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IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

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Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#111
post #78

I just file my taxes by hand and mail it in. Somewhat less concern with 3rd parties holding my information and losing it to leaks/hacks. It is free. A little obnoxious but the forms do have instructions/directions.

I heard that this sometimes takes them much longer to process the returns that way. Has that been your experience? One time I reproduced the forms in a spreadsheet following the instructions and it wasn't much different from doing the online wizards. I would have liked to mail it in but I just paid to e-file anyway.

Now our family unit is not cash starved and can afford to wait, so in the past, before I started using the US Free Filing system I described in another comment, I always mailed in both US and AZ income tax forms. Sometimes it took a couple of months. The US form I think was pretty prompt occasionally.

Now we're also not talking a lot of money. +- a couple of thousand, usually less. But you would have to compare apples to apples which would be the e-file fee vs. the compounded inflation rate for the time difference in receiving, presumably, your refund. I suspect it's a wash.

You need to also factor in the ${turbotax} fee and/or the accountant, as well, if you don't actually fill out the forms yourself.

Fun fact: We moved from AZ to GA last year, and dutifully filed in each state. I am pretty familiar with AZ due to filing our own taxes for most of 25 years, but GA is much more complex, verbose, and quite stupidly, even aggressively, vague.

I produced a spreadsheet for my wife to evaluate that presented my first time interpretation of the GA partial residency filing. We're both B.S. ChE, she's an MS ChE, I'm a MS App. Math. So we know our numbers. The tables were low risk, low refund, medium risk, medium refund, high risk, high refund. She chose medium risk. Fine with me.

Both AZ and GA refunded something like 50% higher than what I filed and expected.

Some sort of emoji here.

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#112
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The agents being hired are mostly just support agents answering the phone. And on net the investment in improving the IRS is a net positive on revenue because they can more effectively go after folk who are cheating. It's amazing how some folks will be ardently opposed to "defunding the police" ... except for the tax police.

it's unpopular because IRS only goes after low-level tax cheats, not the already-rich ones who steal far more, and funding them more doesn't change that priority. similar to police.

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#114

I just file my taxes by hand and mail it in. Somewhat less concern with 3rd parties holding my information and losing it to leaks/hacks. It is free. A little obnoxious but the forms do have instructions/directions.

I'd go further and say it's less obnoxious than the alternatives thus far. It has always bothered me for example, having to enter into some weird murky relationship with a private company as a third party, in my communication with the government. (That's also true for the categorically similar but unrelated outrage of a few years back where you could get a better response from some agencies by engaging them on Twitter than you could through their actual communication channels.) And say what you will, the piece of paper doesn't try to "cleverly" redirect me to some irrelevant paid service. It has no functionality. I'm the one with all the functionality. And just to amplify your point about how it's free - Yeah there's no way I'm ever paying one red goddamn cent for any of this; I'm already paying the taxes!

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in its initial form it is indeed a complete waste of tax payers money. Shocking.

I'm with you; if I still have to fill in the paperwork then quite literally what is the point? I'll continue paying an accountant to do this bullshit. This 'new' system is useless to me.

You're not me. The tax situation covered by this initiative fits my needs perfectly. Fine, there's nothing wrong with you paying. Not all of us have that kind of money.

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#116

If free e-file is so wrong then why is the IRS allowed to distribute forms to citizens with easy instructions? How do people against free e-file justify their anger, unless they are employees of a company leeching off taxpayers' money like Intuit?

I think those are the most vocal opponents.

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#117
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they’re saying this because they know the IRS effort doesn’t have competent people on it (think what happened with the healthcare website when it launched) and is just prepping the waters for a “see we were telling you along this was a bad idea” criticism for congress people to spike it later. It’s really hard to intuit the strategy being employed so best to just ignore them altogether. And if this turns into a pa…

I've used the US Free File Federal Taxes for the last five years and it just wasn't a problem, and I have yet to see anything that looked like programmer incompetence. Now, that said, the way you debug your submittal is to paste an entire page of error gibberish that looks like very low level database error output into an entry box they point you to. Sounds gross! Ewwwww! Well actually I've been debugging c++ templat…

If you're referring to Free Fillable Forms, the error messages are not DB errors, but "business logic rules errors". They do look like gibberish, but buried inside them is a code that can generally give a pretty clue as to the error.

I agree that it would be much nicer if they said "The amount of line 29 of Form ABCD does not appear at line 18 of Form WXYZ".

Even nicer if you never had to manually transfer amounts between forms.

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#118
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The agents being hired are mostly just support agents answering the phone. And on net the investment in improving the IRS is a net positive on revenue because they can more effectively go after folk who are cheating. It's amazing how some folks will be ardently opposed to "defunding the police" ... except for the tax police.

it's unpopular because IRS only goes after low-level tax cheats, not the already-rich ones who steal far more, and funding them more doesn't change that priority. similar to police.

In this particular case, this funding does change that priority. Janet Yellen has instructed that "any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels" [1]. Unfortunately, auditing extremely wealthy individuals is complicated and expensive because you're pitting underpaid and overworked IRS employees against a wildly complicated tax system that is exploited to the max by the super-rich and their well-remunerated tax lawyers.

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0918

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

IRS funding is objectively efficient. Every additional $1 spent on IRS budget brings in $5-9 of additional funding through enforcement. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444

Why don’t they give the irs 100 trillion? America will be rich I say, rich!

Re: IRS to begin trial of its own free tax-filing system

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe spending billions of dollars lobbying should be illegal

It’s not that lobbying is a major slice of $14B, it’s that they actually spend only $3m and it’s effective: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

Notoriously there is also a large contingent of anti-tax politicians and citizens that oppose making paying taxes easier. Their reasoning being the more friction there is the more likely that you will pay attention to how much you are being taxed and support their policies that cut taxes.
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