company is awful, but they're as popular as they are for more reasons than lobbying. At the time, they made one of the worst annual experiences fairly pain free. I never understood the idea that the government ought to write their own e-filing software when others already exist, and quite affordably so; I usually get free tax filing from some TurboTax competitor (last year it was CashApp).
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Well, there's also a faction in the government who will protest against taxes by making paying them as painful as possible. It's not just lobbying by the companies which benefit from filling the gap deliberately produced by this.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  The government paid them to provide this service.
- csallen 3y ago
  > I never understood the idea that the government ought to write their own e-filing software when others already exist This is the most baffling take I've read on this subject. The IRS are the ones we're submitting our tax forms to in the first place. Why on earth shouldn't they have their own e-filing service for the information they're requesting from us? Plus they already have a ton of data on everyone's income and taxes paid throughout the year, so they can largely pre-fill these forms for us, saving us time and preventing mistakes. Why on earth wouldn't we want that?
  - Macha 3y ago
    And they also largely do _do_ these calculations, so they can threaten you with legal liability if you're too far off their calculated value.
- 3y ago
hereme888 3y ago
And you would trust the IRS software to provide all the savings possible? Their job is literally to collect as much money as possible from people to cover for the that new $520MM Biden pledged to give Ukraine for green energy, lol.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  What OP is proposing is how most of the modern world handles tax collection. > Their job is literally to collect as much money as possible from people The tax code clearly dictates how much is owed by each individual. Now a private company like TurboTax is literally out to get as much money as possible because that's how private companies work.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Their job is literally to collect money owed to the government based on income. If one is making all their income from wages it is not complicated to figure out. I'm sure people will test it and write about the accuracy. And nothing is stopping you from using a private tax prep option. Regarding your knee-jerk partisanship: I don't think it's going to directly to Biden and Ukraine yet, the country is still paying off Donald's 2020 trillions of dollars in gifts to corporations that already had three years with enough tax cut money to do massive stock buybacks.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  I pity the fool who trusts Intuit to offer a quality product in a market with a captive and serially misinformed audience. Then again, it seems like you'd fall into the latter category. I don't care how you file your taxes, but take off the tinfoil hat, people are staring.
- sophacles 3y ago
  Even if I didn't trust the bureaucrats to follow their nature and apply the rules, I still want this. It's not like I couldn't still get a CPA or additional tax software to find problems. The IRS literally already has 90%+ of the information I need to gather and manually enter already - there's no reason for them not to provide a prefilled tax form as a starting point. Its just the Intuit (et al) are just a bunch of rent-seeking leeches that lobby to keep their obsolete business model relevant by law.
GuB-42 3y ago
The argument against it, and the one companies like Intuit are using is that the government has incentives to make people pay more, for example by making it easy to miss deductibles. Private companies incentives is to save their customer money by not paying more taxes than they should, because that's where the value of their product lie. I don't live in the US, so I don't know how things are done there. I live in France and we have a rather good government website, doing my taxes takes me less than an hour, but my situation is simple as I am an employee with very little deductibles. Most self employed people I know hire an accountant.
- wizerdrobe 3y ago
