Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing • Hacker News Board

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#411

Post by jacobolus » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 3:44 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #387

hobs wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If republicans wanted to make a system where people would save the most money we'd just reduce the tax loopholes and simplify the system - the system we have now actually only has the wealthy pay the least money. Some would say the republicans think this is a feature.

This is not true. There are tons of bread-and-butter deductions for the middle class. If you do a cross country comparison of taxes, the biggest difference between the US and Europe is not the rich. It’s the folks making $40-100k, where our low brackets plus tons of deductions (mortgage interest, child care, child credits, etc.) drive the effective tax rate way down

Folks in Europe comparable to the ones you are talking about here (i.e. the 50th–85th percentile) are generally much more financially stable/comfortable than in the USA.

Varies a lot from country to country, but in general they have e.g. more-or-less functional healthcare systems, better parental leave, more vacations, easier access to childcare, stronger worker protections, ....

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#412

Post by fyfy18 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 3:45 AM UTC

indemnity wrote: post #227

Meanwhile, in my little country (NZ), as a regular salaried worker, I only had to interact with the IRD in the years that I had a few side gigs in addition to my regular employment. Most years I don't interact with them at all. Don't even have to file. I guess in the USA they are worried the IRS will get it wrong, so on the chance they will, everyone has to follow really complicated processes, even if their tax affai…

That's how it works in the UK too. By default taxes are taken from your paycheck, and that's the most interaction the majority of people have with the tax organisation. If for some reason you pay too much tax (e.g. you start/quit in the middle of the year) they will automatically send you a cheque with the refund.

Even if you are self employed or run your own company you can do most things online, with a nice easy to use form. Last few years when I've done it, it takes around 30 minutes to get everything done (including finding all the numbers I need to enter from banks, my accountant, etc).

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#413

Post by tootie » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 3:48 AM UTC

j16sdiz wrote: post #333

tootie wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and unless the IRS has imminent plans to implement free tax filing this new clause has no real effect. It's not a constitutional amendment, if the IRS wants to offer this service in 5 years they'll probably need a huge multi-year appropriation and this clause to be revoked. Adding it in to this bill costs nothing and probably made the GOP reps willing to sign on.

Of course IRS can go back to congress and revoke this.. Yes, this this make the GOP reps willing to sign on. The question is: why we want this bill? It is not giving any benefit. That's what "ban the IRS from creating a free e-filing system" means.

The bill has dozens of provisions around taxpayer protections. One of them is to affirm the Free File program. That's not the only thing in the bill at all.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#414

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 3:54 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #336

Calloggs wrote: post #298

Planet Money covered tax filing a few years ago and visited it again recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... My understanding is that the main opposition appears to be (1) the tax preparation lobby to protect their business interests and (2) anti-tax activists that believe that making people calculate their own taxes will make them more aware of how much they are paying in taxes. The…

It’s not really about making people more or less aware of what they are paying. The point is to make filing taxes as time consuming and obnoxious (and therefore emotionally painful) as possible, ideally without the public connecting the dots and getting outraged.

[deleted]

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#415

Post by sircastor » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 3:57 AM UTC

ensignavenger wrote: post #192

bsimpson wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you compared to TurboTax? Is one better than the other at finding deductions?

I have not done taxes on both for the same year and compared the two. I have used TurboTax, as well as a variety of other online tax filing solutions, in the past. TurboTax might be better polished and provides better explanations, Credit Karma tax gets better every year, and I find the downsides to be a good trade off for not supporting Intuit.

I did my taxes in both last year (started in TurboTax and learned about their abuses - a coworker suggested Credit karma) and found the numbers to be identical. My taxes are relatively complex, more than most people. I'm very happy with the service for the second year in a row.

I admit that they don't have quite the community links that TurboTax does, and there are some situations they won't handle (for instance, income from 2+ states)

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#416

Post by learc83 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #400

mindcandy wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians don’t put the bribes in their pockets. They put them in their re-election campaigns because without those bribes they will get voted out of office by The People in favor of an opponent with a larger, bribe-based ad budget. They don’t want the bribes, they need them just to stay in power. In return, the real goal of “access” is to hear what the bribing company wants written into law or else the bribes will…

> Politicians don’t put the bribes in their pockets. Yes, they do. All the time. > They put them in their re-election campaigns because without those bribes they will get voted out of office by The People in favor of an opponent with a larger, bribe-based ad budget. You kind of fail at corruption if you are getting bribes many times the annual salary of a job per year and are feeding them into nothing more than keepi…

>Yes, they do. All the time.

Most of them don't need to do something as explicitly criminal as taking money from a lobbyist and using it for personal expenses.

