321–330 of 610 posts
Many users of this site aren’t especially price-sensitive; if you’re one of them and in the habit of using tax filing software, I urge you to consider hiring an accountant for your taxes. You’ll pay a couple hundred bucks, which may be offset by the CPA finding deductions or credits that your software didn’t highlight, and that money goes to someone you’ve picked out and hired rather than a corp that’ll use your mone…
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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…
> As others have noted, the IRS doesn't know everything, and some things may be to your advantage to report to them. Sure, and I'd be ok with giving people the option to deny the default return and file their own using Intuit or something. For people like me, who don't have the ambition to try and do anything clever with taxes, I'd be ok with the default return that they generate from all the information sent via my…
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they had their computer systems scour a bunch of the bank records and discovered that I had forgotten to claim a 1099 I assumed they did that automatically for everyone -- does that mean that if I "forget" to attach a 1099 then they IRS won't know unless they do this special "electronic audit"?
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.
A 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…
It's well known fact that the government can auto-file for most people, it's not really a secret. Many other countries do it, it's been proven to work just fine.
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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.
Even dirtier secret - the government is legally required to publish all the forms in an accessible manner. You can just download them without ever even installing any Intuit software. Just to back this up with facts - here are the braille and spanish language offerings which took all of two seconds of googling: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/irs-tax-forms-in-braille-and-... https://apps.irs.gov/app/picklist/list/form…
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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?
I assume the amount of changes is much higher for the more complex tax forms, which 99% of people don't need. If this free software can even just handle the free tier or semi-complex tier filing, it's still a huge step.
IME everything else stays the same (e.g. the 8000s forms), but there are so many of them that it's a lot of work to just see which ones have changed and if you have to care about them. The forms also become less formulaic. E.g. If you file 6251, you need to keep your own records about Alternative basis, so you can't just fill them out based on w2s and 1099s.
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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.
A 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.
What they don't know is your income from sources like rental income or crypto. They also don't know deductions you are going to claim. In this case you will have to provide the details. Still free to lodge your returns online.
I 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?
I personally use it because my taxes are too complicated to do it myself on paper.
I hope they are correct, I honestly do a good faith job but it's too complicated.... the pdf download for 2020 was 426 pages... that includes state. and it will be even more next this year about to file my 21.
way too complicated I only own a small s-corp (technically 2) and do some really small level investing with active trading.
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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.
free file fillable forms is available to you (I use it). It's not a hand-holder, but it does get the job done (and it does quite a bit of the math for you).