It's freaking hilarious to see exactly the same arguments played out as in the equally long and heated thread on exactly the same subject only a few weeks ago. Complete with the same lazy bastards who couldn't be bothered to read TFA before expounding on it, the same poor schmucks earnestly regurgitating it for them, and the same ultra-libertard arseholes praising this corrupt shitstain of a corporation. Sigh... Geroffmylawn.
Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
261–270 of 332 posts
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never said we need to leave the bad actors out of the narrative. I am simply talking about not placing the blame on them. It is the equivalent of a blameless postmortem. We are in a constant cycle of firing interns for pushing costly bugs into production without ever wondering why we are allowing interns to push to production without supervision. We just fire the intern and think the problem is fixed. We have learn…
Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production because for whatever reason it was in their best interest? We fire bad actors all the time.
> Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production
Probably not faster than I’d fire whoever let an intern repeatedly push broken code to production, without taking responsibility for fixing the deployment process problem they were responsible for, were I at the level where my responsibility wasn't merely to fix the deployment process problem but to address the problem that allowed the deployment process to persist, and presuming that there wasn't a systemic reason rather than simple nonfeasance behind permitting that problem to go unfixed.
Especially as establishing the “intentional” part of the hypothetical would probably take longer than establishing a serious and inexcusable failure even in the absence of any intent in the person responsible for allowing the push to be possible in the first place.
That's, I think, the upthread posters point. If you have an intern posting broken code to production repeatedly (intentionally or not), you have another problem that is a deeper and broader impact problem, whether individual or systemic or both, than the intern.
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
does H&R Block handle investments and cost basis year over year information? That's the only tripping point im finding with whatever product I look to in comparison to Turbotax. Once your tax situation starts down that path I'm noticing getting a product that can pull from multiple investment accounts and keep track of cost basis correctly really narrows it down to Turbotax so far for me.
At that point why not engage an accounting firm? Yes it would probably cost more, but you're supporting your local economy and have a human being to discuss any questions with (as well as be responsible for any mistakes).
For $150 turbotax filed my fed and state taxes:
1. W2s + bank interest for two people
2. Taxable capital gains of various kinds, including stock, options, and 1256 contracts
3. Self employment business (consulting) with multiple clients and deductions for various business expenses.
All of this took less than 2 hours and most of the data was digitally imported from various portals.
I'm guessing it would cost me at least an order of magnitude more and take similar time to do it through an accounting firm.
So i'm kind of split, on the one hand intuit is an evil company and i hope our tax system is changed/irs no longer uses them/etc. On the other hand I really don't want to spend extra 1k+ on taxes OR spend tens of hours it would take me to assemble the 50+ page return on my own.
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find this criticism somewhat weird. It is very common for companies or even individuals to promote and support policies that benefit themselves. Intuit is seeking self interest here. But why would IRS and our elected representatives cave in ? Are these people so clueless or unethical that they do not care about their constituents anymore ? And if that is the case I don't see how anyone can bell the intuit's cat.
You accept that Intuit is lobbying for unethical policies in order to enrich themselves, but you don't understand why anyone would criticize that?
Generously interpreted, I think they are questioning why we're criticizing Intuit for doing it when we don't necessarily criticize other companies for it.
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they're deliberately blocking millions of desperately impoverished people from receiving billions of dollars. They aren't. Those programs don't require Intuit to claim.
Recipients' other options are hire a CPA (obviously untenable), find the correct forms, calculate the credit themselves, do the rest of their returns by hand, and submit those (difficult for the target groups) or... pay to use TurboTax. That's the exact dilemma this new site would've helped solve if it hadn't been sabotaged.
> (difficult for the target groups)
Why? My father is an immigrant, speaks with broken English and has no higher education ... and did his taxes for years with forms.
Which target group are you referring to?
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your question is, why isn't the federal government of the United States, a country of 330M people, as efficient and effective as the government of the Netherlands, a country of 17M people? Holy fuck, can't you Yanks just fucking stop pulling this idiotic non-argument out of your arses every time a comparison with any other country is made?!? Sure, your pool of people to be taxed is X times bigger than some other co…
Do you think “add more administrators” is the correct solution to every problem?
No, I'm just countering your assumption, because that seemed to be your objection.
In actual fact, of course, you wouldn't need anywhere near that many: This is all done by software nowadays, not bespectacled men with green eyeshades, quill pens, and big ledgers. Sure, being so much bigger, you might have more weird edge cases and exceptions... But although your population is twenty times bigger than the Netherlands', your number of kinds of edge cases and exceptions will be far lower than that. And you only need exception code for each kind of edge case. So your larger population will actually allow you to use fewer resources, proportionally, to build an equivalent system; not more.
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#267I 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…
This sounds great, anything I can do to help?
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Corporate death penalty Corporations are legal fictions. If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component. Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are pr…
> > Corporate death penalty > Corporations are legal fictions. Then they shouldn't have the same rights as real people. If they're just fictions, then it stands to reason that at least when they behave so egregiously that their fictional life has to be ended, their worth and value also turns out to be fictional. > If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out,…
We’re talking past each other. I’m in favor of ending companies that wantonly break the law.
Corporate death penalties reinvent the wheel for zero benefit. It gets, at best, to the same place as fines or revocation. It adds the needless step of creating an unprecedented and politically-charged term with major constitutional flaws in respect of the taking of private property. If I’m a lobbyist trying to gut antitrust and the threat of those stronger measures I just mentioned, corporate death penalties are an almost all-too-perfect red herring. It severs the left from the centre-left so cleanly that I’m about 10% sure it came out of the right.
If you like the idea of ending companies for bad things, skip fabricated steps and push for specific crimes being punishable with fines equal to a substantial fraction of enterprise value and/or license revocations. You would have to do that anyway with any corporate death penalty rules. Go straight for the kill.
Unless, of course, the aim is rabble rousing. In that case, fight for corporate death penalties. It’s effective at turning out certain voting blocks.
> [corporations] shouldn't have the same rights as real people
Corporations don’t have the same rights as natural persons.
They have many of them, but those are mostly severable through legislation. Incorporation does have broad support. Taking the evil lobbyist from the previous example, if she sees a list of ten corporate reforms she doesn’t like, adding ending corporate personhood to the list guarantees opposition from small business to multinationals, NGOs and unions to trade associations.
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#269Earlier 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.
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…
> (Free tax filing for incomes It's free period. There is a threshold, but cost isn't what changes. Here's the entrypoint: https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
* * > 72k requires you fill out virtual versions of the paper forms (with some limited automation) and doesn't include state taxes, but it's still free.
Re: Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
#270[deleted]