9 ms·

> A spokeswoman for Intuit, Tania Mercado, criticized the direct file project as a “half-baked solution” and a waste of taxpayer money. “The direct file scheme

> A spokeswoman for Intuit, Tania Mercado, criticized the direct file project as a “half-baked solution” and a waste of taxpayer money. “The direct file scheme is a solution in search of a problem,” she said. Wow, I thought that Intuit would have gone for a little more subtlety.

jacobyoder 3y ago
...and Intuit knows a thing or two about "half-baked solutions". ;)
idiotsecant 3y ago
On the plus side, intuit saying something like this is exactly what I want to hear regarding a program like this. I would have been deeply suspicious if they were anything other than enthusiastically opposed to it.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Or they’re saying this because they know the IRS effort doesn’t have competent people on it (think what happened with the healthcare website when it launched) and is just prepping the waters for a “see we were telling you along this was a bad idea” criticism for congress people to spike it later. It’s really hard to intuit the strategy being employed so best to just ignore them altogether. And if this turns into a partisan issue at all (which an unclean launch might because people are dumb about government tech in the US), then expect the Trump administration to kill this if they win to prevent this from becoming entrenched and popular like Obamacare is.
  - downut 3y ago
    I've used the US Free File Federal Taxes for the last five years and it just wasn't a problem, and I have yet to see anything that looked like programmer incompetence. Now, that said, the way you debug your submittal is to paste an entire page of error gibberish that looks like very low level database error output into an entry box they point you to. Sounds gross! Ewwwww! Well actually I've been debugging c++ templates since forever and hohum it doesn't bother me. However... every single time it decoded the problem and told me exactly what I needed to do. It has taken me 2-4 tries each year to get it debugged and then it sails right through. The final result I've fed into two different state forms and that has sailed right through too. All free, and not that much of my time. Now if they can get the UI for normies painless, which I suspect is the main programming problem (I don't say that UI programming is trivial), this will take off like a rocket ship and the US can the join the coterie of civilized nations that do this for all their citizens.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      If you're referring to Free Fillable Forms, the error messages are not DB errors, but "business logic rules errors". They do look like gibberish, but buried inside them is a code that can generally give a pretty clue as to the error. I agree that it would be much nicer if they said "The amount of line 29 of Form ABCD does not appear at line 18 of Form WXYZ". Even nicer if you never had to manually transfer amounts between forms.
      - downut 3y ago
        Oh yes I am sorry; I didn't mean to imply that I thought that the DB was throwing an error. What the filing process email message body stated looked something like approximately "Form line xxx violates schema requirement such and such: <more gibberish>". I was thinking when I scanned the message was that I bet I could reverse engineer the problem from this back end generated text but why not do what the instructions say and just feed it into the parser box? And every time the next email message gave me exactly the thing I needed to do. It was cool, for a weird sort of nerd. So no, I was casting shade where the process was right in the sunlight: I made the mistake, and the business logic caught it, and told me correctly every time what I needed to do to fix it. I liked the whole process a lot.
        PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        Yeah, me too! Been using FFF for about 8 years now.
crazydoggers 3y ago
This is why we still have the income tax system that we do. It’s a $14 billion a year industry. I’ve talked to people who work the lobbying system very hard. There’s lots of wining and dining to make sure no one messes with the complexity of the system. We need more people who are immune to lobbying in government positions. We’ll see how this goes.. depending on the next election cycle this will either get quashed quickly, or, fingers crossed, might fight on against a growing backlash.
- jlarocco 3y ago
  > We need more people who are immune to lobbying in government positions. What we need to do is stop pretending people like that exist, and come up with a system that works despite people's self-interest, greed and corruption. Maybe what we have is the best we can do.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    More transparency would probably be better. Make them wear NASCAR style jackets and all that.
  - godelski 3y ago
    This is always my frustration when people suggest things for governments. You cannot design a government that relies on people being good. You have to design a government that highly discourages bad actors, make it easy to eject them, and operates while they exist. It's a crazy hard optimization problem and isn't going to work if people are just smart or good. And I never understand why people suggest fixing government by giving government more power and nothing else.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  Maybe spending billions of dollars lobbying should be illegal
  - ttyprintk 3y ago
    It’s not that lobbying is a major slice of $14B, it’s that they actually spend only $3m and it’s effective: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2021&id=D000026667 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
GreedClarifies 3y ago
From the article and from a poster below: "For the pilot participants will have to enter their own financial information, the I.R.S. said." It is indeed a complete waste of taxpayer money unless they actually prefill with the IRS' data.
- simtel20 3y ago
  Why would you say that? If a taxpayer can copy the fields from their w-2 and have it provide a straightforward and correct filing without trying to divert them to dark patterns trying to steal money from them, that is a huge benefit.
- dimal 3y ago
  Consider it an MVP.
SMAAART 3y ago
So it's an endorsement from Intuit.
bitshiftfaced 3y ago
Too funny. So it's a solution in search of a problem... that they also try to solve?
loceng 3y ago
Industrial complexes, all of the obvious ones, have gone too far; it only takes one to push for unfair-unreasonable terms. The next step of citizen's countering Intuit's particular complex is for automatic tax filing to occur.
- a_gnostic 3y ago
  The W2 doesn't count as voluntary, unless you bear witness against yourself, by filing for a return and identifying yourself as a taxpayer –waiving your 5A rights.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
artursapek 3y ago
Rest in piss Intuit

jacobyoder 3y ago

...and Intuit knows a thing or two about "half-baked solutions". ;)

idiotsecant 3y ago

On the plus side, intuit saying something like this is exactly what I want to hear regarding a program like this. I would have been deeply suspicious if they were anything other than enthusiastically opposed to it.