  I’m all for using a private accountant to handle taxes, but boy does TurboTax shit the bed on anything more complicated than a 1099. Sold a house and had a disbursement from an LLC this past year and TurboTax was under the impression we owed capital gains and a massive penalty. We opted in to their tax expert add on, a nice woman with twelve (12) years of expert experience! She also claimed we owed capital gains and her source for this statement was a blogspam link to a Myrtle Beach real estate agent detail how taxes work for OUT-of-staters. Not a factor for a lifelong resident and in any case I was shocked and appalled that this so-called expert cited me a f*cking WordPress blog for taxation resulting in a steep 5-figure sum being due. Our new, beloved, local accountant has our taxes done in an afternoon and we saw a nice refund this year (God bless the child tax credits.) So while Intuit may have a theoretical incentive they sure seem to be a lot more of a Comcast duty of care.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    Yeah, they should have a membership to NATP so they can ask questions to a pool of actual experts if they don't already know the answer. Tax professionals in the US just want to bill as much as possible and get the return out the door as fast as possible. All of their business is compressed into three months out of the year. I worked in a tax prep business my family had for over 40 years. We fixed CPA trainwrecks and H&R Block Block/Jackson Hewitt knightmares for a living. Constantly batting down customer scams in the process.
- 3y ago
jussij 3y ago
> Companies like Intuit have lobbied an industry into existence, and boy oh boy it's lucrative. Nearly every public facing industry lobbies Congress to protect their industries at the expense of the USA citizen. One of the worst offenders is the US drug industry. In Australia, our government can buy the exact same US drugs at a 79% to 306% (the average is 149%) discount to what American citizens have to pay. This only happens because or government barters with these pharmaceutical companies and gets a massive volume discount. Thanks to Congress, these exact same volume discounts are not allowed and in fact there are laws in place that forbid the US government asking for any form of volume discount. This means USA citizens pay way over the full price for their prescription drugs, thanks to restrictive laws designed to hurt the US citizen and protect these companies. Biden finally managed to force Congress's hand and soon the US government will be allowed to barter for a better price, but he only managed to get a change that happens in 2026. For the next two years American citizen will still be getting ripped off by these drug companies. What is worse, most of the America population doesn't even realize Biden managed to bring about these changes, and no doubt should the GOP win in 2024 there's a chance those law changes might be reversed. I have a good idea which candidates these drug companies will be supporting in 2024.
- christophilus 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s so cut and dry. Anecdotally, the Republican base is pretty skeptical of drug companies after COVID. It’s been a weird change to watch. For most of my life it’s been my left wing and / or hippie friends who were super skeptical of the drug industry. Today, it’s a tossup between them and my right wing friends as to who is more anti big-pharma.
imrehg 3y ago
Taiwan does e-tax, and it's pretty decent. Can use some internet banking / investment system credentials to log in, as well as your national health insurance card, as well as digital citizen certificate. Download all your central data of taxes witheld or paid on your behalf, fill in a few details, and off to the races. Except last time I've checked, even the English version needed a Windows system with Chinese characters to run properly (not even any of the Traditional Chinese, say Unicode, but some specific one). Also, there are printed paper bits to file sometimes in the end. Nonetheless it's still good to have something "blessed", and it's also evolving.
amelius 3y ago
Don't worry, soon an army of LLM-based tax lawyers will eat their lunch.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  I was in the business for 30 years and I very much agree. Tax prep is a lucrative service because people refuse to read the manual. It is not hard if you can read and follow directions. If you are lucky enough to be more than a wage slave you need a strategy that is being executed all year...that strategy is based on tax code and you will likely have an advisor plotting this all out anyway until you get it down pat.
stusmall 3y ago
> That costs money? They're literally the revenue service, I'm sure we can find some money for them. I completely agree but I think its worth pointing out the recent controversy over better funding the IRS. Better funding the system to catch tax cheats makes it more fair, helps the middle/lower classes and is revenue positive and somehow that caused outrage. Some folks just don't have any interest in a functional system. It's always been the case but sadly these days they seem to have moved from the fringe to the mainstream.
- m463 3y ago
  There's also a few more points. 1) When Ron Paul ran for office, they thought he was out of his mind when he said the IRS could be abolished. Until you realize that personal income taxes didn't exist before 1913, and started out at 1% revenue. 2) Many people are worried that when citizens are taken out-of-the-loop when filing their income taxes, that the amount of tax will increase dramatically without scrutiny.
cyanydeez 3y ago
The politics of hating the tax system is too valuable.

