Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 338 posts

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#151

Post by gamblor956 »

swozey wrote: post #84
whimsicalism wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you made 25% more than you usually do and are wondering why you have to pay more in tax?

Yep, here we go, the condescension of Hn. The point is they know my exact income and should be able to handle it, not make me figure it out at the end of the year. I have no idea why I got a random $5k bill. It could be something else. And that's the annoyance.

The problem is that you are blaming the IRS for something that your employer messed up during the year.

The IRS doesn't know about your income until the end of the year, when it gets reported to them by your employer.

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#152

Post by schmidtleonard »

dheera wrote: post #139
dmd wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

94% of Americans make less than $200k a year. Not everything is meant for "software engineers in California".

I meat this is Y Combinator Hacker News, so I would expect "software engineers in California" to be a significant fraction of the user base here.

Your suggestion that we don't / shouldn't care about anything other than ourselves is more than a little insulting, whether you intended that or not.

In any case, like the root of this comment tree says, the best way to make sure this program lives to reach us is to make sure it paces itself. If that means another year or two of TurboTax, that's A-OK!

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#153

Post by ohashi »

londons_explore wrote: post #88
yndoendo wrote: post #53

I would argue that having to file taxes through a 3rd party accountant or service is not only forced commerce but also broken glass economics. Looks like it helps the economy by creating jobs but the job is redundant and does not create anything of value. Where are crimes more likely to occur, a city with 10,000 or 1 million? Where are financial crimes more likely to occur, people that make $10,000 a year or people t…

Conventional wisdom is that if one can fund the IRS with one extra dollar, and they use that dollar to collect two dollars more taxes (from evaders), than that was a good way to spend taxpayers money. Many economists don't agree though. If you care about economic success of the country, the goal isn't 'collect as many taxes as possible'. The goal is to make the citizens wealthier in real terms. Effort your citizens p…

I would like to see the citations on this asinine idea.

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#154

Post by giantg2 »

randerson wrote: post #128
giantg2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I would argue that having to file taxes through a 3rd party accountant or service is not only forced commerce but also broken glass economics" Where are people being forced to use a 3rd party? My understanding is that direct file is optional, hiring someone is optional, and using tax software is optional. Isn't it still possible to file with paper on your own?

Anyone with company stock grants, investments, or unusual scenarios is going to find it difficult to file their tax correctly without an accountant or software. The US tax code is too complex for a regular person.

I choose to use software to make it easy. I don't feel like it's being forced since I could use paper if I wanted to. Indo understand that the tax prep lobby generally doesn't want simpler taxes or simpler filing, but it still feels way less coercive than many other areas of legal life.

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#155

Post by Goronmon »

GeekyBear wrote: post #142
llamaimperative wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide examples of Democrats undoing good policy/legislation just because it was passed by a prior Republican administration.

I would give the example of the 2001 Bush tax cuts. Since the Republicans lacked 60 votes in the Senate and zero Democrats supported the Bush tax cuts, The law enacting them was passed using budget reconciliation rules. > Budget reconciliation is a special parliamentary procedure of the United States Congress set up to expedite the passage of certain federal budget legislation in the Senate. The procedure overrides t…

Despite frequent claims over the decade that tax cuts for the rich were morally reprehensible, the Democrats did not allow the tax cuts to automatically expire, extending them for two years in the lame duck session of Congress, and then most were made permanent two years later before they should have expired again.

Isn't that the opposite of "undoing legislation"?

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#156

Post by llamaimperative »

Alupis wrote: post #146
llamaimperative wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but the elected leader of a party openly stating his objectives is not "partisan propaganda." So free of Koolaid you think simply citing the actual words that a grown adult said of his own free will and cognizance is "partisan propaganda."

Care to explain what happened during the Trump Administration then? It's so easy for people to hyper-focus on "my side good" that they lose sight of the overall picture. Resisting an administration's agenda is pretty normal and expected... the people who voted for Mitch simply do not agree with the Biden agenda. Mitch (and other R's) are there to enact the agenda their constituents want. What a shocker... Why is this…

Surely you can find examples of Schumer saying that his party is fully committed to obstructing the Trump administration, right? Or Harry Reid saying it during the Bush administration?

