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FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

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Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#501

Post by Thlom »

makeitdouble wrote: post #475
nathancahill wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government: You owe us money. It’s called taxes. Me: How much do I owe? Gov’t: You have to figure that out. Me: I just pay what I want? Gov’t: Oh, no we know exactly how much you owe. But you have to guess that number too. Me: What if I get it wrong? Gov’t: You go to prison Source: https://twitter.com/jordan_stratton/status/11181414550616719... I dig this one up every April.

The alternative is: Gov’t: You owe us money. We took the amount we want directly from your income. Me: But shouldn't the amount be lower because of X and Y and Z ? Gov’t: Send us all the right paperwork and we might give you back some of what we took if we agree with your claim. I actually like this version better (and it's also what I am used to), but I'd see people being uncomfortable with that arrangement.

My employer pay taxes for me based on either a table or percentage (this is up to me). At the end of the year our tax authorities sums everything together (income, capital gains, ownership, debt and so on) and sends me my preliminary tax report for me to verify and make changes to. For normal people it's usually correct with most deductibles already accounted for. It's easy to fill in any other deductibles or income that is not already accounted for. This year it ended up with the government owing me approx. $2000.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#502

Post by kwhitefoot »

masklinn wrote: post #455
briandear wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intuit isn’t the problem. Politicians are. See Milton Friedman on this subject. A complicated tax code is used to reward and punish people. The tax code was complex long before Intuit came around. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8

That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. All tax codes are complicated, and you can always spend days minmaxing your taxes (or hire someone to do that for you). But the US is unique in the developed world as making filing taxes hell even if you don’t try to minmax them, and that is primarily due to tax filing companies lobbying against the IRS doing what everybody else does (and secondarily due to the GOP very…

> All tax codes are complicated,

But the US tax code is an order of magnitude larger than the Swedish one. Which probably means that it is several orders of magnitude more complex (however that might be defined).

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#503

Post by Frondo »

briandear wrote: post #413
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The central problem is the refusal of US governments (state & federal) to pay people money to do things they want to encourage rather than give them tax credits and whatnot.

Taxes shouldn’t be used to get people to do things or not do things. Taxes should be used only to fund the essential services of the government: common defense, a legal system to enforce contracts, and that’s about it. When taxes are used as a means of control, that’s totalitarian. Tax policy should always be neutral.

The "essential services" are kind of the big thing in dispute -- you say "common defense, a legal system to enforce contracts" and that's a typical libertarian perspective, but certainly not the only set of essential services that reasonable people could posit for their government.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#504

Post by aj7 »

zw123456 wrote: post #271

A few years back I got audited, and it was called an "electronic audit" by the IRS. Which basically meant that they had their computer systems scour a bunch of the bank records and discovered that I had forgotten to claim a 1099 for some contract work I had. OK, so they sent me a computer print out and they had cross checked everything on my return electronically, my property tax deductions, my stock dividends so on…

Methodology: 1) Download your income transcript from the IRS using your IRS account. 2) Make sure all claimed income on the transcript is included. 3) Do the puzzle. 4) Print and file.

Be sure you have a copy, either scanned or electronic, of all documents on your computer. Ditto all tax return filled in forms. Use the fill-in pdf’s the IRS provides.

Do not miss a filing date. File a tax return missing important documentation if necessary, but file. Similarly, pay the tax you owe, or estimate you owe on time. The penalties for late filing and owed taxes are severe. You will not make a serious error if you work from the income transcript.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#505

Post by aj7 »

nathancahill wrote: post #287
zw123456 wrote: post #271

A few years back I got audited, and it was called an "electronic audit" by the IRS. Which basically meant that they had their computer systems scour a bunch of the bank records and discovered that I had forgotten to claim a 1099 for some contract work I had. OK, so they sent me a computer print out and they had cross checked everything on my return electronically, my property tax deductions, my stock dividends so on…

Government: You owe us money. It’s called taxes. Me: How much do I owe? Gov’t: You have to figure that out. Me: I just pay what I want? Gov’t: Oh, no we know exactly how much you owe. But you have to guess that number too. Me: What if I get it wrong? Gov’t: You go to prison Source: https://twitter.com/jordan_stratton/status/11181414550616719... I dig this one up every April.

