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

321–330 of 338 posts

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

#321

Post by mrangle »

vel0city wrote: post #44
mrangle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who are downvoting my "disagree" are likely assuming that I am speaking philosophically. I'm not. Philosophically, sure: the purpose of the government is to serve the people. A philosophy written specifically for the consumption of people. But now I'm speaking about its practical purpose. What a system produces is always its purpose.

Even with your definition of "What a system produces is always its purpose" is still usually incorrect. The US hasn't "turned a profit" (had a budget surplus) for the majority of the past what, 100 years? Lots of places don't tend to run long-term budget surpluses either. Governments generally don't "turn a profit".

It's always correct for any slightly mature system.

That's not what I mean, at all.

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

#322

Post by [deleted] »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #195
mrangle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who are downvoting my "disagree" are likely assuming that I am speaking philosophically. I'm not. Philosophically, sure: the purpose of the government is to serve the people. A philosophy written specifically for the consumption of people. But now I'm speaking about its practical purpose. What a system produces is always its purpose.

It's also possible that people downvoted because a one-word comment doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.

[deleted]

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

#323

Post by mrangle »

plorkyeran wrote: post #172
mrangle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who are downvoting my "disagree" are likely assuming that I am speaking philosophically. I'm not. Philosophically, sure: the purpose of the government is to serve the people. A philosophy written specifically for the consumption of people. But now I'm speaking about its practical purpose. What a system produces is always its purpose.

The US Government operates at a massive deficit, so clearly the purpose of it is not to turn a profit.

There is no such conscious entity as "the US government". Said entity is a legal vehicle. It can't consciously seek to profit, nor does it care whether or not it profits. However, the point of legal vehicles is to benefit people. My point is that I disagree with the characterization that the primary benefit is "for the people".

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

#324

Post by mrangle »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #195
mrangle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who are downvoting my "disagree" are likely assuming that I am speaking philosophically. I'm not. Philosophically, sure: the purpose of the government is to serve the people. A philosophy written specifically for the consumption of people. But now I'm speaking about its practical purpose. What a system produces is always its purpose.

It's also possible that people downvoted because a one-word comment doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.

Disagree

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

#325

Post by PopAlongKid »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #208
8note wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why there's an income cap though. There's nothing that gets more complicated on income alone, only if you add extra stuff to track

Anybody who makes more than about $200K-$300K/year is likely making a mistake if they don't have a CPA.

> if they don't have a CPA.

There are alternatives to CPAs, who are licensed by individual states and don't necessarily specialize in taxes. Several states, including California, require testing and registration for paid tax preparers who aren't CPAs or Enrolled Agents. EAs are the only federally-licensed tax professionals with unlimited practice rights before the IRS.

It's reasonable to assume that CPAs pass along the costs of their marketing and lobbying efforts to their clients, without any guarantee of higher quality compared to the other professionals available.

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

#326

Post by op00to »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #236
op00to wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently renewed my global entry, and it was a piece of cake. I occasionally interact with the FCC because of my amateur radio license, and the FRS is super easy to use. I recently got passports for my kids, and that was super easy to do as well and the passports came much faster than expected.

> I recently got passports for my kids, and that was super easy to do as well and the passports came much faster than expected. Interesting. I am currently renewing my and my spouse’s passports while also trying to get first time passports for my children and I couldn’t find the process more outdated and borderline kafkaesque. If you told me the website was built in 2003 and hasn’t been updated since then I would bel…

I got an appointment within a week. The post office took the pictures and submitted everything for me. Couldn’t have been easier. Sounds like experience varies based on location.

I did a digital renewal for my passport and it was fine also. It’s a once in many year event, so it doesn’t bother me that I need to go to a special place to submit documents.

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

#327

Post by bbwbsb »

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…

The problem with the conventional wisdom is taxes don't fund government services. Fairness is a real asset. Deciding how to weight fairness as an asset against computers and food is political.

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

#328

Post by FireBeyond »

brianwawok wrote: post #233
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say that? I'm assuming you're adding other assumptions. My wife and I combined make about $300K/year. We don't run a business, don't make charity contributions, only pay ~$5K in mortgage interest, and don't have kids. We don't even do retail stock investing (EDIT: And I haven't exercised any employer stock options), just a 401k, an IRA, and a 5.25% savings account. We take the standard deduction. I can…

Yup totally silly. My CPA wouldn’t even take you on as a client, he would say go to HR block if you don’t want to do it,

Which is also silly. My experiences with HR Block was that they basically had their own version of a TurboTax-like thing, and all they were doing was literally asking you for the numbers for each question. There was zero critical thinking applied.

I had just bought a house, just bought a hybrid, started working from home, and was new to the US.

"What are you claiming?" "What can I claim from this?" "I'm not sure. But I can put these numbers in here and see what it says."

You're literally paying for someone to type in the same numbers you would, with as much (or at times less) knowledge than you (who is also less invested than you in getting it right, but much more invested in selling their 'audit protection' stuff).

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

#329

Post by itake »

glii wrote: post #315
itake wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t check last year but free tax USA didn’t support importing stock trades. I didn’t wanna have to input every single trade I made.

If cost basis was reported to the IRS by your brokerage, you can typically just report the summary total, since the IRS already knows about the individual trades.

I receive and sell RSUs, which I don't think the cost basis is reported. I also have ~3 brokerages with 2-3 accounts each.

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

#330

Post by ksec »

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…

It gives me hope and positive energy that no matter how bad governments ( all around the world ) and especially US given how something so simple is still missing and so broken, manage to move forward. I would imagine the hard part isn't even the MVP or defining MVP phase, but to get it started in the first place. The amount of politics involves.

And that is speaking as something who used to work inside government.

Post reply on HN