idontwantthis 3y ago

Thanks to Biden they are getting $60 billion to modernize. And Republicans have done everything they can to take it back from them.

ekianjo 3y ago
60 billion? They need to send a rocket to mars or something?
- idontwantthis 3y ago
  You can read all about it here https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444
- raybb 3y ago
  I don't think it's known exactly how the money will be spent but it also includes hiring 87,000 new IRS agents. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/with-new-agents-heres-who-the-irs-may-target-for-audits.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/with-new-agents-heres-who-th...
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    So modernization means adding more human machines in 2023?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - thedufer 3y ago
      The original comment was confusing - they're getting $60B, and also have a mandate to modernize. Only a minority of that money is actually being spent on the modernization. Most of it is being spent on additional auditing of tax returns - it's well known that every $1 spent on audits brings in more than $1 of additional revenue, and we're nowhere near the breakeven point. It's expected that the additional auditing will pay for itself several times over - even if you count the modernization spend against it as well, the government will see a large ROI on this $60B (they're expecting additional revenue of over $200B from the extra auditing).
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
  The vast majority of that money will go to hire more staff to pursue multi-millionaire tax dodgers, not to modernise the tech, so the previous comment was pretty misleading. The tech modernisation is supposed to cost about $2.5 billion over a decade or so. Just for rough numbers that's about what 1,000 developers would cost. That sounds like a lot but the IRS claims they need to rewrite 600 different applications, most of which are at least 20 years old. And the Individual Master File (IMF) is 60 years old. No idea what the systems are and I doubt each one of those 600 will take the full 5+ years. But you could see how they could pretty quickly get to needing hundreds and hundreds of developers for years at a stretch. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3744.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3744.pdf Looking over their tech modernisation plan ("Objective 4") in Publication 3744 they have a lot of work so the number is high but not like insanely impossibly high.
  - idontwantthis 3y ago
    I didn’t mean to sound like it’s $60 billion on tech. They are getting $60 billion, and they will modernize. Also projected to earn $200 billion over the same timeframe thanks to finally having the resources to catch cheating millionaires.
knubie 3y ago
$60 billion is a lot of money. How much do Americans actually spend on tax prep per year?
- idontwantthis 3y ago
  It’s $60 billion over several years and most of it goes towards enforcement so that the wealthiest Americans won’t be allowed to cheat on their taxes anymore.
  - firebat45 3y ago
    The way that the wealthiest Americans cheat on their taxes is by utilizing loopholes, not by breaking the law. You don't fix that with enforcement.
    - tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
      Often that "loophole" is making themselves too expensive or difficult to prosecute rather than finding an actual hole in the laws.
thunky 3y ago
The tax system will continue to get more and more complex. It's great news for Intuit.

TheGRS 3y ago

I don’t think logical reasoning is the problem in this situation, it’s a lobby issue.

andrewia 3y ago

It looks like the IRS is moving to test their own preparing/filing software for the 2023 tax year. Hopefully in 4-5 years, TurboTax and HR Block will only be needed for people with complicated tax situations, while the remaining 90% of the population can use the IRS's application. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/irs-moves-forward-with-a-new-free-file-tax-return-system-that-has-both-supporters-and-critics-mobilizing https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/irs-moves-forward-with...

mgiampapa 3y ago
No one with a complicated tax situation should ever consider H&R Block, it's almost monkey and a dartboard level of skilled tax prep. TurboTax at least you can drive and as a semi-educated tax payer do it right. Everyone is looking forward to the IRS providing a baseline service except the tax industry.

ekianjo 3y ago

> The IRS should be required to maintain its own online filing system, and provide it to all Americans without charge. Sure but if you let the government do it you can be 100 % sure it will be the worst software ever designed. They have no incentive to make it good. You know the drill.

Vanit 3y ago
The one the govt made in Australia isn't half bad, though mygov was rough when it launched.
- jalapenos 3y ago
  Yeah I remember the days when their e-filing system was you had to download that year's desktop app. But it was still decent. The purely online based one now is very decent.
- mianos 3y ago
  You used to be able to make small business filings on their portal as well. Then it got too hard when they spent a few years making many many more rules. They then mandated you use a third party to file things like employee payments saying there would be free or cheap software to do this and listed a few. Over time the free or low cost became more and more costly for something you have to submit to them by law. It is a difficult issue as most of the government IT are straight up incompetent. (Just last week they gave up on a project after spending $2 Billion AUD). The private industry would likely do a better job but then some people get rich, as opposed to a whole bunch more getting paid for what ends up in the bin.
nly 3y ago
The UK manage this and we're completely dysfunctional in many ways. Doing your taxes via self assessment is free and takes about 30mins to an hour online via HMRC. Most people also go their entire lives without "doing their taxes"
- moomin 3y ago

jalapenos 3y ago

Amen. Australia is a good example. All online via their government website. Basically a glorified multi-page form, but it's autofilled with any data they've already received (e.g. salary paid and tax withheld by employers), and there's lots of guidance. On the otherhand, in Japan they're just in the early days of doing e-tax (borderline unusable and still easier to paper file). But for those who even have to file (most people don't), you can fill in a one page paper form and drop it in the mail. Whenever I see these articles about "turbotax" and whatever, I roll my eyes, same as whenever a discussion about "tips" starts up. It's completely OK to take the best ideas from other countries and make them your own. It doesn't take anything from your own culture, and in fact frees up resources to do more of your own culture.

