TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines • Hacker News Board

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#171

Post by astura » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #161

astura wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Am I correct in understanding that interest paid to deposits at a credit union get you a 1099-DIV? No, income from interest paid on deposit accounts is reported on form 1099-INT, not 1099-DIV. 1099-DIV is for dividend income. 1099-INT for interest income. They are are reported different places on your tax form. Nowadays most people don't get 1099-INTs from their banks or credit unions because interest rates are so l…

All it takes to generate $10 in interest is $1000 in a 1% savings account or $500 in a 2% CD. Anyone with even this small a savings will be issued a 1090-INT, no?

No because rates aren't 1-2% in a typical savings account from a standard bank. If you want 1-2% interest you'll have to have a "high interest savings account" which have historically been online-only offerings and most people really can't be bothered to open up a new account and manage multiple accounts and do the transfers.

For example, if you had $20,000 in a Chase savings account AND had a "Premier Relationship" with them then you'd get an interest rate of 0.04%, or a whopping $8 in interest for the year.

https://www.chase.com/personal/savings/interest-savings/inte...

Its worth noting that rates have gone up significantly in the last year and a half, at one point it got to the point where checking accounts and savings accounts had the same interest rates at many banks and many people stopped using savings accounts entirely at that point.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#172

Post by ljm » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #56

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.

> 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 You know this applies to pretty much every service in the US right? A company wants to make massive profits, so it just lobbies and buys the laws it wants. Healthcare, private prisons, banking, "security" (TSA), education, tra…

I believe this is a consequence of treating a financial policy as a religion or otherwise a fundamental truth. Everything is so much about money and accumulation that it subsumes everything else.

I can’t see another reason why the lessons we learned from capitalism in the booming 20s and the following crash have very quickly been unlearned, as if the free market is a perfectly just and omnipresent force. Couple it with the utterly rabid obsession around communism and socialism, which might as well be swear words.

This logic only holds true if you are the benefactor (one of the wealthy) or you think that you will become one.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#173

Post by HeWhoLurksLate » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #25

morley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article mentions, it's set in the metatags of the page https://turbotax.intuit.com/taxfreedom/ :

An archive of both pages in case they try to play the "revise history" game. https://archive.fo/0WTCE https://web.archive.org/web/20190423172440/https://turbotax.... https://web.archive.org/web/20190426004701/https://turbotax....

Good thinking, and nice username!

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#174

Post by jakelazaroff » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

ahallock wrote: post #98

ppseafield wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intuit lobbies to keep taxes complicated so they can continue to have a business model. https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

And this is surprising because? It would be surprising if they didn't do that, honestly. The government is at fault here for selling political power and not representing the interests of the people. We could boycott Intuit, I suppose, or use different products, but aside from that, the fault and source of the problem lies squarely with the government.

I truly don't understand this logic. If I found some legal loophole by which I could indiscriminately murder people with no repercussions, no one would excuse it with "well, technically he was allowed to do this so why are we surprised?"

And if I were working with the government to create that loophole… I mean, in this scenario, I'm still murdering people, right? Should my conscience be clean because the government wasn't representing the interests of the people? How is any of this ethically exculpatory?

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#175

Post by HeWhoLurksLate » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #41

Demiurge wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? This is a greedy policy, not an engineering decision. How many engineers have managers they disagree with? I'm sure you've always quit every company in such a situation?

No-one is saying engineers chose the company policy, they're saying that engineers are complicit by working on it. Someone had to but that no-index instruction on the page, and they knew what they were doing. We're lucky (at least at this moment in time) that engineers are in huge demand. If you're an engineer at an ethically compromised company you could change jobs within a few months, tops. If you haven't then, ye…

One of my friend's parents works at a company where a large percentage of the engineers / etc. are corrupt (think Boeing with its FAA certifications done by fellow engineers, but with all the engineers agreeing to not look at each other's stuff)- and he decided to stay there and continue to work, despite the corruption- if the company goes down or gets attacked by the Feds, he has a lot of proof to show that he wasn't part of the problem. He's also sort of doing that classical destroy-the-company-from-the-inside thing.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#176

Post by vonmoltke » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #79

jakelazaroff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Actually, 100% of taxpayers are eligible for free electronic filing. 70% are eligible for free filing software that calculates everything for you. The other 30% just get fillable forms.

