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TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

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Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#71

Post by pnutjam »

mortgagemonster wrote: post #54
maxmcd wrote: post #34

I learned a little while ago that H&R Block makes a substantial amount of its revenue from "refund anticipation loans" (no citation, I couldn't find it here: https://investors.hrblock.com/static-files/4293dedf-951d-454... maybe my information is overblown). Is there a reason there isn't a "Robin Hood for Taxes"? A service that makes all of its revenue off of refund anticipation loads and provides all tax services for…

Credit Karma does legitimately free filing

I file free with DIY tax (freetax.com). I've been using it for several years, but it's not well advertised.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#72

Post by MagicPropmaker »

Zenst wrote: post #5

I popped "file free tax returns turbotax" into Google and found the page directly listed. The page in question is https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi... The robots.txt for the intuit.com domain is: https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt Not listing in robots.txt to block the personal-taxes folder, which has many offerings and a sub from that is the free one. I'm not seeing the block that the…

You got tricked! Now think what happens to less tech-savvy people.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#73

Post by themagician »

linsomniac wrote: post #37

Govt: "We need some money from you to buy things." Me: "How much?" Govt: "You figure it out." Me: "Oh, I get to pay whatever I want?" Govt: "LOL, no, we have a figure that we want you to pay." Me: "What happens if I guess that number wrong?" Govt: "You get to go to prison."

You only go to prison if you willfully and purposely try to defraud the government.

It’s more of a, “Pay what you believe you owe based on your best guess and the laws as you best understand them, and if we disagree we may ask you to pay more.”

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#74

Post by tantalor »

thomasfortes wrote: post #61

It's an idea so dumb that you need to pay for a software that the only reason to exist is for you to pay your taxes, Brazil gets a lot of things wrong, but at least our government provides a software available for every platform (windows, mac, linux, ios, android and even a jar, so if it runs java, you're fine) for us to do our taxes. You need to pay an accountant only if your taxes are complex, and even them will us…

Software takes time to develop, and time is money. Tax software is especially bad because 1. the rules are insanely complicated and 2. the insane rules change every year requiring updates.

The real question is why don't we have open-source tax software? I'd argue that since 1. IRS is publicly funded and 2. they have to write code anyway to enforce the tax rules as they change, then they should just publish that code.

At a first step, the tax rules could be published in a machine-readable format.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#75

Post by asdfuadirea »

gsk22 wrote: post #64
asdfuadirea wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Income in an IRA isn't taxed, so that's not relevant for taxes. If you had post-tax investments then yes it's more complicated, but that has nothing to do with IRA/401k retirement savings?

I assume they meant a Roth IRA, which does tax deposits.

Growth/income in the Roth IRA is also tax-free (there'd be no point in the Roth otherwise).

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#78

Post by idlewords »

linsomniac wrote: post #37

Govt: "We need some money from you to buy things." Me: "How much?" Govt: "You figure it out." Me: "Oh, I get to pay whatever I want?" Govt: "LOL, no, we have a figure that we want you to pay." Me: "What happens if I guess that number wrong?" Govt: "You get to go to prison."

If you guess that number wrong in good faith, you get a polite letter from the IRS with the correct number. Let's not be dramatic.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#79

Post by bunderbunder »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #27
metalliqaz wrote: post #4

Yeah they do, of course they do. They are in business to make money, after all. The real story is the absolute travesty of government corruption that TurboTax and HR Block have perpetrated by making it illegal for the government to make tax filing as easy as it should be. It's one of the things I would immediately correct if I was king for a day.

This is directly related, I think. One reason the IRS hasn't made it easier is a deal with the industry group "Free File Alliance", which essentially privatizes this (indeed, the page TurboTax is hiding here is their Free File page). However, while 70% of taxpayers would be eligible for free filing, in practice only 3% do — no doubt because tax prep companies make it so difficult to find and use this option. These co…

Correction: 100% of taxpayers are eligible for free filing, and 70% of them are eligible for free electronic filing.

The options out there for free e-filing are hardly any better than the paper option, though. They're typically just the paper forms translated very directly into an electronic fill-in form. You're still left to your own to make sense of all the byzantine rules and instructions, and to grind through it all yourself.

I know because, for the entirety of the time that I was eligible for free e-filing, I didn't bother. Using the PDF fill-in forms and then just printing them out and mailing them gave me very nearly the same UX, with the added benefit of not having to read a giant pile of legalese in order to figure out exactly how some third party is planning to make money with all the financial information I'm sharing with them.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#80

Post by miguelmota »

The government has a copy of your W2’s and 1099’s so they know how much you make. It’s a shame that the government didn’t make 'ReadyReturn' [0] the new way of filing taxes where the government sends you a packet of all the tax information they have on you and you simply make corrections to it. Many countries have something similar and it’s a breeze to file taxes. Only in the US do people hate filing taxes.

Intuit lobbies hard to make taxes as difficult as possible. Their rational is that they want people to hate tax filing as much as possible so that they vote against taxes and taxes are lowered for big corporations like Intuit.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyReturn

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