kahnclusions 3y ago
The UK is also a pretty good example. For the vast majority of people paid through PAYE, their tax reporting, withholdings and refunds are completely automatic. You only start having to file a tax return when you earn above £100k, and even then you can do it online for free at the government’s website. Intuit as a business should not exist. Congress needs to make tax filing free and as automated as possible. I’ll be happy to see Sasan run out of business.
- twic 3y ago
  Although given that the Australian version is "autofilled with any data they've already received (e.g. salary paid and tax withheld by employers)", it's definitely not as good an example as them. The UK system requires you to do a lot of working out yourself, including if you have crossed certain complicated thresholds related to pension contributions.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  It is very easy to pay nothing for tax filing in the US. There are multiple genuinely free e-file providers and most people could easily file their taxes themselves on paper. That said, while I agree the IRS situation can be dramatically improved - move the Free Fillable Forms program to the irs.gov domain instead of just linking to it, for starters, or just buy out one of the extant free programs and incorporate it - takes like this miss a lot of important factors. 1. US taxpayers are filing federal and state taxes. The state tax revenue agencies are completely independent of the IRS. While free federal filing would be nice, you've only solved no-more-than 50% of my problem. (Many people have to file in multiple states.) 2. This is relatively well known, but the US tax code is generally more complicated than many other countries. This isn't so much of a problem except that US taxpayers are obsessed with making sure the government doesn't get one over on them. They are always on the lookout for deductions and credits, frequently that they may not even be actually eligible for. I personally know a lot of people who have illegitimately claimed commuting mileage on their taxes, for example. So the complexity is a desired feature, not something you can just remove without consequence. 3. Because of the US federal system and US privacy rights, most countries collect much more information about their citizens than the US federal government. The IRS and the US federal government do not even know where you live until you tell it; unlike many countries, there is no such thing as registering with the government when you move. They don't know what, if any, children you actually have living with you - which at $2000 tax credit per kid, is extremely important information when calculating your tax bill. Remember that even a national ID program was/is extremely controversial in the US. So to have automatic tax prep that's even close to correct entails collecting reams of information the government does not currently have. You could maybe make a start by re-using information from last year, sure...but that's going to be inaccurate in a lot of cases which will then cause it's own problems - people incorrectly not applying for credits they should have and you don't know to correct them, and people realizing they can probably get one over on the IRS. 4. This is an issue that mostly affects educated upper-middle class people, not lower income people. I have struggled to convince most lower income people to use free! tax prep software at all. Most of them are paying companies and individuals to do their taxes, convinced that some guy with an office has the power to arm-wrestle the IRS and get them more back on their tax refund than anyone else via secret loopholes that don't exist on the 1040EZ. (They are wrong, except to the degree the less circumspect filers definitely commit lots of tax fraud.) You will never, ever convince these people to use the IRS website to file their taxes - that's walking into the enemy camp, in their minds. On top of this, they are convinced that making a tiny mistake on their taxes will result in severe fines and penalties and possibly imprisonment, despite the fact the IRS generally is very amenable to working with you. (Mostly. One guy I know was forced to pay his taxes twice because the IRS refused to accept the payment they had on record as payment, because whoever processed it did so wrongly somehow.)

smitty1e 3y ago

Jonah Golberg notes: "Complexity is a subsidy." The U.S. tax code is a canonical example. It is astounding to compose this reply on a smart phone in a country with such a Byzantine train wreck of a tax system. The situation would border on acceptable if the tax system actually did a coherent job of funding the government. However, the arterial bleeding that is the government's deficit spending habit can only be said to have a notional relationship to the tax code. Rather, the tax code seems to exist as a means to sculpt societal behavior. Those who read HN and have some insights into stabile systems need to be thought leaders in reforming this mess. /rant

ryukoposting 3y ago
Intuit has lobbied against policies that would simplify the tax code. They have enormous financial incentive to make people believe that taxes are hard and must be hard. Just look at the new "don't do your taxes" schtick they've been pushing since this lawsuit got off the ground.
- smitty1e 3y ago
  This is a textbook example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
datavirtue 3y ago
Yeah, I realized a long time ago that all federal income taxes do is cancel out a portion of the money supply to keep inflation in check.

