Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 717 posts

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

#471

Post by Zeebrommer »

knubie wrote: post #59
fsloth wrote: post #25

Oh man, I've had government provided automatic filings for ages now (Finland). US is really odd how it emphasizes the benefit of the middleman over the benefit of the individual citizen (it seems). Or have I completely misunderstood what's going on here?

The question I have is whether a government provided automatic filing would actually be cheaper (or more effective) than say, Turbotax. I see a couple of ways in which it might not be as favorable: 1. It costs more than $100 per tax payer per year to implement (about the cost of Turbotax). However the flat $100 or so that most people pay to Turbotax can be seen as a kind of regressive tax. 2. It is less effective at…

But TurboTax has many other incentives besides making tax filings more efficient, including reselling user data, targeted ads for their own products, they might even have reasons to nudge you towards certain options and dark-pattern others.

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

#472

Post by spinach »

dosy wrote: post #459
kristopolous wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market dogma is a scam: an intellectual framework invented to rationalize a position. There's a long history of people doing these things such as with monarchist theory or eugenics for colonialism and slavery. People have theories and frameworks to justify misogyny, child abuse and being harsh to homeless people. In this case it's an ability to do whatever you want to make money without any oversight, laws, rest…

I definitely agree that the intentions of the ruling elite will be formalized into nice-sounding theories, irrespective of their faithfulness to reality or their utility outside of supporting the system of rule. Marxism for example and you can replace ruling elite, with people who want to be that. Then you get notions like identity politics, feminism, cultural Marxism, misandry, racism. There's an interesting second…

How can it be that ideologies such as 'racism' and 'identity politics' are only born from people who want to be the elite? (If this is indeed what you are saying) Was not America's founding based on identity politics and racism by white Christian people? How is the genocide of indigenous people and enslavement of black people not racism and identity politics?

Besides that, I don't think racism and feminism stems from 'wanting' to be elite. People who experience racism just don't want to be killed and threatened, women just want the same opportunities and to be able to feel safe and not be harassed randomly.

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

#473

Post by yellow_postit »

rayiner wrote: post #140
renholder wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this similar to PAYE or do you actually have to submit a tax return but it's pre-filled for you? As long as your PAYE is like Ireland's (ROI) PAYE, then the American's system is far-removed from it. Even though their tax revenue office gets the reports from businesses for how much they were paid and how much taxes they paid, the Americans still need to fill out a tax form - every year - to repeat the same inform…

> Even though their tax revenue office gets the reports from businesses for how much they were paid and how much taxes they paid, the Americans still need to fill out a tax form - every year - to repeat the same information (it's an added benefit for the prison system, in that mistakes on tax forms can equate to jail time). They get a form from their employer (which their tax office also has), that contains all of th…

A tweak to W4 could easily encapsulate planned filing status.

Tax returns really do take a huge majority of repeat information and a tiny amount of additional metadata.

There's no reason for the vast majority of Americans this couldn't be automated.

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

#474

Post by [deleted] »

dosy wrote: post #459
kristopolous wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market dogma is a scam: an intellectual framework invented to rationalize a position. There's a long history of people doing these things such as with monarchist theory or eugenics for colonialism and slavery. People have theories and frameworks to justify misogyny, child abuse and being harsh to homeless people. In this case it's an ability to do whatever you want to make money without any oversight, laws, rest…

I definitely agree that the intentions of the ruling elite will be formalized into nice-sounding theories, irrespective of their faithfulness to reality or their utility outside of supporting the system of rule. Marxism for example and you can replace ruling elite, with people who want to be that. Then you get notions like identity politics, feminism, cultural Marxism, misandry, racism. There's an interesting second…

[deleted]

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

#475

Post by ryacko »

yellow_postit wrote: post #473
rayiner wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though their tax revenue office gets the reports from businesses for how much they were paid and how much taxes they paid, the Americans still need to fill out a tax form - every year - to repeat the same information (it's an added benefit for the prison system, in that mistakes on tax forms can equate to jail time). They get a form from their employer (which their tax office also has), that contains all of th…

A tweak to W4 could easily encapsulate planned filing status. Tax returns really do take a huge majority of repeat information and a tiny amount of additional metadata. There's no reason for the vast majority of Americans this couldn't be automated.

Google already parses purchasing information from emails.

Alphabet Taxes doesn’t sound too bad.

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

#476

Post by yellow_postit »

rogerkirkness wrote: post #391
throwaway287391 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, I hate this argument so much. It's the argument Grover Norquist goes around making to every Republican in Congress that that (in addition to Intuit's lobbying efforts) to stop this from ever happening. (There's a great episode of Planet Money [1] about it.) In addition to just about every major country other than the US, California already has this and it's absolutely fantastic. I've literally never heard anyone…

The cell phone company doesn't have guns or regulate my property rights. Your argument is weak. Turbotax is better than government software will ever be, and it's close enough to free that no one is out in the cold on it.

Citation needed that Turbotax is better than the government software that is used to validate millions of tax returns.

So much of this is just re-running information that other entities like employers, banks, etc. have already furnished to the IRS with a slim bit of additional data on top of it (vast majority of Americans) that there's no reason the IRS can't just compute it directly since that's what they're doing already when they validate a return.

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

#477

Post by RandomTisk »

I'm surprised more people aren't skeptical of the IRS themselves. Inverting the way the US does their taxes would disrupt a lot of careers of a lot of of IRS employees. I would imagine there is considerable pressure to keep the status quo from within the IRS itself.

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

#478

Post by adarsh_thampy »

kam wrote: post #435
astura wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use taxhawk.com and would absolutely recommend it, I think the UI is fantastic (and without a fantastic UI, I'd just continue to do taxes with paper and pen). I've been using it since 2011. I have heard good things about freetaxusa.com as well. Both are very reasonably priced, only $15 for state - federal is free. Since I have business income TurboTax wants over $100 to do my taxes.

They're the same company; no idea why they have two brands.

SEO Benefits. The latter is a keyword domain that might rank well when people search for a generic term.

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

#479

Post by rhacker »

astine wrote: post #370
sanderjd wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the tax preparation industry must be taking a significant enough cut to make it lucrative to spend money lobbying. Is that cut smaller than the total extra tax that would be paid due to mistakes in the auto filing system? I'm skeptical.

Tax preparers usually file federal taxes for free while charging a fee to file state and local taxes. That's where they make their money.

So basically even if the IRS wanted to create a system, they would be competing with a free system anyway?

And the IRS wouldn't go out and do a system for each state.

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

#480

Post by lozenge »

arcticbull wrote: post #363
gowld wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying that IRS should write a TurboTax competitor.

Honestly if a company exists solely to solve an inefficiency they lobby to create, that’s not something I care to defend. Taxes are in the public interest and as such profit is just not a concern of mine. There’s plenty of other ways to make money than regulatory capture and rent seeking. I want the IRS to do what’s best for Americans and that is either providing a way to file free of charge or eliminating the comple…

The IRS isn't authorised to simplify the tax code, it would have to be Congress.
Post reply on HN