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Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

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Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#171

Post by hannasanarion »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #158
hannasanarion wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as we all know, privatization never leads to perverse incentives and anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. Just look at the American telecom industry, which is famous for high satisfaction and low prices with no price fixing, tying, market segmentation, or any other cartel-like behavior to be seen.

American telecom industry has done much better after US government ended government granted monopoly to bell labs. Plenty of literature on that topic actually. Same for aviation. Whatever bad things you see with ATT and Comcast are actually a direct result of city granted monopolies which will likely be ended by Musk's Starlink sooner or later.

How have they done better? Prices have risen substantially as quality of service stagnates or deteriorates unless the companies are given grants and subsidies by governments to compel them to upgrade infrastructure at the taxpayer's expense. All the while they reap ever growing profits and lobby to get their employees onto regulatory boards to prevent any pro-consumer regulation.

"city-granted monopolies", are you kidding? The monopolies exist because of non-competition arrangements between companies. A city can't have anything but a monopoly when only one company willing to run cable because they've made everybody else agree to keep off their turf.

And starlink won't save anybody. For one thing, satellite internet already exists, you can buy it from providers like Viasat, DirecTV, and Hughesnet: it's expensive and the latency is outrageous because of the speed-of-light distance to satellites.

I get that you're just reciting the propaganda talking points that you've heard from news organizations and media properties (which are all now owned by telecom monopolies thanks to all the cash they have to spare from the extremely profitable telecom business, funny how that works), but a person can hope.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#172

Post by robertofmoria »

Intuit is not without blame, but the IRS in genrral is at fault and allows these problems. One cannot go to or ask the IRS for help on taxes as the IRS is not responsible legally for anything they say. Which means the IRS can tell you how to fill out a tax form and then penalize you for filling the form out wrong. Here is a solution to the tax problems... no income tax.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#173

Post by chrisseaton »

oneplane wrote: post #133
macspoofing wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lobbying is a fact of life in a democracy. For any government regulation, law, program, etc. there are multitudes of lobby groups on all sides of each issue. Why in this case is this such a big unethical crime? Lots of government programs are inefficient and expensive due to interest groups - that will never ever change. Welcome to Democracy.

No it's not a fact of life, it's a known quantity but not a fact and not life-related. And you can definitely ban it as well. It's not a requirement, and it's not the best, only or 'current' way. It's just a weak side-effect of the status quo (yes, technically that means 'weak' and 'current' but that is besides the point).

> It's just a weak side-effect

Isn't it literally a constitutional right? It's not a side-effect of anything - it's a right by itself.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#174

Post by jwoah12 »

Retric wrote: post #126
birdyrooster wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to stop calling companies “big tech” because every large cap company uses technology in a way that used to be exclusive to one tech industry.

Nintendo wasn’t a tech company for a long time but it made the switch. The same is true of Intuit, if most of your money comes from directly selling software/computer hardware ... your a tech company. That’s still not true of most large companies like say Walmart or McDonalds which still invest a great deal in technology.

> it made the switch

Nice.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#175

Post by nrmitchi »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #52

This year I paid TurboTax extra to get their "professional advice". I didn't get any. Had to find a real accountant to solve the problem. This was my last year of using TT.

I did this once.

The "professional" they connected me with turned out too not actually be a CPA, and was an IRS "Enrolled Agent" instead, and did all of my taxes wrong. I don't mean "the math was a little off", I mean "used all of the wrong forms" because he was was unaware of the criteria to be considered a Resident Alien for tax purposes.

Further, when I tried to contact this individual again (through Turbo Tax), Turbo Tax had shut down the program and was blackhole-ing all of the email without notice.

It cost me thousands of dollars after-the-fact to get fixed.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#176

Post by andrewaylett »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #141
Retric wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo wasn’t a tech company for a long time but it made the switch. The same is true of Intuit, if most of your money comes from directly selling software/computer hardware ... your a tech company. That’s still not true of most large companies like say Walmart or McDonalds which still invest a great deal in technology.

Obviously Microsoft or Apple is a tech company, they sell software and hardware. It's hard to say whether Intuit sells accounting services or whether they sell software. Is Google a tech company? Probably, but technically they sell advertisements, not software. You could say that they make money by operating ad-selling software. Walmart is a company that makes money by operating purchasing, distribution, and retailin…

I'd suggest that being "tech company" is in large part cultural mindset.

Are they primarily dependant on off-the-shelf software? Possibly not a tech company. Is their software development team bigger than the whole of the rest of the company put together? Probably a tech company. Have the developers convinced everyone else to form squads and hold all the usual agile ceremonies? Don't @ me.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#177

Post by tzs »

user3939382 wrote: post #107
whoisjuan wrote: post #39

Already said in this thread, but I think it's ridiculous that when people think about abusive big tech, they never think about Intuit. Their business is literally the idea of creating friction in federal and local tax systems so they can extort people in exchange of removing some of those synthetic frictions (emphasis on "some"). A sinister business model in every possible way.

Don’t forget the CPA trade associations who are right there with them lobbying for the same nonsense tax complexity.

The tax code is complex because people do not want to pay tax, and so anything that is ambiguous or underspecified becomes a loophole, the closing of which generally adds complexity to the code.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#178

Post by Cederfjard »

Robotbeat wrote: post #119
acomjean wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the IRS has actually partnered with the "Free File Alliance" which is a group of companies that partner with the IRS (Free tax filing for incomes Intuit is one of the members: https://freefilealliance.org/free-file-alliance-members/ https://freefilealliance.org/about/ Its a little weird. One would hope they would just send you the bill.. I filed my taxes late with an extension. I could go to the IRS site and get all…

This is literally because Intuit lobbied to ban the IRS from being able to do it for you.

This is so bizarre looking in from the outside. I’ve spent my working life in two European countries, one where if you’re just a regular employee and not doing anything special you just approve and submit your prefilled tax return, and one where you under the same circumstances literally have do to nothing.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#179

Post by lazyweb »

There's a very good Patriot Act episode [1] regarding devious patterns in the US tax industry. In fact the whole show is well worth watching. It's cancelled now, presumably because Netflix felt some heat since every episode stirred/kicked another wasp's nest.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xQQkzWhMOc

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#180

Post by andrewaylett »

barbazoo wrote: post #90
kaiju0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most every other country has the government send a tax sheet to you. If you disagree you go to appeal. If you do nothing your done. So much easier.

While I agree that that would be nice, I'm not sure that this is really as common as you say it is. Do you have examples?

The UK is a good example of this -- if you're a regular employee and earn under the higher earnings threshold then you're very unlikely to be required to fill in any kind of tax return, as all your income will have been taxed at source and we don't tend to _do_ deductions. You'll get a P60 from your employer and you've got until October to notice if you either want to or need to fill in a self-assessment (hint: you don't). If you earn more, it may well be worthwhile filling one in because schemes like gift-aid assume basic rate tax and you can claim back the difference between basic and higher rate. But even then, as an employee you can often ask for any pension contributions or charitable donations to be given directly from salary pre-tax which means less paperwork later.

Having to fill out self-assessment -- or at least complaining about doing so -- is a bit of a humble-brag as it's an indication that the person complaining earns enough (or has sufficiently complicated tax arrangements) to need to.

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