bdzr 3y ago

> Companies like Intuit have lobbied an industry into existence Did they lobby an industry into existence, or did they beat the government at providing value to their own esoteric system by 15 or more years, and then lobby to keep their standing? I don't doubt the company is awful, but they're as popular as they are for more reasons than lobbying. At the time, they made one of the worst annual experiences fairly pain free. I never understood the idea that the government ought to write their own e-filing software when others already exist, and quite affordably so; I usually get free tax filing from some TurboTax competitor (last year it was CashApp).

rcxdude 3y ago
Well, there's also a faction in the government who will protest against taxes by making paying them as painful as possible. It's not just lobbying by the companies which benefit from filling the gap deliberately produced by this.
chris_wot 3y ago
The government paid them to provide this service.
csallen 3y ago
> I never understood the idea that the government ought to write their own e-filing software when others already exist This is the most baffling take I've read on this subject. The IRS are the ones we're submitting our tax forms to in the first place. Why on earth shouldn't they have their own e-filing service for the information they're requesting from us? Plus they already have a ton of data on everyone's income and taxes paid throughout the year, so they can largely pre-fill these forms for us, saving us time and preventing mistakes. Why on earth wouldn't we want that?
- Macha 3y ago
  And they also largely do _do_ these calculations, so they can threaten you with legal liability if you're too far off their calculated value.
3y ago

hereme888 3y ago

And you would trust the IRS software to provide all the savings possible? Their job is literally to collect as much money as possible from people to cover for the that new $520MM Biden pledged to give Ukraine for green energy, lol.

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
What OP is proposing is how most of the modern world handles tax collection. > Their job is literally to collect as much money as possible from people The tax code clearly dictates how much is owed by each individual. Now a private company like TurboTax is literally out to get as much money as possible because that's how private companies work.
plagiarist 3y ago
Their job is literally to collect money owed to the government based on income. If one is making all their income from wages it is not complicated to figure out. I'm sure people will test it and write about the accuracy. And nothing is stopping you from using a private tax prep option. Regarding your knee-jerk partisanship: I don't think it's going to directly to Biden and Ukraine yet, the country is still paying off Donald's 2020 trillions of dollars in gifts to corporations that already had three years with enough tax cut money to do massive stock buybacks.
ryukoposting 3y ago
I pity the fool who trusts Intuit to offer a quality product in a market with a captive and serially misinformed audience. Then again, it seems like you'd fall into the latter category. I don't care how you file your taxes, but take off the tinfoil hat, people are staring.
sophacles 3y ago
Even if I didn't trust the bureaucrats to follow their nature and apply the rules, I still want this. It's not like I couldn't still get a CPA or additional tax software to find problems. The IRS literally already has 90%+ of the information I need to gather and manually enter already - there's no reason for them not to provide a prefilled tax form as a starting point. Its just the Intuit (et al) are just a bunch of rent-seeking leeches that lobby to keep their obsolete business model relevant by law.

GuB-42 3y ago

The argument against it, and the one companies like Intuit are using is that the government has incentives to make people pay more, for example by making it easy to miss deductibles. Private companies incentives is to save their customer money by not paying more taxes than they should, because that's where the value of their product lie. I don't live in the US, so I don't know how things are done there. I live in France and we have a rather good government website, doing my taxes takes me less than an hour, but my situation is simple as I am an employee with very little deductibles. Most self employed people I know hire an accountant.

