21–30 of 284 posts
Turbo tax is free for federal filers with no business income, same thing as this service. Except now no taxpayer dollars were spent on maintaining this. This would have been useful if it also did state taxes, which turbo tax is not free for.
With the rise of AI there is no excuse on why tax software should be so hard to make.
The entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
As the government it should be possible to reduce the negative impact of making mistakes.
>Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
Then start simple. You don't have to cover all of tax law at the start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re going to give your tax data - some of the most sensitive data to some constituents - to OpenAI / Google / some other startup? That seems like a nightmare of a product as far as privacy is concerned.
ISTM one ought to be able to use AI to translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format. No personal data needs to go anywhere near the AI. Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.
The instructions for each form published by the IRS every year are already written by professional technical writers to be unambiguous. Do you mean that someone ought to write a simplified english grammar transpiler? I think that would genuinely be interesting. What's missing are the guidelines the technical writers are using, but that can probably be derived.
With the rise of AI there is no excuse on why tax software should be so hard to make.
Turbo tax is free for federal filers with no business income, same thing as this service. Except now no taxpayer dollars were spent on maintaining this. This would have been useful if it also did state taxes, which turbo tax is not free for.
I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...
With the rise of AI there is no excuse on why tax software should be so hard to make.
Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target, lest it be mistaken for, and contribute to, that which it intends to criticize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re going to give your tax data - some of the most sensitive data to some constituents - to OpenAI / Google / some other startup? That seems like a nightmare of a product as far as privacy is concerned.
Fwiw they have already bought all you financial info from Experian https://theworknumber.com/solutions/products/income-employme...
What was wrong with using Free File Fillable Forms in the first place? It's the real deal forms just online and with nothing obscured or sugar coated. I use it every year, and while I wouldn't exactly say I enjoy doing my taxes, I do enjoy being fully aware what I'm filing and not being forced to do it on paper just because others have obtuse opinions or are lazy.
Money well spent https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trum...
Such a cheap bribe holy crap.