vlovich123 3y ago
Or they’re saying this because they know the IRS effort doesn’t have competent people on it (think what happened with the healthcare website when it launched) and is just prepping the waters for a “see we were telling you along this was a bad idea” criticism for congress people to spike it later. It’s really hard to intuit the strategy being employed so best to just ignore them altogether. And if this turns into a partisan issue at all (which an unclean launch might because people are dumb about government tech in the US), then expect the Trump administration to kill this if they win to prevent this from becoming entrenched and popular like Obamacare is.
- downut 3y ago
  I've used the US Free File Federal Taxes for the last five years and it just wasn't a problem, and I have yet to see anything that looked like programmer incompetence. Now, that said, the way you debug your submittal is to paste an entire page of error gibberish that looks like very low level database error output into an entry box they point you to. Sounds gross! Ewwwww! Well actually I've been debugging c++ templates since forever and hohum it doesn't bother me. However... every single time it decoded the problem and told me exactly what I needed to do. It has taken me 2-4 tries each year to get it debugged and then it sails right through. The final result I've fed into two different state forms and that has sailed right through too. All free, and not that much of my time. Now if they can get the UI for normies painless, which I suspect is the main programming problem (I don't say that UI programming is trivial), this will take off like a rocket ship and the US can the join the coterie of civilized nations that do this for all their citizens.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    If you're referring to Free Fillable Forms, the error messages are not DB errors, but "business logic rules errors". They do look like gibberish, but buried inside them is a code that can generally give a pretty clue as to the error. I agree that it would be much nicer if they said "The amount of line 29 of Form ABCD does not appear at line 18 of Form WXYZ". Even nicer if you never had to manually transfer amounts between forms.
    - downut 3y ago
      Oh yes I am sorry; I didn't mean to imply that I thought that the DB was throwing an error. What the filing process email message body stated looked something like approximately "Form line xxx violates schema requirement such and such: <more gibberish>". I was thinking when I scanned the message was that I bet I could reverse engineer the problem from this back end generated text but why not do what the instructions say and just feed it into the parser box? And every time the next email message gave me exactly the thing I needed to do. It was cool, for a weird sort of nerd. So no, I was casting shade where the process was right in the sunlight: I made the mistake, and the business logic caught it, and told me correctly every time what I needed to do to fix it. I liked the whole process a lot.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        Yeah, me too! Been using FFF for about 8 years now.

crazydoggers 3y ago

This is why we still have the income tax system that we do. It’s a $14 billion a year industry. I’ve talked to people who work the lobbying system very hard. There’s lots of wining and dining to make sure no one messes with the complexity of the system. We need more people who are immune to lobbying in government positions. We’ll see how this goes.. depending on the next election cycle this will either get quashed quickly, or, fingers crossed, might fight on against a growing backlash.

jlarocco 3y ago
> We need more people who are immune to lobbying in government positions. What we need to do is stop pretending people like that exist, and come up with a system that works despite people's self-interest, greed and corruption. Maybe what we have is the best we can do.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  More transparency would probably be better. Make them wear NASCAR style jackets and all that.
- godelski 3y ago
  This is always my frustration when people suggest things for governments. You cannot design a government that relies on people being good. You have to design a government that highly discourages bad actors, make it easy to eject them, and operates while they exist. It's a crazy hard optimization problem and isn't going to work if people are just smart or good. And I never understand why people suggest fixing government by giving government more power and nothing else.
calamari4065 3y ago
Maybe spending billions of dollars lobbying should be illegal
- ttyprintk 3y ago
  It’s not that lobbying is a major slice of $14B, it’s that they actually spend only $3m and it’s effective: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2021&id=D000026667 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

GreedClarifies 3y ago

From the article and from a poster below: "For the pilot participants will have to enter their own financial information, the I.R.S. said." It is indeed a complete waste of taxpayer money unless they actually prefill with the IRS' data.

simtel20 3y ago
Why would you say that? If a taxpayer can copy the fields from their w-2 and have it provide a straightforward and correct filing without trying to divert them to dark patterns trying to steal money from them, that is a huge benefit.
dimal 3y ago
Consider it an MVP.

SMAAART 3y ago

So it's an endorsement from Intuit.

bitshiftfaced 3y ago

Too funny. So it's a solution in search of a problem... that they also try to solve?

loceng 3y ago

Industrial complexes, all of the obvious ones, have gone too far; it only takes one to push for unfair-unreasonable terms. The next step of citizen's countering Intuit's particular complex is for automatic tax filing to occur.

a_gnostic 3y ago
The W2 doesn't count as voluntary, unless you bear witness against yourself, by filing for a return and identifying yourself as a taxpayer –waiving your 5A rights.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

artursapek 3y ago

Rest in piss Intuit