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

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

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 466 posts

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

#71

Post by LilBytes »

Nursie wrote: post #59
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…

In Australia a sort of spreadsheet-like app is published each year. It pulls in data from a variety of sources (banks and employers mostly, IIRC), fills in everything it can and then lets you do the rest. Windows only last time I did it (7 years ago?), things may have improved further since then.

All Web based now, no thick client. It still pools in all of your data from various sources as the old e tax client did. It was only Windows too from what I recall. It's all been centralised in myGov for a few years.

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

#72

Post by mywittyname »

paxys wrote: post #44
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.

Open source software can be paid for. With a bit of funding, I bet an OSS-clone of TT could be produced and the organization can host and offer e-filing for a nominal fee.

I think the IRS will actually pay a service fee to small companies that file the free federal returns for individuals.

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

#73

Post by lqet »

MrGilbert wrote: post #37
lqet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: the official tax filing application in Germany which has been around for a few decades is called "ELSTER" (apronym for El ektronische St euer er klärung, "Electronic Tax Return") which literally translates to "MAGPIE", as in "thieving magpie" ("Diebische Elster"). This is a form of self-irony which is quite unusual for the German tax offices. OS portability has greatly improved with their online app [0], wh…

ELSTER is one of the few examples that come into my mind in terms of "software done right": It's stable and "just works", at least for me. It's first version was released to the public in 1999, so... Yes, ELSTER is around for almost 20 years now, getting constantly refined at least in the front-end. All in all, it's something you wouldn't have expected here in Germany in terms of software projects from the government…

AFAIK, it is mostly developed in-house, at least the original version was developed by the Bavarian tax office. In my experience, if government software (for schools, tax offices, political participation, etc.) is developed by an external company, the primary objective of the company often quickly transforms from "creating usable software for all citizens" to "drain the most amount of money out of the infinite resources of the federal government".

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

#74

Post by MarketingJason »

Their efforts to block return-free filing is the important issue here. Filing taxes, even on paper, would be orders of magnitude easier if the government had to pre-fill it before sending - removing the complexity that makes tax filing applications necessary for most.

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

#76

Post by wffurr »

jedimastert wrote: post #49
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.

18F has really changed the game in government IT and software. https://18f.gsa.gov/

They brought in a bunch of dedicated experienced software pros who among other things rescued the federal health insurance exchange site.

I think they could do a fine job with tax software.

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

#77

Post by kristiandupont »

giovannibonetti wrote: post #51
jib wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden, the government does the work for most normal cases. They send you a suggestion of “this is all we know about” and you just say “yeah, seems right” via SMS. In Ireland you don’t do anything in the usual case, unless you think it’s wrong, everything is taxed at source by the employers/banks. Both cases different if you’re a company ofc.

It seems a bit naive of the government to reveal to you your income sources they know about. If you have any hidden ones you can confidently not report them and pay less taxes than you would otherwise.

It's the same in Denmark and it feels right to me. It's not like they are doing detective work (per default). If you have a concealed source of income, I'd expect them not to know about it. Of course, you'd still be breaking the law by not reporting it and it could turn up if they notice something that doesn't add up somewhere.

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

#78

Post by at_a_remove »

dangus wrote: post #21
u801e wrote: post #3

Free fillable forms[1] has been around for a number of years and van be used by anyone regardless of income level. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_File#Free_File_Fillable...

They are still an unnecessarily painful solution. I did do these last year to finally kick TurboTax to the curb. However, they’re shamefully complex especially considering how they’re already a piece of software. They barely do basic arithmetic. The restrictions are entirely artificial, and the system is gamed so that you either spend a lot of time learning tax form rules and lingo or you just pay TurboTax to do it f…

Your point about how the IRS already has all of the relevant information is something that has always puzzled me. Why are we performing this bizarre, ever-changing ritual with the threat of IRS audits hanging over us if they already know everything?

I think that is part of why TurboTax has such a foothold. I use it because it walks me through the frankly byzantine process and explains a good deal of the arcane terminology for me.

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

#79

Post by isostatic »

jedimastert wrote: post #49
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.

One of the best sites to 'do stuff' in the UK is gov.uk

I've just filled in a new ESTA application on the US gov site too, simple (albeit stupid), and worked.

This morning however I tried using enterprise b2b to book a hire car, it took 6 attempts before it actually worked. Almost all corporate tools seem to be terrible.

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

#80

Post by cvhashim »

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…

Tax lobbyists like Intuit benefit too much from all of this really. Planet money podcast episode that outlines some of this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

Also Reply All did an episode recently on the Propublica Intuit story.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nhgol

Post reply on HN