221–230 of 338 posts
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.
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Used to be I think. I believe the EZ doesn’t exist any longer. Basic point is that if your taxes are simple enough to just say that yep these numbers square with the few pieces of paper I received in the mail, filling out a return is maybe 30 minutes work.
It's moronic that they got rid of that. I would say (as someone whose taxes will never take less than several hours) that those 30 minutes are about 28 minutes too many.
The “IRS will functionally increase taxes” argument is a distraction and I doubt anyone here takes it seriously.
But the argument matters because it has given Congress political cover to let Intuit keep leeching off the system, so a response is in order.
Congress should require the IRS to give every person an auditable receipt of every tax they paid in a standard format.
Then, truly public-minded services can use the receipt to help people understand if their filings were correct.
There’s no good reason automated IRS filing would result in tax increases for anyone, it’s a fixable problem, and good grief I’m ready to stop paying TurboTax $180/year.
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My wife calculates and submits our taxes (here in the US). It typically takes her 40 to 60 hours to complete, and that's after spending around $100 USD on tax preparation software to make it easier. To be fair, our taxes are more complex than many people's (I live in a different state than my employer and we have some stock market investments), but it's still ABSURDLY difficult. And I'm not counting the time needed t…
What?! I do my taxes myself for my family. I have W2s, K1s, various 1099s for investments, own a home, and deal with carry overs from the previous years. It takes me about an hour to do it. And then another hour to amend them many months later when I get my actual K1s. How hard is it to answer 100 questions and copy numbers over from one place to another? W2 box 1 goes to W2 box 1. No I don't own a corn farm. I donat…
Perhaps the poster is including the accounting in the tax prep.
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For those who don't know, of those 12 states, only 4 actually have income taxes. The other 8 do not. This whole system stinks. The overly complicated tax code, the sleazy corporations making tons of money on it, the entrenched politicians and bureacrats who make a living on it, etc.
We can still appreciate progress. And this is progress. Although if the IRS is gonna audit when I under pay, they technically already know how much I owe. Why not just tell me? Reckon it's since people also over pay, and there's no refunds for doing that.
Instead, it’s because they want to make sure you were truthful in what you reported, and may have some reason to believe you were not. Often, they don’t know how much you owe in this case.
Just one thing to add… The “IRS will functionally increase taxes” argument is a distraction and I doubt anyone here takes it seriously. But the argument matters because it has given Congress political cover to let Intuit keep leeching off the system, so a response is in order. Congress should require the IRS to give every person an auditable receipt of every tax they paid in a standard format. Then, truly public-mind…
It seems illogical for the government to not have a free, easy way for the taxpayer to remit their taxes to the government (or submit the paperwork that should generate a return from that government). But at the same time I think it's fine to be skeptical that you should trust the government to be honest in showing you what amount of taxes you actually owe given how complicated the tax code is, and because there exists, ahem, a bit of an incentive problem there.
Is the free-filing system designed to maximize your return? Is it designed for ease of use? Generally I agree that TurboTax is a leech, but just because they're leeches doesn't mean there isn't an incentive problem that should be addressed.
>Then, truly public-minded services can use the receipt to help people understand if their filings were correct.
Do you mean a private company does this? Or something else?
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patio11 has a huge and well known bias here, which is that he wants to claim, not necessarily with evidence, that all inefficiency is caused by governments and not by the private sector. A comparison of tax filing in the United States with other countries, including those where governments are much bigger and more interventionist, leads to a different conclusion.
>that all inefficiency is caused by governments Forget about the evidence of other countries (which is completely valid), I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top.…
The more general argument is that monopolies are inefficient, and most instances of government programs are monopolies.
> In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail.
This is uncharitable. It's more accurate to say that they expect it to fail and hate government programs because they regard them as inefficient and net harmful on average.
> If everyone agreed that, once we make a choice on what the government is going to do we should do it well, we could have government services that are just as effective as whatever private enterprise example people always like to cite
The inefficiency is caused by the principal-agent problem more than anybody's ideology. Even if every politician wanted and expected the government to be effective, you still have the problem where a government program is providing a service consumed by e.g. 5% of the population and is serving 20% of them poorly. This is only 1% of the voters, who themselves have to balance their vote against their positions on every other issue on the ballot, whereas in a competitive market the company doing that would be losing 20% of their customers to a competitor and a competitor would be available to satisfy that 20% of the customers.
Meanwhile if a program is inefficient but its total cost is We don't have great solutions for these in the public sector. The best you can say is that sometimes it's worth it. For example, every taxpayer can use tax filing software and it has no unit cost, so even if the government is less efficient than a private company, that could still be worth it because you can spread the fixed cost of developing it over so many people. This is a general argument for the government to create and publish open source software whenever there is a reasonable expectation it would be widely used.
What it isn't is a general argument for government programs, because products with zero unit cost are relatively uncommon and so are software products that are both widely used (as opposed to having a particular niche) but not already well-served by existing free software. Software in the service of regulatory compliance is unusually well-suited to being published by the government. (And they should definitely be publishing the source code.)
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patio11 has a huge and well known bias here, which is that he wants to claim, not necessarily with evidence, that all inefficiency is caused by governments and not by the private sector. A comparison of tax filing in the United States with other countries, including those where governments are much bigger and more interventionist, leads to a different conclusion.
>that all inefficiency is caused by governments Forget about the evidence of other countries (which is completely valid), I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top.…
Some things work well in government given limited resources. Other parts of government seek bigger and bigger budgets to implement ideological goals, no matter their efficiency.
(Any amount of money spent is justified by the end goal since the purpose of government is to print however much money is required to ensure complete social welfare.)
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Some very low income workers that get the EIC end up with a net payment.
TIL! Every tax form I’ve ever filled out has an instruction like: > Enter the lesser of lines X and Y when applying deductions and credits to prevent them from exceeding some value. I’m surprised to learn that the EIC isn’t clamped like this.
Are you forced to use third party services ?
How exactly is it hard to do your taxes on your own ?