Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

ftc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 610 posts

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#211

Post by sidewndr46 »

bombcar wrote: post #54
notch656a wrote: post #45

The 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.

My understanding is that most Western European get what amounts to a "final bill" for the previous year sometime early on each year. It shows what you owe. If you don't want to contest it, you just pay it and you're done.

The fact that our government has made such a process for fulfilling a legal obligation speaks volumes about the mafia-like nature of our federal government.

I pay lots of property tax where I live. But its just a bill. I can and sometimes do dispute the amount owed. But imagine if each year instead of that process I had to hire an independent team to determine what I owe, make a case for that, then submit that to my local tax authority. That's basically what the IRS does with individuals.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#212

Post by thebean11 »

smordistan wrote: post #206
ericmcer wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not allowed to use the free file because I made >70k if I recall correctly. It seems really stupid and arbitrary to not allow people above a certain income to access software that helps them fill out govt. forms. Only lower income people deserve help filling out their taxes??! Bizarre.

*edited for flagging

What's your point though? Does the free file system not work correctly or something?

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#213

Post by throwawayboise »

aidangrimshaw wrote: post #151

I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org , an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes . Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!

Very cool. Will give it a look, I am about to start my taxes.

Last year I used http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

It did the job, mostly, but had some quirks and didn't quite get everything right with the rounding when I set it to use whole dollar amounts, so I had to correct a few totals that ended up being $1 off, which was annoying. Probably won't use that one again.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#214

Post by wolverine876 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #202
wolverine876 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people don't have a clue what day they need to file by. That does not at all match my experience, it's widely discussed every year, and I wonder how many returns are late.

Alright. Thanks for the data point. But you left out income. The idea here is that HN users tend to be a biased sample. Most of us aren't impoverished. I would bet that your family's discussions are due to the fact that you have a stable, fully functional family. Most people outside of tech aren't as fortunate. If I'm mistaken about this, and your family isn't middle class or higher, then that's an important data poi…

I'm not talking about my family discussions. Just turn on the local news and you'll see them discuss it, including the annual segment about the lines at the post office.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#216

Post by sillysaurusx »

creato wrote: post #203
sillysaurusx wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to make this point in the other thread, so let me take another stab at it here. You say this like it's just a thing that people can do. But the people you're telling to "Just do this" have already been trained to be terrified of the IRS. Many of them are currently paying huge fines due to missing their returns in prior years. Any small mistake can hang you when you're impoverished, precisely because you don't…

What are you actually referring to? In my experience, it takes a pretty serious mistake to get charged a fine (it’s never happened to me despite mistakes). The IRS just charges (fairly reasonable) interest if a mistake results in underpayment. And IIRC, they pay interest to you when you overpay too.

Much of my experience may have been shaped by my experiences with Chicago. I vividly remember how painful it was to have to call them up every month in order to pay them. It was 2016, and I forget exactly what the reason was. But autopay was somehow sufficiently painful to set up that the path of least resistance was to set a reminder in my phone of "Pay taxes to city" and deal with sitting on hold.

If it sounds unbelievable, I don't blame you at all. I wouldn't have believed it myself until seeing just how Kafkaesque "dealing with the government" can be. Especially when penalties are involved.

For the rest of my family, it's a little awkward to find out. It's mostly on my wife's side; my father was always very fastidious about taxes, as most families of most HN readers probably are. I only wanted to point out that there's a large number of people where this isn't true.

I'll try to dig up direct answers for you. Thankfully most of this pain has been not-mine for many years now.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#217

Post by aidangrimshaw »

freedomben wrote: post #176
aidangrimshaw wrote: post #151

I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org , an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes . Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!

That's really neat and I'm glad you're doing it. That said I worked on tax software once and the amount of changes each year are huge and often require expert analysis. Sometimes they get dropped on you with very little notice. How does the project plan to keep up with that? Will it require volunteers?

Absolutely, yeah the project has a loose group of contributor volunteers but longer term we would probably have to have a larger, more formal structure.

Right now, we're focusing on tooling to make onboarding new tax forms simpler and require a lower threshold of project understanding to allow a larger, less technical group of people to contribute

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#218

Post by sillysaurusx »

wolverine876 wrote: post #214
sillysaurusx wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. Thanks for the data point. But you left out income. The idea here is that HN users tend to be a biased sample. Most of us aren't impoverished. I would bet that your family's discussions are due to the fact that you have a stable, fully functional family. Most people outside of tech aren't as fortunate. If I'm mistaken about this, and your family isn't middle class or higher, then that's an important data poi…

I'm not talking about my family discussions. Just turn on the local news and you'll see them discuss it, including the annual segment about the lines at the post office.

Ah.

For what it's worth -- and it's possible I'm living in a bubble, but -- the only family member I know that watches the news is my dad. Everyone else quietly switched to netflix long ago. The news mostly comes from the drama of the day; things that show up on facebook. (The recent Chris Rock drama, and other nonsense like that.)

I recently followed CBS on TikTok though, to my surprise. They had some of the best coverage of the Ukraine war I've seen. I even joked to my wife that the circle of life was complete: not only have I never watched the news in years, and not only does my dad have no clue what tiktok is, but now I'm watching the news on tiktok.

Thanks for pointing out that the news is sometimes a valuable thing to keep on one's radar.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#219

Post by ceejayoz »

rootusrootus wrote: post #80
kaitai wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manually filed taxes on paper (federal) last year and they still have not been processed. Got a letter that the IRS is sitting on my 5-figure tax payment but haven't gone through the 1040 yet. There is an institutional (mainly Republican) commitment to strangling the IRS here in the US. Filing taxes should be free and easy.

And of course they won't be paying interest on a delayed refund, but they definitely want interest if you are slow in paying them .

If you’re gonna be mad at the IRS, at least be mad about something real.

https://www.cnbc.com/select/what-to-do-with-late-tax-return-...

> A long-standing law requires the IRS to pay interest to those who received their tax refunds late — notably 45 days after the typical filing date of April 15. Just as taxpayers must pay interest on any outstanding obligations they owe to the IRS, the rule works both ways if the IRS is late on the money they owe back.

They pay 3% interest currently, which is pretty nice.

Post reply on HN