Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?
No, Turbotax wants you to pay a taxes to Intuit to pay taxes to the IRS.
FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
311–320 of 610 posts
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#312Turbotax is a tax on paying tax.
I like paying taxes to the State because that money goes to military and entitlements, and keeping the lights on. I do not agree with every military action, or every entitlement, but it's not my place to decide what direction the country goes in, it is my place to push.
I wonder how many orphanages Intuit runs, how much welfare they pay, where the bases they operate are, how many men they've put on the moon, to have the gall to demand taxes. That is an literally an act of sedition, literally a racket.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Huh, as an aspiring tax professional how do I get in on this?
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#314Pro tip: when I was doing my taxes TurboTax asked me for a survey. I complained bitterly about their lobbying. I was suddenly able to file fed and state free.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#315A few years back I got audited, and it was called an "electronic audit" by the IRS. Which basically meant that they had their computer systems scour a bunch of the bank records and discovered that I had forgotten to claim a 1099 for some contract work I had. OK, so they sent me a computer print out and they had cross checked everything on my return electronically, my property tax deductions, my stock dividends so on…
Government: You owe us money. It’s called taxes. Me: How much do I owe? Gov’t: You have to figure that out. Me: I just pay what I want? Gov’t: Oh, no we know exactly how much you owe. But you have to guess that number too. Me: What if I get it wrong? Gov’t: You go to prison Source: https://twitter.com/jordan_stratton/status/11181414550616719... I dig this one up every April.
you don't really go to prison unless you're going out of you way to do something really nefarious
it's also super easy to setup a payment plan online now if you really mess things up
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
About two weeks ago, I got a letter from the IRS telling me that I owe an extra eight-thousand dollars from my 2020 return, with a $1000 fine and $200 interest as a result. [1] I'm not mad about owing the money, but what annoys me is if they have enough information to know that I underreported, then why am I part of this equation to begin with? Clearly they have enough of my tax data to know I screwed up, so why don'…
As others have noted, the IRS doesn't know everything, and some things may be to your advantage to report to them. They could send you a bill and ask you to fix it, but many people wouldn't know where to look to find mistakes. For example: RSUs and NQSOs (employee stock grants) are in my experience handled extremely poorly by default. If I have RSUs vest when the stock is worth $10 a share, then I pay income tax that…
Wait, do brokerages report stock sales to the IRS?
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#317I found out from a friend that she paid $600 to have her taxes done because (presumably) she falls for the dark patterns that TurboTax uses. She's a low paid service worker whose tax return can probably be done for free. And it is a sizable portion of her income because of things like Earned income tax credits, child tax credits, etc. Fuck these companies.
TurboTax's dark patterns charge people $50, not $600. How exactly did she end up paying that much?
Some tax preparers offer "immediate refund" for a hefty fee, instead waiting three weeks for the IRS to deposit it.
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, currently the user would print out the PDF generated by the site and mail it in to the IRS. E-filing is on the roadmap, but registering as an E-file provider is a pretty complex process. One of the options we were thinking about is scraping and automatically filling in fields on the free fillable forms site https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
> but registering as an E-file provider is a pretty complex process Sounds like yet another thing the e-filing lobby worked to ensure their monopoly...
Intuit and H&R Block have been lobbying for decades against tax filing.
https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's actually how this works - most times when you get a 1099, the issuer is also required to file a copy with the IRS. As such - no bank account scanning required.
That's what I thought, my SSN is on the 1099, so it should be trivial for the IRS to match them up. That's why I was surprised when he said that they only caught it during an audit.
I suspect the term "audit" is being used loosely here. One man's audit is another man's reconciliation - did they just send you a notice of deficiency?
Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government: You owe us money. It’s called taxes. Me: How much do I owe? Gov’t: You have to figure that out. Me: I just pay what I want? Gov’t: Oh, no we know exactly how much you owe. But you have to guess that number too. Me: What if I get it wrong? Gov’t: You go to prison Source: https://twitter.com/jordan_stratton/status/11181414550616719... I dig this one up every April.
Obviously it's a joke, but if you get it wrong, they send you the right amount and then you pay it (or they pay you). As long as you are close with your on-time payment, the interest is very reasonable on small differences. It's probably cheaper than paying for turbotax if you would have to pay for that.
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