4 ms·

I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!

by com2kid 11mo ago

vkou 11mo ago
Jon Oliver tried his best to bribe Clarence Thomas, but unfortunately, the prick turns out to only be for sale to one side. You might run into similar problems.
- kgwxd 11mo ago
  economies of scale, he's just being a smart businessman.
sobkas 11mo ago
> I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. > > It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep! It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
- com2kid 11mo ago
  > It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail. This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire! However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11mo ago
    There's no guarantee this doesn't simply make the bribe more expensive for Intuit.
    - com2kid 11mo ago
      There are limits to corporate donations and lobbying, which is why the price of lobbying seems so low (see the linked blog post in the comments here!) SuperPACs get around that, but there is a chance a large company like Inuit isn't agile enough to defend against a well organized political attack. Ultimately career politicians care about being elected. Even corrupt ones need to stay in office and they'll happily sacrifice one small donor to keep the gravy train coming with all their other connections. If an independently funded lobbying group walks into DC and tells a senator they just raised 30M dollars and 80k residents in their state donated as part of that, I bet people will start to listen.
Amezarak 11mo ago
The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation. Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software. What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.) The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant. https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office-federal-tax-return-preparer-statistics https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office... There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.
- bigfishrunning 11mo ago
  I'd like to defend the notion of using a CPA a bit. I started using one when I became a partner in a passthrough LLC. I was now self-employed and was responsible for paying taxes on the businesses income as well as my own personal income. Filing that first year was incredibly stressful and time consuming, and I came to the conclusion that sometimes the right thing to do is to hire someone who knows what theyre doing. Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial. I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.
  - didgeoridoo 11mo ago

I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!

by com2kid 11mo ago

I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!

vkou 11mo ago

Jon Oliver tried his best to bribe Clarence Thomas, but unfortunately, the prick turns out to only be for sale to one side. You might run into similar problems.

kgwxd 11mo ago
economies of scale, he's just being a smart businessman.

sobkas 11mo ago

> I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. > > It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep! It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.

com2kid 11mo ago
> It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail. This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire! However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11mo ago
  There's no guarantee this doesn't simply make the bribe more expensive for Intuit.
  - com2kid 11mo ago
    There are limits to corporate donations and lobbying, which is why the price of lobbying seems so low (see the linked blog post in the comments here!) SuperPACs get around that, but there is a chance a large company like Inuit isn't agile enough to defend against a well organized political attack. Ultimately career politicians care about being elected. Even corrupt ones need to stay in office and they'll happily sacrifice one small donor to keep the gravy train coming with all their other connections. If an independently funded lobbying group walks into DC and tells a senator they just raised 30M dollars and 80k residents in their state donated as part of that, I bet people will start to listen.

Amezarak 11mo ago

The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation. Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software. What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.) The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant. https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office-federal-tax-return-preparer-statistics https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office... There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.

bigfishrunning 11mo ago
I'd like to defend the notion of using a CPA a bit. I started using one when I became a partner in a passthrough LLC. I was now self-employed and was responsible for paying taxes on the businesses income as well as my own personal income. Filing that first year was incredibly stressful and time consuming, and I came to the conclusion that sometimes the right thing to do is to hire someone who knows what theyre doing. Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial. I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.
- didgeoridoo 11mo ago