Credit Karma had a free tax filing application as of last year but as they were purchased by Intuit who knows what is happening with that....
FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
51–60 of 610 posts
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me know if you find anyone that is better. I'm sick of TaxAct premium for the same reason. I'm ready to go back to doing my taxes by hand and mailing them in. (I'm old enough to remember doing that - it is faster than doing it on the computer except for the one year I forgot to copy line 13 of form 1234A to line 56b of form 9876B) So many dark patters where the software is pretending to take time doing a complex…
FreeTaxUsa is great for most usecases, including stock sales. It is free for federal filing, state is a bit extra ($10)
FreeTaxUsa forced me to manually enter my stock last year, I had to provide a supplemental PDF form outlining each transaction.
Obnoxiously, this year TurboTax's integration with Binance is broken. I haven't checked in a few weeks but it won't accept Binance CSV's either. This needs to be fixed soon.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#53Credit Karma had a free tax filing application as of last year but as they were purchased by Intuit who knows what is happening with that....
It's now Cash App Tax here https://cash.app/taxes as part of the acquisition agreement.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#54The fact that our government doesn't have the collective intelligence to just mail the tax bill using the information it already knows, with the option for the recipient to submit corrections/deductions, is a testament to the utter failure of governance in the US. Fortunately having an ineffective government can often be a feature instead of a bug.
The IRS wants to do it, they already have all the software internally to do it, they're legally barred from doing it.
It's nuts. Intuit isn't worth that much.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me know if you find anyone that is better. I'm sick of TaxAct premium for the same reason. I'm ready to go back to doing my taxes by hand and mailing them in. (I'm old enough to remember doing that - it is faster than doing it on the computer except for the one year I forgot to copy line 13 of form 1234A to line 56b of form 9876B) So many dark patters where the software is pretending to take time doing a complex…
FreeTaxUsa is great for most usecases, including stock sales. It is free for federal filing, state is a bit extra ($10)
I used them for the first time and it was fine. But it doesn't look like they support the state form I plan to use for this year. Already contacted them asking for it next year, but didn't receive a concrete answer.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#56Did my taxes this year using TurboTax like always. Sold some stocks this year and all of a sudden I am paying $90 for TurboTax "Premium" to put a couple additional entries in the 1040. What a racket. Next year I'm going to file using something else. This has gone on too long.
Dirty secret: all versions of TurboTax have all the forms - you can just switch to form mode and enter the values yourself into the forms.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not confident in my ability to get my taxes right (mostly due to my wife and I having owned small businesses plus my day job's stock awards and ESPP), so I've paid a local CPA to do our taxes for years now. He always did an incredible job, was happy to answer my questions for me (tax-related or not), helped us refi our house at an amazing price, and so on. His fees were something on the order of $400 or maybe eve…
It's not like an honest mistake is the end of the world. I've made tax mistakes. You get a letter from the IRS, with the amount you owe or are due back, and you settle up. There are no draconian penalties or full audits unless they suspect intentional fraud.
The IRS will even send you "you screwed up and paid us too much, you forgot X" letters at times.
What they can't do for you is know about deductions sometimes.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#58Not just TurboTax, H&R Block does this shit as well. "File your taxes free! Oh, you have to file an HSA contribution? Sorry, you'll have to buy H&R Block DELUXE ($79.99) to do that!" Kinda feels like blackmail, really. If I don't file my HSA contribution I'm technically committing fraud, right?
Not sure why you're including the word 'technically,' in there - you are clearly and definitely committing tax fraud if you knowingly fail to include all of your financial information.
You could do it the hard way by doing the taxes in the app, printing it out, and then modifying the forms as necessary.
But the companies know exactly how much to charge you so you avoid the hassle; though I won't shell out for state e-filing when I can print and mail.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#59Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?
If your tax situation doesn't change much from year to year, you can have a CPA or even TurboTax do this years, and next year fill out the new forms based on the new numbers.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#60Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?
Just pirate TurboTax. Torrent it, set up a fresh windows VM with Internet access via VPN, install/update turbotax, crack it to get the state version, make sure it's got live versions of all the forms you need, disconnect Internet access (never to be reconnected), copy previous year's data files to VM, do taxes, print out and file by mail, copy data files off to long term storage, save VM image in case you need to revisit any time soon.
Sure, it's a bit tedious. But short of a privacy-preserving libre solution or just doing them manually with fillable PDFs, you'd have to do most of that isolation prepwork anyway. So fuck 'em.
P.S. The directions for modifying .NET assemblies to crack TurboTax are simple and easily followed by anyone with basic programming skill. So if you're fine trusting Intuit you could obtain the installation files from them directly, crack it yourself, and even have e-filing capability from what I understand.