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The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30M Americans

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Re: The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30M Americans

#6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, are you worried about anything in particular?

'taxes' is a 4... erm, 5 letter word for some; almost taboo.

Right, but given the choice between the agency that decides whether you did your taxes correctly and a for profit company, why would you choose the latter?

Re: The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30M Americans

#8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'taxes' is a 4... erm, 5 letter word for some; almost taboo.

Right, but given the choice between the agency that decides whether you did your taxes correctly and a for profit company, why would you choose the latter?

What i’ve found delusional is the amount of duplicative entry of data by individuals that’s already been submitted to the tax agency electronically by employers and finance firms.

At least in Canada for the last couple years, our tax software can download all that from the tax agency and plug that into your forms automatically. And for most people, that’s all the info there is.

There aren’t a lot of “elections” or “decisions” to actually make when filing.

And there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t happen automatically because you •could• have the same investments across multiple brokers, but that’s not the majority either.

Re: The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30M Americans

#9
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'taxes' is a 4... erm, 5 letter word for some; almost taboo.

Right, but given the choice between the agency that decides whether you did your taxes correctly and a for profit company, why would you choose the latter?

Because the agency which decides whether I did my taxes correctly is likely going to have terrible UX and has an incentive to hide options for me to save on taxes?

I pay private agents all the time to avoid having to deal with terrible governments interfaces and find shortcuts, wins for me.

Re: The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30M Americans

#10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'taxes' is a 4... erm, 5 letter word for some; almost taboo.

Right, but given the choice between the agency that decides whether you did your taxes correctly and a for profit company, why would you choose the latter?

What makes you think that a division of the federal government is going to get it right the first time? I'm being serious (not snarky). Have you ever worked with the federal government? I have (as a contractor) and I was constantly amazed (not in a good way).
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