See https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#177

Post by tialaramex » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #165

kristopolous wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many are convinced that paying the workers, the lobbyists, shareholders, board of directors, and contract overhead is cheaper than just paying the workers directly. I've been investigating why people think this for years. I've read a number of books, listened to lectures, went to proseminars in economics at UC schools, took some classes ... Recently, I've become increasingly convinced it's actually just a giant hustl…

This is largely correct. Simple case: the local school district here in a suburb of Boston provides a school bus service. So did the one I attended in New York. The one in NY owned a fleet of diesel buses, a central depot to put them in, a repair facility next to the depot, and paid administrators, mechanics and drivers. Every so often a wave of buses were replaced. The one in MA pays a bus company that does all the…

You can also see this very easily in the UK.

One city in the entire country has essentially all its transport infrastructure owned by the government (some of it is operated by private companies under license). In every other city they're a mess of private companies.

Result: In that one city (it's London) the transport infrastructure works as an integrated whole and everywhere else it's just a bunch of assemble-it-yourself components.

Private bus companies actually operate the buses in every city, but in London those companies have to work for the government, their contract says all the buses must look alike (they're painted red, if you've visited or thought of visiting London you can probably visualise one) and work alike (taking contactless cards) and so on, they're all part of a single system. In London you don't care which private company operates the bus you got on and pays the driver, it says "35" on the front, it's a 35 bus, sorted. In my city they're just three (or maybe four?) different private companies, different livery, their timetables aren't co-ordinated, they have different overlapping number schemes, and different fare schemes - if I have my City card but I'm on a Blue bus that's no good, I'll have to pay by credit card.

Why? Because as in the US one of our political parties dogmatically believes that privatisation is better, and confronted with the fact that it doesn't work their answer is more privatisation. Nationally many people keep voting for them anyway. In London not so much.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#178

Post by vonmoltke » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

ppseafield wrote: post #47

craftyguy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather shame the government that allows Intuit to have their way with taxpayers. Intuit exists primarily because of the convoluted tax filing process in the US afterall..

Intuit lobbies to keep taxes complicated so they can continue to have a business model. https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

How easy it is to file has little relation with how complicated they are to prepare. That article is exclusively about filing.

Intuit very little to do with making taxes complicated. There are plenty of more powerful interests responsible for that.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#179

Post by ryandrake » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #171

ryandrake wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes to generate $10 in interest is $1000 in a 1% savings account or $500 in a 2% CD. Anyone with even this small a savings will be issued a 1090-INT, no?

No because rates aren't 1-2% in a typical savings account from a standard bank. If you want 1-2% interest you'll have to have a "high interest savings account" which have historically been online-only offerings and most people really can't be bothered to open up a new account and manage multiple accounts and do the transfers. For example, if you had $20,000 in a Chase savings account AND had a "Premier Relationship"…

Online makes it even easier. I opened a >2.5% 12 mo CD online and it took an hour max. No pre-existing relationship with the bank.

The high yield savings accounts tend to have a few strings attached but nothing I’d consider a barrier to someone with at least a job that offers direct deposit.

The biggest barrier to getting a 1090-INT is not the bank or the APR. It is having a low income and not enough money to save.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#180

Post by Rebelgecko » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

mars4rp wrote: post #131

CalRobert wrote: post #127

Meanwhile, California makes it pretty easy to file your state taxes for free, with no intermediary https://www.ftb.ca.gov/online/calfile/index.asp

I am the developer in charge of this, thanks for promoting it.

Thanks for your work, I'm a big fan of Calfile for the years when I'm eligible to use it. Out of curiosity are there any plans to support returns with capital gains?