One of the sad things behind the story: Bill Campbell was Chairman of the board at Inuit while this was going on. His story is inspiring. I’m a capitalist at heart. But I’m not a monopolist or a crony—and hope not to become one. The best among us aren’t perfect. We should take this as a cautionary tale.
The vexing question: Why does there seem to be no space in the market for an honest, quality vendor? As in Fastmail, Costco, or the pre-Amazon Whole Foods?
Are there so few customers willing to pay a truthful, higher sticker price that such a business cannot be sustained?
>HN has always been at war with TurboTax. "Snarky trivialization of activism on this issue" seems like the very kind of thing you'd normally discourage.
Assuming positive intentions, it's unlikely that this is a snarky trivialization and more likely that it is acknowledging/praising the persistence of the topic.
Precisely. But what we always tell users is that intent doesn't communicate itself on the internet, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate.
HN has always been at war with TurboTax. Edit: looks like this line didn't go over so well. To avoid distractions, I'm going to move these links to another post and mark this subthread off topic. Links moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21924055 .
I suggest you change "HN has always been at war with TurboTax" which unless I'm mistaken is a reference to 1984, in which history is rewritten retroactively[1]. To me this phrasing seems to imply that half of your links would be strong support of TurboTax. Since this whole subject includes a lot of doublethink (such as the fact that according to a video someone posted in this thread, the Free File Alliance is a front…
I just want to move to a system where the IRS sends me a bill, they know how much I owe them.
Yeah there's no reason that in 2019 we should even have to file. Everything should be automated for 85% of the population and they just receive the bill. Only a small percent would actually need to file due to certain circumstances mostly by people that are using special business structures to minimize taxes.
100% agree. To me they seem to be playing this perverse game of knowing how much you owe based on your W-2s then not telling you, waiting for you to file and guess how much you owe just right. If you guess wrong tough luck, you get penalties years later.
The "penalties" are just what you owed plus interest. I think the IRS will only charge an actual penalty if they think you were deliberately trying to avoid taxes.
Unfortunately, the IRS includes ignorance in their definition of deliberately.
100% agree. To me they seem to be playing this perverse game of knowing how much you owe based on your W-2s then not telling you, waiting for you to file and guess how much you owe just right. If you guess wrong tough luck, you get penalties years later.
The "penalties" are just what you owed plus interest. I think the IRS will only charge an actual penalty if they think you were deliberately trying to avoid taxes.
> The "penalties" are just what you owed plus interest
Sure, interest after 6 years can accumulate into a nice penalty sum on top of what is owed. If IRS ends up owing you, and they discover it 6 years later, would they send you the refund with an interest as well? I am guessing they won't.
So in Canada I pay about $15 CAD to file for my household. It takes 20 mins and is submitted digitally. Is this the equivalent of the issue in the USA or is it more expensive or something? I get that free filing is kind of obvious as a right, but the online service really does give me $15 of value so I've never thought to be upset by it.
If you're in Canada I can't recommend SimpleTax [1] enough. Donation-based, so free or what you can pay. Was recently acquired by Wealthsimple.
In the US, we've had decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government can't do anything properly. A substantial portion of the population believes it. As noted in a sibling comment, the IRS could pre-fill forms that would be correct for the vast majority of tax payers (who take the standard deduction/don't itemize, have a single job, and no other edge cases). These people should not be paying TurboTax either wa…
It's pretty disgusting. Summed up in one of my favorite tweets, which went something like > Gov: you owe us money. It's called taxes > Ctzn: oh ok, how much do I owe you? > Gov: you have to figure it out > Ctzn: oh well, then I owe you 0 > Gov: no, no, we know how much you owe, you have to figure it out, and by the way if you get it wrong you go to jail
You can have the irs figure out how much you owe if your income is simple enough. This is similar to a lot of countries just taxing you at your income sources and not requiring you to file a return. However, the American system has a lot of deductions, exemptions, status modifiers, etc... so you often need to pay less than that, hence the need for everyone to do tax returns.
Are we reading the same article? Don't invent partisan issues, the article makes it clear it's not a "Republican" thing, it's an Intuit thing.
Did you read it? Intuit lobbied....Republicans.
"In 2007, Eric Cantor (a Republican leader) and Zoe Lofgren (a Democrat from Silicon Valley) had introduced a bill to ban return-free filing. Both received contributions from Inuit."
And Intuit did not lobby Republicans, it lobbied Grover Norquist.