Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit • Hacker News Board

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#191

Post by dnautics » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

alexlmiller wrote: post #144

dnautics wrote: post #113

I'd love to see a turbotax alternative that 1. imports your previous turbotax years 2. charges $10 less than turbotax 3. offers a free version gated by income 4. squirrels away some percentage of profits each year to a big "F U" fund, half of which goes to lobbying for permanent income tax simplification, half of which goes to directly paying out the shareholders in the company on dissolution.

This is basically https://www.taxact.com , minus #4

#4 is the key part! I mean maybe I have an irrational obsession with the idea of a corporation chartered with an expiration date, heh.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#192

Post by throwaway413 » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

All of the people supercritical of Intuit in this thread make me wonder, do they think the government would truly be providing a service on par with TurboTax? When has the government ever done Internet right…looking at you, Healthcare.gov.

$90 bucks a year to ensure your taxes are right, with a streamlined interface that almost anyone can follow, that returns you back significant value in time and tax return…

Intuit legally cannot sell your information like other companies can, because they are in the business of taxes.

People here LOVE to tell founders, “oh, you should be charging for your product! Otherwise it isn’t sustainable!”

I’m sorry, would you rather TT be free and them be slanging your data like Facebook and Amazon? Or alternatively, the government just in charge of replacing it with a congruent service? I didn’t think so.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#193

Post by alkonaut » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

bestcoder69 wrote: post #102

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should literally be nationalized Political note: calls for nationalisation, in American politics, is a gift to the other side. It lets one paint the opposition as extremists without grounding in U.S. Constitutional law or the economic history of countries that regularly expropriate property. I get the impulse. But literally any other phrasing—massive fines, criminal prosecution, open-licensing requirements, et cete…

Allowing “nationalization” to remain a dirty word (and not “privatization”) is a much bigger gift. Why should it be off the table? Does the average person even give a shit about the public/private status of Intuit? I get conservatives will complain but they will (and do) literally call ANY improvement to the IRS Communism. Is the hope that if you play language games they’ll see the light?

I guess it would be easier and better to just strangle them by simplifying the tax code, sending pre-filled returns to everyone and making a simple and accessible web app for people to file theit taxes with a few clicks.

Intuit aren't alone in this scheme. There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#194

Post by paulproteus » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

I work at Code for America on the Tax Benefits team, and we're working on a different website to apply for the Child Tax Credit. (See https://www.getctc.org/ and https://www.getyourrefund.org/. ) From the original article: > Alas, all [People's Policy Project's website] can do is funnel users into Intuit's terrible [child tax credit] site. Today at work, I'm learning how to use the IRS's e-File SOAP API in the hopes that we can build a flow that is easier to use than Intuit's. Feel free to subscribe to our newsletter. :) https://info.codeforamerica.org/newsletter See also https://www.codeforamerica.org/news/meet-code-for-americas-n... for how we're thinking about this work.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#195

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #177

user3939382 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#196

Post by xyzelement » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #34

cmckn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. The IRS needs to offer a tax preparation platform, the grift in this industry is astounding. I've always had decent experiences with TurboTax, but they've gotten extremely good at making your taxes hell if you want to avoid giving them $89.99.

This year we tried doing our taxes using both TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA. TurboTax has a much worse interface, it took almost twice as long to complete the taxes despite having an identical return. TurboTax did find about $50 more return for us somehow despite having entered the same information into both sites, but that amount is less than the fee TurboTax would charge so we ended up submitting through FreeTaxUSA inste…

This is the sort of critical thing. You do your taxes once a year but the impact could be hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. In your case it was only 50 but thematically this says that TT is better because it found you more credits/deductions. You don't know it's gonna "only" be 50 ahead of time. And the more complexity/money is at stake, the more important it is to get right. Once you are talking about potentially real money, the quality of the UI becomes quite secondary in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong, would love for the IRS to offer a standard free filing solution. But short of that, I want the thing that is most likely to get me the biggest legal return

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#197

Post by adrusi » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #169

jandrese wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This year we tried doing our taxes using both TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA. TurboTax has a much worse interface, it took almost twice as long to complete the taxes despite having an identical return. TurboTax did find about $50 more return for us somehow despite having entered the same information into both sites, but that amount is less than the fee TurboTax would charge so we ended up submitting through FreeTaxUSA inste…

> TurboTax did find about $50 more return for us somehow Don’t you have to sign to say that you’re entitled to that return? How are you doing it if you don’t understand where it’s coming from?