You do not have to guess “what the government knows.” Download your income transcript. See the “methodology” I replied above in response to this comment.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#506

Post by aj7 »

JSavageOne wrote: post #376
softveda wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how is works in Australia. The Australian Tax Office will pre-fill your tax return online with income from your wages, interests, managed fund distributions, dividends etc. That maybe enough for simple tax returns, you can just accept their values and submit. What they don't know is your income from sources like rental income or crypto. They also don't know deductions you are going to claim. In this case you…

Pretty much every other major developed country operates like this. Here in South Korea for example filing taxes is as simple as logging into some government portal, verifying that the information they already have on you is correct, and making any corrections if necessary. 10 minutes, done. The U.S is unique in forcing its citizens to waste countless hours and pay hundreds/thousands of dollars every year doing the u…

Yes. So see my “methodology” above. It is the systematic way for you to do the part that is missing. With various weird-ass forms, this is STILL a lot of work. But it will be substantially correct, where substantially means that the IRS will correct any errors without considering you a miscreant.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#507

Post by aj7 »

mikeInAlaska wrote: post #381
JSavageOne wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every other major developed country operates like this. Here in South Korea for example filing taxes is as simple as logging into some government portal, verifying that the information they already have on you is correct, and making any corrections if necessary. 10 minutes, done. The U.S is unique in forcing its citizens to waste countless hours and pay hundreds/thousands of dollars every year doing the u…

> Why is the system still this backwards? Intuit lobbying hard to keep tax rules complex.

Yes. This is well known. They became so rich and powerful they had lobbyists (bag men) to protect their interests.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#508

Post by encryptluks2 »

soorya3 wrote: post #487

This is insane and I get PTSD during tax time. You know simple task of adding a state refund into turbotax took 2 hours. I wrote to both of the representatives in my state, let's see what I hear back.

If it is anything like my experience they will just add you to their bulk email list, and possibly send you a letter saying thanks for your comments. Unless you pay to play, your ideas will not influence them significantly.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#509

Post by aj7 »

missedthecue wrote: post #485
mikeInAlaska wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is the system still this backwards? Intuit lobbying hard to keep tax rules complex.

TurboTax is a relatively new product, and they haven't been big lobbyists for their whole existence. Why wasn't the tax process simple before then?

No. TurboTax has been around for as long as people have had their own computers.

Re: FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign

#510

Post by hnbad »

xioxox wrote: post #500
lexs wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employee doing your taxes is optional in Germany as taxes are already deducted by the employer.

It can work ok if you're a single person with no children. However, you'll potentially have to pay a lot more tax if you're married where your spouse earns more or less than you. There several other reasons where legally you'll have to complete a tax return (e.g foreign income). German taxes are really horrible, in general. They expect you to pay in advance for expected untaxed income (based on the previous year's re…

The fun part about advances is that in the first year they don't have data to set your advances so you have to back pay the taxes for the first year in full after filing the first year's taxes in the second year in addition to now having to pay the advances on that year so even if you saved all the money you expected to have to pay in taxes during the first year you also need to have saved up enough to pay the advances but the more money you made (allowing you to set more money aside), the higher the advances will be.

You can negotiate to have your advances reduced but the government really doesn't like it when businesses (including freelancers and solo entrepreneurs) have a high difference between their advances and the actual taxes. This also goes for declaring your VAT (which depending on how much you make you'll have to do monthly or quarterly as an advance and then alongside your income tax) and while in that case you basically set the advance yourself you'll get in trouble if it doesn't match your actual VAT (difference between charged and paid).

You can file your own taxes and if you're a regular employee there are tons of non-commercial orgs you can go to that will assist you in doing that but if you're a "business" (even if it's just you and you haven't incorporated) they'll often not help you.

BTW the reason you can just forego filing your own taxes as an employee if you just want to be taxed on your wages (and don't have anything else to declare, e.g. interest on savings) is that your employer already had to do the taxes on your wages and benefits for you. So it's not like the government just does them themselves, it's just done by payroll instead of you.

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