41–50 of 692 posts
What exactly does everyone have against Turbotax? I use it every year and I love it. Sure I could save a hundred bucks and spend hours filling out IRS worksheets, but I don't want to. They have excellent UX, and serve as a reliable secure cloud repository for all of my financial information. What's the big deal?
Or the IRS could file our taxes for us for free.
I gotta say I have a love-hate thing with Turbotax. I hate the company and its influence peddling, lobbying, and near monopoly status, but Turbotax itself is a very well designed product with a great intuitive experience that has done a great job filing taxes. So it's a rare case of a sleazy state-sanctioned (via refusal to simplify the tax code) monopoly with a decent product. Usually such monopolies have complete s…
TurboTax works great, until things get a little too complicated, and it quickly becomes terrible. What is needed is a strongly typed DSL where you can copy and paste your entire tax return as a single text document/spreadsheet.
It's intentionally obtuse and confusing for something that should be simple and straightforward for 80% of the population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that they are so slick that you don't even notice the dark patterns that funnel you into needlessly spending money.
I buy the standalone version every year. I am not sure what dark patterns are in that version that you are talking about.
What exactly does everyone have against Turbotax? I use it every year and I love it. Sure I could save a hundred bucks and spend hours filling out IRS worksheets, but I don't want to. They have excellent UX, and serve as a reliable secure cloud repository for all of my financial information. What's the big deal?
Filing taxes should be much simpler and free for everyone, but they lobby the government to prevent that, among other things. Quick Google search result: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... .
I started building my own open source US tax engine, but then found https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes here on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138446 ) and decided to throw my efforts with them instead. Check it out!
I was just thinking that an open-source tax engine is the way to go in the future. I would like to see it maintained by the USGOV.
Or the IRS could file our taxes for us for free.
Instead of developing software, we should be writing our representatives.
This has already been done successfully in Canada. A small team from Vancouver built a pay-what-you-want web-based tax-filing system from scratch. It's called SimpleTax and it's already a major competitor to the Canadian version of TurboTax. In fact, it was so successful that it was recently acquired by Canadian investment group WealthSimple.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/the-canadian-tech-comp...
Or the IRS could file our taxes for us for free.
Turbotax et al. lobby heavily to prevent this. Given that much of the relevant information--W2s, 1099s, etc., are already reported, you'd think that this would be easier for a very large percentage of taxpayers. But it would effectively kill TurboTax's business.
Or the IRS could file our taxes for us for free.
I don't know where this idea came from (I've seen it on reddit a LOT), but it's the same here in Switzerland: you do it yourself because the tax department has no idea how much you made precisely, what you can deduce from it (expenses you had to do in order to acquire your income), etc. It just makes more sense to have everyone manage their own taxes.
It's trivial for government to be able to automatically produce a tax return that's basically almost all done for everyone.