The person paying the taxes is not always expected to understand exactly how the tax code applies to them. IANAL but I think that when you hire a human tax accountant, their saying that your return is legally sufficient for you to testify that you are entitled to your return as filed. I don't know how that would apply to tax software, but I imagine that for purposes that TurboTax is appropriate for, saying "well TurboTax, a widely used and generally respected accounting tool generated this return, so I believe that it is correct," would be sufficient. Of course if it turned out that you were not entitled to the full refund you filed for, you would still be liable to pay back the difference, but you wouldn't be assessed an additional fine.

Again IANAL, this is how I expect the law would work, not necessarily how it actually works.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#198

Post by alkonaut » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

pesfandiar wrote: post #112

MarkusWandel wrote: post #99

We had the completely free "click here for a default tax return" situation here in Canada, at least in Ontario. As of last year (in my case) finally the tax authority had all the information slips you need to file already in their database. The freely usable tax software (Studio Tax) was able to download and autofill them to generate a valid (as far as the government knows) tax return that could then be e-filed. The…

You still need to do the cost basis calculation yourself, because a single financial institution can't calculate that for you (you may have the same securities with another institution).

A different institution from what? If all banks, employers and other institutions are required to send the info to the tax authority, the only "other" things you need to fill in is basically income made abroad. But most people obviously don't have foreign income or assets, so a tax calculation should be 100% correct and simply a matter of accepting?

The Tax authority should also have a very good guess of all possible deductions/credits, so that can be filled automatically too.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#199

Post by tmp_anon_22 » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

Miraste wrote: post #136

maxmamis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Political note: calls for nationalisation, in American politics, is a gift to the other side. Perhaps you should rephrase this as "calls for nationalization run counter to my own free-market ideology" rather than a) assuming you know what everybody else thinks, and b) suggesting that conventional wisdom should dictate the bounds of acceptable discourse. Not to mention, plenty of countries — the US included — have s…

Unless you go back to FDR, the US has only "nationalized" (bailed out) companies when they were on the verge of collapse with catastrophic economic consequences, and because of 9/11. Nationalizing a functioning company, no matter how evil, would be unprecedented and immediately fail after being labeled communist. I'm not commenting on the merits of the idea here, only the political reality.

> labeled communist

Its so crazy to me that some Americans label abstract ideas as evil. Communism == evil. Socialism == evil. Many welfare programs == evil. Immigrant labor == evil. High minimum wage == evil. Some languages, religions, cultures == evil. Stop subverting the English language because you're too lazy to check a thesaurus. None of those things are evil.

Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

#200

Post by stouset » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

throwaway413 wrote: post #192

All of the people supercritical of Intuit in this thread make me wonder, do they think the government would truly be providing a service on par with TurboTax? When has the government ever done Internet right…looking at you, Healthcare.gov. $90 bucks a year to ensure your taxes are right, with a streamlined interface that almost anyone can follow, that returns you back significant value in time and tax return… Intuit…

The government literally already computes the number they expect you to owe. It's how they send you a letter if your own calculations come up short (or long, in which case they will in fact contact you to issue you a refund). If the government simply sends you their calculations (which they are already computing anyway) and you disagree, you would still be able to file an amended return with a company like TurboTax.

Why do you think it is—specifically—that a multitude of other governments can manage to accomplish this feat, but the United States government shouldn't be able to?