No, it's not normal. That's exactly my point. If it's normal, cite it.

Believing it's normal for one party to have as an explicit goal to simply obstruct everything the administration is doing is a symptom of drinking too much Koolaid.

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#157

Post by tombert »

randerson wrote: post #141
yndoendo wrote: post #53

I would argue that having to file taxes through a 3rd party accountant or service is not only forced commerce but also broken glass economics. Looks like it helps the economy by creating jobs but the job is redundant and does not create anything of value. Where are crimes more likely to occur, a city with 10,000 or 1 million? Where are financial crimes more likely to occur, people that make $10,000 a year or people t…

I keep hearing that its mostly the wealthy who evade tax, but I don't understand it. Service workers love being tipped in cash because its easy to not report. OTOH the wealthy have more to lose if they're caught, and can afford to pay their taxes and accountants.

Even if that's true, the number of dollars being evaded is substantially lower. Not reporting $2000 a year in tips isn't exactly going to have the same effect of a billionaire not reporting $100,000,000 of their income.

There are plenty of legal ways to evade (or at least not pay) taxes as well, though. An easy way, for example, is to store wealth in the form of stock; generally you don't pay taxes until you sell, so increased value is ignored until then, but once you have that many assets you can borrow money using the stock as collateral, and in some cases I believe you can even write off the interest. All of this is perfectly legal, and I'm not sure if it can or should be "fixed", but a lot of cash that might otherwise be taxed simply isn't.

For that matter, they could also buy a piece of art for a million dollars, a year later get it appraised as worth $40 million, donate it, and then write off $39 million. Again, as far as I know this isn't strictly illegal, but it can be used to evade taxes.

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#158

Post by ohashi »

GeekyBear wrote: post #142
llamaimperative wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide examples of Democrats undoing good policy/legislation just because it was passed by a prior Republican administration.

I would give the example of the 2001 Bush tax cuts. Since the Republicans lacked 60 votes in the Senate and zero Democrats supported the Bush tax cuts, The law enacting them was passed using budget reconciliation rules. > Budget reconciliation is a special parliamentary procedure of the United States Congress set up to expedite the passage of certain federal budget legislation in the Senate. The procedure overrides t…

Isn't this the opposite of what you're saying? Democrats didn't undue policy just because it was passed by the GOP

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#159

Post by gamblor956 »

swozey wrote: post #36
nly wrote: post #28

As a Brit it's baffling that this is even an issue. I filed my taxes online with HMRC for free this year (we call it Self Assessment), it took 20 minutes, and I received a 4 figure refund in ~2 weeks directly in to my bank account.

The tax system here (usa) is an absolute joke. I owed $5k this year and I literally did nothing different except receive a small 5% raise last year. I have the most basic taxes you can, single, no kids, no house. Literally just a salary paycheck every 2 weeks. Had no idea I would owe anything, much less that much money until I filed 2 weeks prior to our tax date in April and you're expected to pay everything you owe…

Millions of people manage to properly report the sale of their home every year. Don't blame the IRS for this mistake; this was entirely on you.

Re: IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

#160

Post by [deleted] »

dheera wrote: post #112
macrael wrote: post #81

It's SUCH a win that they managed to roll this out to a small set of tax situations and states to start. Every government project I've been on has required creativity in defining an MVP that doesn't include shipping to everyone. This was cited consistently as one of the great successes of this project, they were able to ship something that successfully filed 150k taxes b/c they were able to scope things down to somet…

sigh this is a baby step but - Many if not most software engineers in California earn more than the $200K household limitation for using Direct File - From my understanding there is no way auto-generate my state tax return from Direct File so I would have to do all the work twice even if I can use it - Complicating my tax situation (legally) allows me to save more money, I would save far more than the price of TurboT…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN