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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

#521

Post by imtringued »

adfgadfgaery wrote: post #399
anitil wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did Grover Norquist do (not-American here)?

Grover Norquist wants to cut government spending. It's difficult to do that directly because people often like government services. Instead he suggests cutting taxes. This is easier to sell to the public because no one likes paying taxes. This will drive the government into debt, forcing spending cuts due to the risk of default. This plan is called "starving the beast". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast…

> Grover Norquist wants to cut government spending. It's difficult to do that directly because people often like government services.

Reminds me of Grafton where the population didn't care about cutting government services and only cared about lower taxes. Liberals all over the country moved there and it ended with bear attacks because everyone was disposing their trash incorrectly and the only policeman in town had a broken down car.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

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

#522

Post by Iv »

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…

> Ok, so if they can do all that automatically for an "electronic audit" why am I filing a return, just run that thing and send it to me and I can file an exception if there is something on it I disagree with.

That's how it worked for me in France when I was an employee. As a freelancer there is a bit more work, but nothing like the puzzle that tax declaration seems to be in the US.

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

#523

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

sgjohnson wrote: post #467
broptimist wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you wouldn't be in favor of a carbon tax? What about a tax on tobacco sales in a universal healthcare system? (to offset tobacco users' additional healthcare costs)

I wouldn’t. And “sin taxes”, i.e. tobbaco taxes and carbon taxes are a logical fallacy. Tobacco tax won’t offset the additional healthcare costs for smokers on average, so it ends up just being a penalty for having a bad habit, and carbon tax will simply put a price tag on high carbon emissions.

Kind of tangential - the tobacco tax is a fallacy in another way: without taking into account quality of life adjustments, smokers are actually a net benefit for society in healthcare costs [1]. The simple reason is because they die earlier and most healthcare costs are incurred near the tail end of life, so by shortening those final years it becomes much cheaper for society to pay out.

1: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001678

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

#524

Post by noduerme »

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…

I dunno. Most people I know are 1099 / contract workers, and a lot of them get paid cash off the books. The government might have a rough idea of what they make, but it definitely doesn't know down to the penny. I keep very good books, but I have foreign bank accounts, crypto trades, subcontractors I paid over Paypal, people who paid me over Paypal, and there's no one system I'm aware of that could figure out what I actually owe in taxes. It still costs me about $800 a year through an accountant to file my taxes. (Luckily, you can write it off).

Until or unless everything is centralized and cash ceases to exist, I don't know how they'd really do it. In South Korea do waiters live on tips? Because in the US, almost all money made in the restaurant service industry comes from unrecorded cash tips; the actual wages are extremely low. The restaurant will attempt to estimate their workers tips and cover the taxes out of the fixed wages, but... this doesn't even get into all the other cash industries like stripping or moonlighting as a dominatrix. The US's tax attitude seems to be: You're on your honor, and most of the time we won't catch you, but not even Jesus can help if we do.

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

#525

Post by dotancohen »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #443
creakingstairs wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've even done a pilot program that literally did what you wanted. [1] And yes, it was much better experience: > Almost all participants said that they would opt to use the service the following year. And yes, as you have said, the answer is lobbying. > Tax preparation services strongly opposed ReadyReturn and have lobbied against its expansion. [1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-was-exper... .…

> EDIT: I can't find the podcast I heard this in, but pretty sure the tax professor that spearheaded this pilot got followed by people hired by Intuit. This feels somehow like it should be illegal to willfully and knowingly make the common good worse in favor of your company. Perhaps via antitrust.

Intuit argues that they are working _for_ the common good, not against.

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

#526

Post by DocTomoe »

w23j wrote: post #518
rkachowski wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty much every other major developed country operates like this cries in German

https://www.elster.de/elsterweb/infoseite/belegabruf_(privat...

Of course, why would you trust a piece of software created by your government to fill out the forms in a way that benefits yourself instead of them?

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

#527

Post by kevincox »

dotancohen wrote: post #525
Griffinsauce wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EDIT: I can't find the podcast I heard this in, but pretty sure the tax professor that spearheaded this pilot got followed by people hired by Intuit. This feels somehow like it should be illegal to willfully and knowingly make the common good worse in favor of your company. Perhaps via antitrust.

Intuit argues that they are working _for_ the common good, not against.

And once the politicians receive enough donations they believe them!

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

#528

Post by w23j »

DocTomoe wrote: post #526
w23j wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.elster.de/elsterweb/infoseite/belegabruf_(privat...

Of course, why would you trust a piece of software created by your government to fill out the forms in a way that benefits yourself instead of them?

This thread was not about deductions, but about the government pre-filling your tax-returns with data it already has about you. Parent was implying that does not exist in Germany, which isn't true. Or are you actually saying that the government will deliberately fill in wrong values, so that you have to pay higher taxes, even though the prefilled values are visible to you and discrepancies would be obvious (and a huge scandal).

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

#529

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

> The U.S is unique in forcing its citizens to waste countless hours

It may be unusual, but it's certainly not unique; I have to fill in a tax-return every year, because I receive rental income. Anyone in the UK that receives income that isn't taxed at source by their employer has to complete one.

The last one I completed was 21 pages long, with notes for each page; a lot of the time I spent was scrabbling through my filing cabinet searching for my evidence.

That rental income plus my state pension and bank interest are the only taxable income I receive.

At one time I was a company director, and had to fill in personal tax returns. I folded the company, and returned to salaried employment, taxed at source; it took me a decade to get the tax authorities to stop sending me tax return forms that I was required by law to complete.

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

#530

Post by aclindsa »

csb6 wrote: post #276
bschwindHN wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you should combine forces with ustaxes.org? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848936

Here is another similar project that has been around a while for anyone interested http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net

Perhaps so. Though I found structural things with each of those projects that I did not like. For example, opentaxsolver's logic is a bunch of 'monolithic' C code, and I haven't been able to find any tests. UStaxes is better in that respect, but there I couldn't get past typescript, honestly, and they have code like https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/blob/master/src/forms/Y20... where they're relying on position of an item in the array to indicate which field it is. Not trying to disparage anyone, but I did not see evidence of an attention to detail I felt I could trust (and maybe that's just me and NIH syndrome).

What I would really like is to somehow extract out a representation of the tax logic into something separate from the business of collecting the data from the user, or even calculating the results. I'm not entirely sure what that would look like, maybe it would have to be some domain-specific language (eww) in order to be able to fully express the relationships and dependencies between different fields/forms.

But I think that tax logic portion is the difficult-to-maintain part, and also the portion different projects would benefit the most from sharing.

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