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I don't think the IRS doesn't actually get all of your W2s, 1099s in time to do your taxes. I've made a few mistakes, and it always took the IRS a year or two t

I don't think the IRS doesn't actually get all of your W2s, 1099s in time to do your taxes. I've made a few mistakes, and it always took the IRS a year or two to catch them with the info they have (and I'm sure automatically). The big kicker is the 1099 that is generated when they sell stock from an RSU grant to cover ordinary income taxes of that grant. Ugh. Using TurboTax, I usually have to add them by importing a PDF, and then double check that they didn't make any errors in the import (this year they forgot to add taxes my wife paid on her W2, oops!). The value of tax prep software isn't in "knowing" all your forms, however, I can get those easy enough. It is in asking questions and doing all the computations. Seriously, a decision tree and some auto computed fields would be good enough.

antisthenes 3y ago
> I don't think the IRS doesn't actually get all of your W2s, 1099s in time to do your taxes. It doesn't need to? It should have all your information from prior year pre-entered, except the wage numbers that change. That's the value proposition. At least don't make people re-enter their address and employer information again. (unless it changed, obviously)
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  My w2s aren't that stable, there aren't many that change year to year. I don't have to re-enter very much, and the import from PDF means you enter even less. It is a huge step up from having to do my taxes by hand by editing PDFs and maintaining a spreadsheet when I was in China because tax software couldn't deal with the foreign income exclusion yet. But ya, if I only had w2s to worry about, I would expect to file nothing like when I was paying Chinese/Swiss taxes (well, China had a weird self report you had to do yearly, but it was in Chinese and I just copied the numbers via a powerpoint management gave us). Of course, in either country, if you have a non-trivial situation, you had to file something as well.

antisthenes 3y ago

> I don't think the IRS doesn't actually get all of your W2s, 1099s in time to do your taxes. It doesn't need to? It should have all your information from prior year pre-entered, except the wage numbers that change. That's the value proposition. At least don't make people re-enter their address and employer information again. (unless it changed, obviously)

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
My w2s aren't that stable, there aren't many that change year to year. I don't have to re-enter very much, and the import from PDF means you enter even less. It is a huge step up from having to do my taxes by hand by editing PDFs and maintaining a spreadsheet when I was in China because tax software couldn't deal with the foreign income exclusion yet. But ya, if I only had w2s to worry about, I would expect to file nothing like when I was paying Chinese/Swiss taxes (well, China had a weird self report you had to do yearly, but it was in Chinese and I just copied the numbers via a powerpoint management gave us). Of course, in either country, if you have a non-trivial situation, you had to file something as well.