11–20 of 489 posts
Just don't outsource it. I'm sure USDS could have it ready in less than a year.
Essentially: * IRS wanted to open tax software business to private companies. * Intuit has a variety of products with similar names and each has a free offering for a specific set of tax payers (e.g. income below some number). IRS + US Gov bought the story. * Intuit caught doing a variety of false advertising, misleading documentation, adversarial website editing, etc. They make it impossibly hard to find which is the free version of whatever you need.
So this is a big first step away from the draconian Intuit monopoly. It would be interesting to know what precipitated this change.
> a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system has been scrapped What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens? There's a lot wrong with Brazil but here I just download the government-provided software (that runs on Windows/Linux/Mac) and fill my taxes in 10-15 minutes. Every year they release a new version that is easier t…
> a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system has been scrapped What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens? There's a lot wrong with Brazil but here I just download the government-provided software (that runs on Windows/Linux/Mac) and fill my taxes in 10-15 minutes. Every year they release a new version that is easier t…
The idea was lots of people could file for free using a private online service. Not many people at all ended up using it, since it wasn't in the company's interest to have people not pay them.
This is good news, right? I'm kind of amazed that good news is happening and that the lobbying forces (eventually) got defeated in this case.
> a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system has been scrapped What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens? There's a lot wrong with Brazil but here I just download the government-provided software (that runs on Windows/Linux/Mac) and fill my taxes in 10-15 minutes. Every year they release a new version that is easier t…
I really hope the IRS creates it's own site, they would need to advertise it heavily though, way way too many people think eFile = TurboTax. There's already vastly better options out there but very few people use them or know about them.
Edit: I think the real killer feature would be to pre-populate the "IRS e-file" with the information the IRS already knows about you. That would get people paying attention.
> a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system has been scrapped What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens? There's a lot wrong with Brazil but here I just download the government-provided software (that runs on Windows/Linux/Mac) and fill my taxes in 10-15 minutes. Every year they release a new version that is easier t…
The idea was lots of people could file for free using a private online service. Not many people at all ended up using it, since it wasn't in the company's interest to have people not pay them.
Related: TurboTax Deliberately Hid Its Free File Page From Search Engines
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126
Not sure how factual Adam Ruins Everything is, but his skit on taxes is pretty damning for tax software companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj4anUL-LvY