> What it will take to defeat TurboTax
Get rid of the income tax and the irs
Killing TurboTax
481–490 of 692 posts
Re: Killing TurboTax
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the GOP We now have an opportunity to test your hypothesis- for at least two years there will be single party rule by the other party.
Single party rule would be true only if the Senate was not encumbered by the filibuster.
The majority party can remove the filibuster rule anytime it likes, as they have done for several special cases in recent years.
Re: Killing TurboTax
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. This is primarily not a "software" problem. Unless we simplify our tax codes in the US, tools like turbotax will stay. In fact, to be honest, turbotax was great when I used it last in 2009ish (I know they got acquired by Intuit and have gone downhill due to Intuit ) but the point is that it is overall an excellent software that really makes it easy to calculate and file things based on current tax codes. I wo…
It's still excellent. I just did my taxes in FreeTaxUSA this year for the first time and it's not nearly as good as TT last year. FTU is like manually filling in the IRS PDF's except as webforms, whereas TT imports PDF's and parses everything correctly, leaving you to do a quick scan. FTU is free because it's just a light GUI layer over the 1040 and various Schedule forms.
I've used FTU for the last 2 years and it's all I need, it has all the forms easily searchable and you just next next finish your taxes basically.
There isn't a need for anything else...
Re: Killing TurboTax
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tax prep industry lobbied Congress to prevent the IRS from auto-tax filing. The compromise was "free filing" for those with median incomes and below. For a majority, W2s, 1099s and the previous years return can provide an auto-filing framework. The IRS would send your their draft and you agree or modify. Other countries do this.
If I saw a proposal to make tax codes simpler, have people file taxes with a good app provided by the IRS etc and then I saw a politician vote against it, while being funded by companies benefiting from the status quo... I'd just not vote for that person again.
This is 99.9% of politicians.
Re: Killing TurboTax
#485"Killing TurboTax" is essentially a meme until we meaningfully simplify the tax code. There is no software development team on earth who could catch up with the full capabilities of TurboTax without some sort of fundamental shift in the business. I really hate to say this as someone who makes a living out of it, but dealing with the current amount of complexity in the tax code with a piece of software that a non-expe…
Most of the US is W2'd with a house, limited investments, with some dependents sprinkled in utilizing the standard deduction... it wouldn't be that hard. For everyone else there is a justification for tax professionals.
Re: Killing TurboTax
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the GOP We now have an opportunity to test your hypothesis- for at least two years there will be single party rule by the other party.
Single party rule would be true only if the Senate was not encumbered by the filibuster.
That might be a notion too drenched in game theory.
The filibuster itself is not some sort of switch that gets flipped. The parties need to be careful how often they use it and for which reasons. It's just a part of the procedural possibilities and its effectiveness is not some sort of set-in-stone rule.
In our particular case right now, the reason the Senate does not allow us single-party rule is due to the makeup of the senators themselves. It only takes a few to not vote down the party line to negate single-party rule. We've seen this a few times already since the start of the new administration.
Re: Killing TurboTax
#487"Killing TurboTax" is essentially a meme until we meaningfully simplify the tax code. There is no software development team on earth who could catch up with the full capabilities of TurboTax without some sort of fundamental shift in the business. I really hate to say this as someone who makes a living out of it, but dealing with the current amount of complexity in the tax code with a piece of software that a non-expe…
Aren't there a number of tools that people use already other than TurboTax? This seems incorrect.
Re: Killing TurboTax
#488“Jesse Wilson said to me”
Who?
Re: Killing TurboTax
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IRS themselves need to provide this "auto tax" service.
My employer didn’t send me a W2 this year which caused me to seek another method to access this information. I created an account on irs.gov and was surprised to find a single PDF for each tax year containing W2’s, 1099Ints, 1099Divs that I assume were given to the IRS on my employers/bankers behalf. Now it would be great for a tax program to ingest this PDF and auto-populate your tax return. Unfortunately no PDF for…
you made me curious and I logged into the IRS to find those "transcripts". I really cannot tell if they generate that information from your own tax report or if they generate it from what they already got in their own databases.
Re: Killing TurboTax
#490"Killing TurboTax" is essentially a meme until we meaningfully simplify the tax code. There is no software development team on earth who could catch up with the full capabilities of TurboTax without some sort of fundamental shift in the business. I really hate to say this as someone who makes a living out of it, but dealing with the current amount of complexity in the tax code with a piece of software that a non-expe…
The tax code is complex because the economic realities we want to assess taxes on are complex. A naive treatment would be both trivial to bypass and ruinous to unlucky innocent people.