There are far better ways for members of congress to make money--passing laws that benefit companies they or their family members are invested in and taking lucracitive industry jobs after they leave office for example.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#417

Post by patio11 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:04 AM UTC

renholder wrote: post #161

rayiner wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, the social security administration gives out social security numbers. But that aside, more than 40% of children don't live with both biological birth parents: https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-than-60-of-u-s-kids-live-wit... . So your automated calculation will get it wrong almost half the time. > All of those tax credits you mention are given by our respective tax agencies when we become employed and/or w…

> Every year, I have to dig up receipts for what we spent on daycare, what we spent out of our HSA accounts, etc. The government doesn't track any of that. Aside from the daycare costs (as an aside, creche in Ireland is quite decent[0]), isn't all of that is still reported to the IRS? Your HSA isn't sitting in some dark corner that the government doesn't know about, ever since the Patriot Act, yeah? I'm fairly certai…

The IRS does not in the ordinary course receive informational returns about people's bank accounts. They do receive informational returns about interest generated by bank accounts (and other places), but they don't get e.g. transaction lists by default. Google "1099-INT example" to see one of these informational returns. They're minimalistic and they are minimalistic precisely because a large portion of the US polity hates the notion that the IRS would have arbitrary read access to people's financial lives.

You can reasonably assume that the IRS can use subpoena power to compel a US financial institution or foreign financial institution to surrender records to it. This is an oppositional process and they use it relatively rarely next to the total universe of taxpayers and accounts, generally only after they already have evidence of hinkiness and want to quantify unsurveilled amounts and/or locate assets.

These are not secret facts about the world; the operations of the IRS are exhaustively public (trust me, I have weird hobbies). People on a programmer-dense message board should have more weight for "While I understand that X would be accomplishable via an API if it existed, it is possible that that API does not factually exist" than they often do.

Also, the number of times someone in the financial industry typed in git commit -m "tldr Patriot Act compliance" is orders of magnitude below the number that HN comments routinely predict.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#418

Post by webdevatlurk » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:05 AM UTC

avsteele wrote: post #378

Disappointed by the overwhelmingly negative commentary here. There are multiple private companies providing this service for low amount, as many have mentioned; for free for incomes below a threshold. 1) Why would you want the IRS to duplicate this effort and compete with these companies? Remember 'Free' in this context means paid for by tax dollars. Do you think the IRS is going to spend less to implement a filing s…

> Why would you want the IRS to duplicate this effort and compete with these companies?

Is tax collection not a function of the government? I'd rather my taxes fund a free, easy tax filing system than pay fees to rent seeking middle men. Those fees are just an inflated tax by another name. We should be eliminating those kinds of taxes, not entrenching them.

> If they do it in-house, do they even have the expertise?

Government websites and software have a reputation for being ugly, slow, broken and poorly designed. Government is also capable of building good tools. Two organizations that have done good work and could conceivably work with the IRS are:

- https://www.usds.gov/

- https://18f.gsa.gov/

I'm also pretty sure the IRS has plenty of expertise around the filing of federal tax returns.

> Everyone needs to file state taxes anyway.

I don't see your point? Everyone will continue to file their state taxes separately, electing to use or not use available tools, as they always have.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#419

Post by learc83 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

blindwatchmaker wrote: post #388

vidarh wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to think about it is that if people were actually straight up buying votes on a regular basis the prices would likely be much higher. If politicians were admitting to themselves they were selling their vote, a large proportion of them would likely think about the value their vote have in a particular setting and price it accordingly. Part of the reason it's cheap is because most of the time the politician…

> Another way to think about it is that if people were actually straight up buying votes on a regular basis the prices would likely be much higher And as I said earlier, the campaign contributions are window dressing for the rest of it and I gave a concrete example. Families like the Clintons have made massive amounts of money cashing out after office, and secured lucrative sinecures for their daughter while in it. T…

> Families like the Clintons have made massive amounts of money cashing out after office

No need to look into the past for examples. The current administration isn't even waiting until they are out of office to cash out.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#420

Post by lhorie » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

avsteele wrote: post #378

Disappointed by the overwhelmingly negative commentary here. There are multiple private companies providing this service for low amount, as many have mentioned; for free for incomes below a threshold. 1) Why would you want the IRS to duplicate this effort and compete with these companies? Remember 'Free' in this context means paid for by tax dollars. Do you think the IRS is going to spend less to implement a filing s…

> paid for by tax dollars

You make it sound like that's a bad thing. If federal taxes don't go towards things that _the entire country's population_ could use, then, why are there taxes in the first place again?

If you've got a complex tax situation that TurboTax asks you to file by mail, or even if you just want to file yourself, you have to go to - you guessed it - the IRS' website to get all the forms and instructions. The IRS already has to navigate all that complexity to put out all these forms and instructions for every field, tax table, eligibility flow charts etc and the government certainly employs developers[1] already. The government also has to budget for printing millions of 1040 pamphlets for the entire country, and they somehow are able to come up with budget for things like that Trump wall, so surely coming up with budget to implement electronic filing isn't a question of money waste?

[1] https://v2.designsystem.digital.gov/components/