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

181–190 of 338 posts

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

#181

Post by PaulHoule »

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.

They are still a tiny minority. I mean HNers from everwhere from Wyoming to Germany and Brazil.

One of the best ideas the Reagan administration had was paperwork simplification, they introduced a 1040EZ for (roughly) the same kind of filer that Direct File works for.

My son put off paying his 2023 taxes to the last minute, I told him he should try Direct File (I'd believed the story that it would be easy) but when he tried it he had extreme difficulty authenticating himself, I think because they check you against consumer databases and they could not compare to past tax returns, credit history, etc. because this was his first tax return and he had no credit history.

We were forced to wait for a long time to talk to a human operator for him to verify his id. In that time I found out that there was no longer a 1040EZ, see

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/1040ez.asp

but I was able to fill out a complete 1040 and the New York equivalent of it before we got through to the operator. We just got the check from New York the other day after about 6 weeks, haven't heard from the IRS yet.

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

#182

Post by jimbob45 »

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.

US government services are bad almost across the board. Most of us would pay a premium to use a private version over a government version of almost anything.

I’m guessing you would find it equally confusing if I told you we’d pay a premium to use a private DMV or private post office. Here in the US, that statement wouldn’t be controversial at all.

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

#183

Post by favorited »

dripton wrote: post #107
KittenInABox wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually curious on the reverse. What programs did the GOP start that were cancelled by the Dems? Note I'm a biased liberal, so potentially the reversals might've been propagandized to me as lifting restrictions or some other such political language and I might be unaware of the actual policies.

A couple of examples would be reduction of some of the Reagan-era defense spending under the Clinton administration, and partial rollback of some of the Reagan-era tax cuts under the Clinton administration. Of course these were not complete elimination of programs, but adjustments. And you could argue that there were other reasons besides partisanship, like the end of the Cold War and budgetary issues.

> reduction of some of the Reagan-era defense spending under the Clinton administration

...you mean when the USSR collapsed, and Cold War ended?

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

#184

Post by BeetleB »

dheera wrote: post #175
cududa wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you're exposing yourself as someone extremely self-centered, and someone that assumes their lived experience is equivalent of everyone else's, and adjudicating the utility of this particular thing as if you are reflective of the larger population. Saying the majority of engineers in California make at least $200k makes you even more out of touch. According to Glassdoor, over $200k for a SE in CA is 90t…

GlassDoor and Ziprecruiter are grossly out of date. https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...

Sorry, but they're far more representative than levels.fyi. The latter has a very strong sampling bias - most of the companies in its DB are on the high end of the payscale.

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

#185

Post by BeetleB »

giantg2 wrote: post #117

I'll still be using 3rd party software. The main benefit is the guarantee of audit support and legal representation. For such a small fee, that's decent insurance. You'll get no such benefit working directly with the IRS.

> The main benefit is the guarantee of audit support and legal representation.

I strongly urge you to read the fine print. The support is usually quite limited.

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

#186

Post by wredcoll »

whimsicalism wrote: post #135
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 think this has been studied and low-to-medium income filers are more likely to actually commit tax fraud so you get better returns as the IRS by focusing on these filers

This is contrary to every article I've seen on the subject.

Are you perhaps thinking of when IRS said they couldn't afford to go after wealth tax evaders because they were underfunded?

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

#187

Post by gottorf »

Drakim wrote: post #106
londons_explore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Just like how "collect as many taxes as possible" isn't actually a good goal, just "make the citizens wealthier" isn't actually a good goal either because it says nothing about the distribution of that wealth. If we enacted a law that made 99.9% of all citi…

> Taxes are used to run society, from it's roads, fire department, education, social services, and much more

The "much more" is much, much, much more than anyone thinks. The federal budget is tremendous. People cannot conceive of trillions, yet the federal government alone spent over six of it a year, three years in a row.

Virtually nobody has a problem with tax funds being used to build roads and bridges, fire departments, and whatnot. It's everything else that's contentious. Public schools are visibly wasteful, with the number of students and teachers overall remaining largely constant, but the number of administrators having increased many-fold in the past decades; at this point it's a jobs scheme for adults, not an education scheme for children. Nonprofits received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support illegal immigration. Et cetera.

So many things in the federal budget appeal to a fringe minority of advocates, yet the money hose continues to flow. This is not the way that a federal government with clearly delineated limits should work. Something is wrong.

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

#188

Post by rqtwteye »

gottorf wrote: post #104
thatguy0900 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congress honestly seems to have completely shut down as a body able to accomplish anything. The president is all we have

This is a feature of the US constitutional system, not a bug. It's designed such that things move very, very slowly. If Congress isn't able to pass laws, it probably reflects a division in how the voting populace feels about the subject of such laws. The president may be all we have, but he is constitutionally forbidden from acting like a king. Though, of course, that hasn't stopped presidents from trying.

“ it probably reflects a division in how the voting populace feels about the subject of such laws.”

I don’t think that’s correct. There is way too much propaganda coming from the parties to think that voters have made up their minds based on the facts. It’s actually quite hard to get the facts because the media is mostly reporting politics like they report a football match.

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

#189

Post by pavon »

MichaelNolan wrote: post #15
Someone1234 wrote: post #4

How volatile is this to the political winds? As the article makes clear this was largely done with the support of the current incumbent, but what if the next one is more amenable to TurboTax's ideas? That seems to be an ongoing headache in the US with executive branch created programs, courts can just immediately squish them or political winds can change, then they're suddenly gone. Something like this, in order to b…

> How volatile is this to the political winds? Very. Had the GOP won the senate in 2022, this would have probably been cut already. Depending on how this November goes the policy could definitely be reversed. > Something like this, in order to be permanent, needs congressional approval. This program did come from Congress. It was apart of the inflation reduction act.

> This program did come from Congress. It was apart of the inflation reduction act.

The inflation reduction act directed the IRS to perform a study on Direct eFile. Implementing an actual pilot and then expanding to a permanent tool was based solely on executive authority, so either congress or the president could choose to scrap the program in the future.

> Inflation Reduction Act §10301(1)(B) TASK FORCE TO DESIGN AN IRS-RUN FREE ‘‘DIRECT EFILE’’ TAX RETURN SYSTEM.—For necessary expenses of the Internal Revenue Service to deliver to Congress, within nine months following the date of the enactment of this Act, a report on (I) the cost (including options for differen- tial coverage based on taxpayer adjusted gross income and return complexity) of developing and running a free direct efile tax return system, including costs to build and admin- ister each release, with a focus on multi-lingual and mobile- friendly features and safeguards for taxpayer data; (II) taxpayer opinions, expectations, and level of trust, based on surveys, for such a free direct efile system; and (III) the opinions of an independent third-party on the overall feasibility, approach, schedule, cost, organizational design, and Internal Revenue Service capacity to deliver such a direct efile tax return system, $15,000,000, to remain avail- able until September 30, 2023: Provided, That these amounts shall be in addition to amounts otherwise avail- able for such purposes

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

#190

Post by wredcoll »

gottorf wrote: post #102
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.

The great increase in illegal entry into the country through the southern border is a good recent example. Though, I suppose this is predicated upon it being "good policy" that illegal immigration be slowed.

What increase? The numbers are very constant.
Post reply on HN