wizerdrobe 3y ago
I’m all for using a private accountant to handle taxes, but boy does TurboTax shit the bed on anything more complicated than a 1099. Sold a house and had a disbursement from an LLC this past year and TurboTax was under the impression we owed capital gains and a massive penalty. We opted in to their tax expert add on, a nice woman with twelve (12) years of expert experience! She also claimed we owed capital gains and her source for this statement was a blogspam link to a Myrtle Beach real estate agent detail how taxes work for OUT-of-staters. Not a factor for a lifelong resident and in any case I was shocked and appalled that this so-called expert cited me a f*cking WordPress blog for taxation resulting in a steep 5-figure sum being due. Our new, beloved, local accountant has our taxes done in an afternoon and we saw a nice refund this year (God bless the child tax credits.) So while Intuit may have a theoretical incentive they sure seem to be a lot more of a Comcast duty of care.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Yeah, they should have a membership to NATP so they can ask questions to a pool of actual experts if they don't already know the answer. Tax professionals in the US just want to bill as much as possible and get the return out the door as fast as possible. All of their business is compressed into three months out of the year. I worked in a tax prep business my family had for over 40 years. We fixed CPA trainwrecks and H&R Block Block/Jackson Hewitt knightmares for a living. Constantly batting down customer scams in the process.
3y ago

jussij 3y ago

> Companies like Intuit have lobbied an industry into existence, and boy oh boy it's lucrative. Nearly every public facing industry lobbies Congress to protect their industries at the expense of the USA citizen. One of the worst offenders is the US drug industry. In Australia, our government can buy the exact same US drugs at a 79% to 306% (the average is 149%) discount to what American citizens have to pay. This only happens because or government barters with these pharmaceutical companies and gets a massive volume discount. Thanks to Congress, these exact same volume discounts are not allowed and in fact there are laws in place that forbid the US government asking for any form of volume discount. This means USA citizens pay way over the full price for their prescription drugs, thanks to restrictive laws designed to hurt the US citizen and protect these companies. Biden finally managed to force Congress's hand and soon the US government will be allowed to barter for a better price, but he only managed to get a change that happens in 2026. For the next two years American citizen will still be getting ripped off by these drug companies. What is worse, most of the America population doesn't even realize Biden managed to bring about these changes, and no doubt should the GOP win in 2024 there's a chance those law changes might be reversed. I have a good idea which candidates these drug companies will be supporting in 2024.

christophilus 3y ago
I don’t think it’s so cut and dry. Anecdotally, the Republican base is pretty skeptical of drug companies after COVID. It’s been a weird change to watch. For most of my life it’s been my left wing and / or hippie friends who were super skeptical of the drug industry. Today, it’s a tossup between them and my right wing friends as to who is more anti big-pharma.

imrehg 3y ago

Taiwan does e-tax, and it's pretty decent. Can use some internet banking / investment system credentials to log in, as well as your national health insurance card, as well as digital citizen certificate. Download all your central data of taxes witheld or paid on your behalf, fill in a few details, and off to the races. Except last time I've checked, even the English version needed a Windows system with Chinese characters to run properly (not even any of the Traditional Chinese, say Unicode, but some specific one). Also, there are printed paper bits to file sometimes in the end. Nonetheless it's still good to have something "blessed", and it's also evolving.

amelius 3y ago

Don't worry, soon an army of LLM-based tax lawyers will eat their lunch.

datavirtue 3y ago
I was in the business for 30 years and I very much agree. Tax prep is a lucrative service because people refuse to read the manual. It is not hard if you can read and follow directions. If you are lucky enough to be more than a wage slave you need a strategy that is being executed all year...that strategy is based on tax code and you will likely have an advisor plotting this all out anyway until you get it down pat.

stusmall 3y ago

> That costs money? They're literally the revenue service, I'm sure we can find some money for them. I completely agree but I think its worth pointing out the recent controversy over better funding the IRS. Better funding the system to catch tax cheats makes it more fair, helps the middle/lower classes and is revenue positive and somehow that caused outrage. Some folks just don't have any interest in a functional system. It's always been the case but sadly these days they seem to have moved from the fringe to the mainstream.

m463 3y ago
There's also a few more points. 1) When Ron Paul ran for office, they thought he was out of his mind when he said the IRS could be abolished. Until you realize that personal income taxes didn't exist before 1913, and started out at 1% revenue. 2) Many people are worried that when citizens are taken out-of-the-loop when filing their income taxes, that the amount of tax will increase dramatically without scrutiny.

cyanydeez 3y ago

The politics of hating the tax system is too valuable.