31–40 of 56 posts
The IRS should open-source at least the ‘rules’ part of the code, with enough functionality to let people add new forms. I think they’d get a lot of contributions and good QA.
The IRS seems subject to FOIA. I wonder if people could get together and request that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your bank, employer, cash app and brokerage all report to the IRS so unless you are a drug dealer or similar, yeah for the most part they already know it. Heres the best bit, people working under the table are going to be making less than 100k generally so it doesn't really matter, anyone making real money will be making big enough waves in the financial system to be detected, small movements of cash doesn't matter a…
Banks don't report every transaction and even if they did it may not be "income". E.g. moving money from one account to another is a transaction but no income was earned and it is not taxable.
It's not really an answer to TurboTax, because it's not good enough. I'll continue to pay Intuit for now. It's relatively speaking a small price to pay for something done well.
> Direct File isn’t perfect—the program is available in only 12 states, and it isn’t able to handle anything beyond the simplest tax situations—but it’s a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans. In turn, it is also an agonizing realization of how far we are from that reality.
According to directfile.gov, those states are: Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, and Wyoming.
I have no great love of Intuit, but this is not ready for prime time.
The government requires us to pay taxes. It also requires us to file tax returns. It's unconscionable that we have to pay a third-party to fulfill our legally-mandated obligations. It is way past time for tax filing to be made available for free at all levels of government. (Don't come to me with paper forms or FreeTaxUsa or whatever. FREE IRS software should be able to handle taxes of any complexity and situation. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banks don't report every transaction and even if they did it may not be "income". E.g. moving money from one account to another is a transaction but no income was earned and it is not taxable.
How does this meaningfully affect the thesis of the comment you're responding to? What is the point of nitpicking something like this? I conjecture there isn't a point beyond "I found someone wrong in a comment you spent less than 5 minutes on even though the core thesis is still correct."
Surveys show as much as half of workers make money outside normal employment so this is not some obscure side effect but the common case.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/side-gigs-2023-50-americans-1...
The only complaint I have is that last year and the year before the IRS did not have enough representatives to staff the phone lines to have short queue times, so each call to the IRS took several hours to complete. So I was really excited to see the IRS get more funding this year. I believe they are trying to do the right thing but are often hampered by funding and by politics.
The government requires us to pay taxes. It also requires us to file tax returns. It's unconscionable that we have to pay a third-party to fulfill our legally-mandated obligations. It is way past time for tax filing to be made available for free at all levels of government. (Don't come to me with paper forms or FreeTaxUsa or whatever. FREE IRS software should be able to handle taxes of any complexity and situation. I…
https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
The IRS should open-source at least the ‘rules’ part of the code, with enough functionality to let people add new forms. I think they’d get a lot of contributions and good QA.
The IRS seems subject to FOIA. I wonder if people could get together and request that.
People say a lot of bad things about the IRS, but my wife and I have had to call them a couple of times and the representatives are incredibly helpful and try really hard to solve the problems we've brought them. The only complaint I have is that last year and the year before the IRS did not have enough representatives to staff the phone lines to have short queue times, so each call to the IRS took several hours to c…
that probably has more to do with having to pay them "their" hard earned money than anything to do with how pleasant it is to interact with their customer service department.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IRS seems subject to FOIA. I wonder if people could get together and request that.
This is very interesting. Is it difficult and/or expensive to file FOIA? I have never done it but I am aware of a few academic friends who have used it for their research work. However, I believe their universities handled the paperwork and expenses.