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TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

propublica.org

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Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#41

Post by danmg »

vonmoltke wrote: post #2

ProPublica seems to be singularly focused on Intuit to the exclusion of all the other powerful interests who benefit from a complex and opaque tax code. They may be fighting efforts to make filing easier under the current rules, but they aren't really doing anything to keep those rules a clusterfuck.

Most of the other people gaming the system are doing it to benefit themselves personally. Intuit is gaming the system so it can continue its rent-seeking behavior against the American tax payer at large. There is an element of direct unjust enrichment against the tax payer at large which is absent from other forms of tax code manipulation.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#42

Post by lincolnq »

ttn wrote: post #17

Can someone from US explain how come there is still no open source alternative to TurboTax?

Anyone want to start one?

The project is not easy. It requires carefully reading tax codes and implementing them, handling presumably thousands of explicit legal requirements plus whatever edge cases exist that may or may not be explicit in the law. Not to mention keeping up with annual changes. If you screw it up, whether or not you are legally liable, people are probably coming after you anyway. And the support nightmare...

That said, I think a programming-languages approach might be a good one to try to execute on this. Keeping the source code as close to the tax code as possible seems the only way to stay sane with respect to long-term maintenance.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#43

Post by mywittyname »

throwaway_law wrote: post #33
ttn wrote: post #17

Can someone from US explain how come there is still no open source alternative to TurboTax?

There are...you can download any tax form for free and fill it in by hand or in a PDF program. You will see articles regularly attacking TurboTax because SV has been wildly unsuccessful in producing a startup that can compete with TurboTax, so instead a lot of effort is spent attacking them in the media. Google, Microsoft, Facebook all spend significantly more on lobbying to ensure market hegemony. Don't be surprised…

I can just imagine the YouTube advertising campaign...

> Do you hate doing you taxes? Try Simple, we made it easy! Just put in a few personal details and we'll take care of all the rest. We'll download your W2 information from your employer and send it to the IRS. With our Simple Guarantee, you can feel confident that your return will be correct.

Or maybe we could call it Tophat. That's a good tax software name.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#44

Post by paxys »

ttn wrote: post #17

Can someone from US explain how come there is still no open source alternative to TurboTax?

It isn't the software that is complicated, it's the intricate knowledge of the tax laws at the Federal and state level that goes behind building it. If you can find a team of lawyers and tax accountants willing to work on it for free (and update it every year) then building something like TurboTax wouldn't be too difficult.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#46

Post by cesarb »

gjvnq wrote: post #9

Just for comparison: in Brazil the _Receita Federal_ (IRS equivalent) provides a free multi-platform* Java desktop app for filing your taxes. The UI isn't great* and if you do complex stock trading it can be a pain to add the necessary information, but for the vast majority of people it works just fine. It also shows if it is better to use the standard deduction or the itemized deductions for your particular case and…

> Brazil the _Receita Federal_ (IRS equivalent) provides a free multi-platform Java desktop app for filing your taxes.

Other fun stuff about that desktop app...

* Originally, it was a DOS-only program (yes, it's that old). Then for a while, it was Windows-only, then for some time (probably due to the Linux users complaining) there was both the Windows-only version and the Java multi-platform version, and later the Windows-only version was discontinued.

* The original way of sending the output of this program to Receita Federal was to write it to a floppy disk and take it to a bank, which would read and upload it. Later functionality was added to send it through the Internet instead, and some time later the floppy disk option was removed.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#47

Post by vonmoltke »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #4
vonmoltke wrote: post #2

ProPublica seems to be singularly focused on Intuit to the exclusion of all the other powerful interests who benefit from a complex and opaque tax code. They may be fighting efforts to make filing easier under the current rules, but they aren't really doing anything to keep those rules a clusterfuck.

Who else lobbies like Intuit? Who else spends millions of dollars on defeating measures intended to make paying taxes simpler and easier?

That's hard to disentangle, because there are lots of individuals and large corporations that benefit from complex holes in the tax code that would go away if the code were made simpler. Intuit's efforts are just easier to ascribe to that purpose.

There's also the block of special interests that advance their agendas via the tax code. Things like the capital gains tax regime, Child Tax Credit, and mortgage interest deduction.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#48

Post by _jal »

mywittyname wrote: post #35
HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #20

Maybe I'm totally wrong here, but I don't see much of a difference between extorsionist tax filing software and scam callers warning me about the IRS suing me. Can the government please make something that's easy to use? Filing taxes isn't something that requires a separate company to help with, and I see no reason why these products have a right to exist (and especially not be canonized), especially with how exploit…

> I see no reason why these products have a right to exist (and especially not be canonized), especially with how exploitive they are or can be. But if we remove the annual pain of dealing with taxes, then Americans will get complacent and may stop being bothered by having to pay taxes. - The serious ideology of a major American political party vis-a-vis taxes.

This. It is a special combination of sadistic and stupid, an American classic.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#49

Post by jedimastert »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #20

Maybe I'm totally wrong here, but I don't see much of a difference between extorsionist tax filing software and scam callers warning me about the IRS suing me. Can the government please make something that's easy to use? Filing taxes isn't something that requires a separate company to help with, and I see no reason why these products have a right to exist (and especially not be canonized), especially with how exploit…

> Can the government please make something that's easy to use?

To be frank, the government has issues making things usable, and "usable" is a pretty small target when you're talking about the entire US workforce.

Re: TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

#50

Post by candyman »

I guess this is why some voters are eager for someone like Elizabeth Warren to get in office and stop some of this anti-competitive behavior. It's odd to me because TurboTax is good software (at least when I used it) and it saves time. So to me it's worth the money. But to force someone who as a job and no real deductions to not simply file a 1040 EZ online is just a rent seeker making sure they get paid.
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