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Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

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Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#91

Post by dang »

Past threads. Get ready for more in April...

Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against It (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185484 - Feb 2022 (18 comments)

Killing TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330584 - March 2021 (662 comments)

Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138446 - Feb 2021 (219 comments)

TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102695 - Feb 2021 (306 comments)

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26060414 - Feb 2021 (199 comments)

FTC Is Investigating Intuit over TurboTax Practices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24409093 - Sept 2020 (194 comments)

IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923220 - Dec 2019 (448 comments)

IRS Tried to Hide Emails That Show Tax Industry Influence over Free File Program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393758 - Oct 2019 (188 comments)

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411 - Oct 2019 (447 comments)

TurboTax to charge more lower-income customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461169 - July 2019 (81 comments)

Congress Scraps Provision to Restrict IRS from Competing with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119916 - June 2019 (18 comments)

TurboTax Uses a “Military Discount” to Trick Troops into Paying to File Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19994118 - May 2019 (42 comments)

Listen to TurboTax Lie to Get Out of Refunding Overcharged Customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870242 - May 2019 (44 comments)

TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19810981 - May 2019 (143 comments)

TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126 - April 2019 (262 comments)

TurboTax Uses Dark Patterns to Trick You into Paying to File Your Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718284 - April 2019 (274 comments)

Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725 - April 2019 (696 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673 - March 2019 (253 comments)

H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against Free and Simple Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18956883 - Jan 2019 (190 comments)

Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751383 - Aug 2018 (424 comments)

Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16844458 - April 2018 (23 comments)

H&R Block and Intuit Lobbying Against Simpler Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16841449 - April 2018 (232 comments)

H&R Block and Intuit Are Lobbying Against Making Tax Filling Free and Easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922482 - March 2017 (234 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150 - March 2017 (439 comments)

TurboTax Takes Aim at Smaller Rival in Fight for Filers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11150694 - Feb 2016 (87 comments)

Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381437 - April 2015 (150 comments)

Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380232 - April 2015 (124 comments)

Filing taxes: It shouldn't be so hard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488084 - April 2013 (56 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203 - March 2013 (330 comments)

Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#92

Post by nickjj »

A client of mine sent me a 1099 last month through their QuickBooks account. I never used any of Intuit's products before.

In order to download it I (the recipient of the 1099 which is nothing but a PDF file) had to create a QuickBooks account.

During this process:

1. I was denied being able to make an account unless I used a password less than 33 characters (my normal passwords are well above that but it was blocked). Here's a tweet and screenshot of the form validation https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1486793382789885960.

2. Their page tried to get me to sign up to their paid services multiple times while attempting to download the 1099.

3. Their page tried to get me to upgrade my account to a paid account after I downloaded the 1099.

4. In order to close my account I had to call an 800 number and speak to a human. I ended up not doing this, but someone else in another comment said they tried unsuccessfully and ultimately filed a complaint against them through their state's Attorney General.

Pretty much every dark pattern you can ask for tied into an activity where incorrectly paying your taxes can lead to fines or imprisonment.

Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#93

Post by SilasX »

mwint wrote: post #76
SilasX wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used FreeTaxUSA with a Wealthfront account that had stock trading. Wasn’t charged.

FreeTaxUSA is strangely under-mentioned on these threads. I’ve used it the last couple years with a complex-ish situation. Not a single complaint.

I initially tried it because CreditKarma had egregious errors last time, like:

1) Inverting my answer to “have you sold cryptocurrency” on the forms.

2) Silently removing decimal points (changing 8.005 to 8005 shares in the forms)

3) Persisting an entry for income after I tried to delete it and re-enter, with no way to fix it even after talking to support.

4) Having forms with an overlay “do not use”.

FreeTaxUSA still refused decimal points in the forms (like in item 2) but at least warned me so I could work around it.

Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#96

Post by nickjj »

Serious question:

Tax laws change constantly as do the amounts you need to pay.

Accountants tend to use automated tools to calculate accurate taxes which they routinely pay yearly updates for.

What is stopping an accountant who is also a programmer to release a tool which they feed in the accurate / up to date info from whatever tools they are paying for to produce an accurate tax return?

It could be open source and donation based or priced at something that makes it a no brainer to use for everyone who isn't eligible to do free tax returns. I have to think they would make many orders of magnitude more money from this than charging their usual accounting fees to a small local group of folks but this is such a basic idea that there has to be something stopping them from doing it.

Is this because of liability concerns around providing inaccurate numbers or is there a lot of manual work being done to calculate taxes that a tool can't accurately calculate on its own without a huge amount of domain knowledge?

Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#97

Post by boplicity »

Darmody wrote: post #43
mcherm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA the government also knows the money you make. They have all the data they need to be able to generate a pre-filled draft, and taxpayers could use that as a starting point and modify it if they needed to take a large tax credit for installing solar panels, or some other such thing which the government doesn't necessarily know about. But it's against the law. The law specifically prohibits the tax agency (IR…

That was my point. They know the money you make, they can make it free and easy but they don't want to cut the middleman.

I have to disagree here. It's not about the middleman. They probably know the income you made -- but they may also not know all the income you made. Self reporting of taxes is standard in many countries for this reason. People run small businesses, freelance, get cash payments, tips, etc that are outside their normal (reported) income. You are required to report this, even if the IRS doesn't know about it. That's why they will never send you pre-filled forms. They want you to report everything -- and they're certainly not going to make easier to skip reporting some of your income.

Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#98

Post by bshoemaker »

aerosmile wrote: post #40

So many people offering explanations, and yet not a single one of them answers the OP's question. If you're upset that Intuit is engaging in lobbying (as you should be!), that might be an appropriate answer for a different question (eg: why doesn't the IRS just send us their own reports for us to approve?). Again, I am not defending Intuit's involvement in politics, but that's not the answer to the dark patterns ques…

I've used FreeTaxUSA and it's done everything I've ever wanted.

Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#99

Post by nhumrich »

nickjj wrote: post #96

Serious question: Tax laws change constantly as do the amounts you need to pay. Accountants tend to use automated tools to calculate accurate taxes which they routinely pay yearly updates for. What is stopping an accountant who is also a programmer to release a tool which they feed in the accurate / up to date info from whatever tools they are paying for to produce an accurate tax return? It could be open source and…

As a former employee of a company that was essentially trying to build the "turbo tax for accountants", we had over 200 accounts, 50+ software engineers, and still barely scratched the surface. (The project eventually shut down after burning through 25 million). The problem is that tax code is very very ugly. We had entire teams thar would specialize in a specific tax area. Even if you could codify everything, the amount things change from year to year is insane. Most accountants deal with a very small subset of tax law, and they send the rest off to specialist teams, like a big-4 accountant firm where a lots of things are done by hand or older archaic software that costs a lot of money. (Comparative to turbo tax). Even the small subset of tax law most people deal with, there are thousands of edge cases. And then, to top it off, the problem isn't really "calculating everything" but filling out the forms. Because the IRS expects PDFs.

Re: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

#100

Post by pie42000 »

aerosmile wrote: post #40

So many people offering explanations, and yet not a single one of them answers the OP's question. If you're upset that Intuit is engaging in lobbying (as you should be!), that might be an appropriate answer for a different question (eg: why doesn't the IRS just send us their own reports for us to approve?). Again, I am not defending Intuit's involvement in politics, but that's not the answer to the dark patterns ques…

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