
TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines - danso
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hides-its-free-file-page-from-search-engines
======
metalliqaz
Yeah they do, of course they do. They are in business to make money, after
all.

The real story is the absolute travesty of government corruption that TurboTax
and HR Block have perpetrated by making it illegal for the government to make
tax filing as easy as it should be. It's one of the things I would immediately
correct if I was king for a day.

~~~
jakelazaroff
This is directly related, I think. One reason the IRS hasn't made it easier is
a deal with the industry group "Free File Alliance", which essentially
privatizes this (indeed, the page TurboTax is hiding here is their Free File
page).

However, while 70% of taxpayers would be eligible for free filing, in practice
only 3% do — no doubt because tax prep companies make it so difficult to find
and use this option. These companies are offering products like this as a
carrot to prevent the IRS from competing with them, and then deliberately
making them as difficult to find and use as possible.

Source: [https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-
ban-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-
government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax)

~~~
dontbenebby
Edit: As a child comment pointed out, the issue was a brokerage account I
opened in addition to the Roth IRA. (The Roth IRA deposit limit is smaller
than the 401K deposit limit)

///

The problem with that is there's often caveats.

Ex: in grad school I did a summer internship, and put my profits into an IRA.
Later on, I found out I could not use many free file software, because they
considered handling the dividends my index funds had generated as a premium
feature, even though I was below the income limit.

Eventually I found out the AARP had a free tax prep program that did not have
that restriction (nor was it limited to over 65s), but it took a lot of effort
to avoid paying 50+ bucks just to process a tiny, tiny bit of tax because it
was in the "wrong" category.

IMHO it's not cool to nudge low income people to not save for retirement.

If anyone else has had this frustration, bookmark this page:
[https://secure.aarp.org/applications/VMISLocator/searchTaxAi...](https://secure.aarp.org/applications/VMISLocator/searchTaxAideLocations.action)

~~~
asdfuadirea
I'm confused. Income in an IRA isn't taxed, so that's not relevant for taxes.
If you had post-tax investments then yes it's more complicated, but that has
nothing to do with IRA/401k retirement savings?

~~~
gsk22
I assume they meant a Roth IRA, which does tax deposits.

~~~
dontbenebby
I may have mispoke. In addition to a Roth IRA, I also had a traditional
brokerage account. It's my understanding even if you invest in index
funds/ETFs, some of the stocks in the funds generate dividends and those can
be taxable even if there's no capital gains tax on the growth in value of the
index fund/ETF.

Anyways, whether it was from the brokerage I opened or the IRA, I had a
_class_ of income that would have made me need to pay to file, even though my
total income was below 65k.

Another thing was foreign taxes paid (because some funds in one of your
indexes are international). But they don't let you just say "listen, I'd
rather skip the credit for those two whole dollars in taxes and not pay 50
dollars to file"

~~~
asdfuadirea
That's a rather big misstatement: most lower income people (most people in
general actually) won't be investing post-tax, a 1099-DIV really is quite
uncommon

It's still a shitty and stupid situation... but that doesn't mean it's
relevant for most free filers.

You should be able to skip the foreign tax credit if you _manually_ enter the
1099-DIV: simply enter foreign taxes paid field on the 1099-DIV as 0, and your
tax software won't offer to credit it.

~~~
Consultant32452
Am I correct in understanding that interest paid to deposits at a credit union
get you a 1099-DIV? And wouldn't that mean virtually everyone who banks at a
credit union would get that form? Also, anyone who owns savings bonds or CDs.
Those are out of fashion these days, but many people still get them. Your
point stands that these are still not the majority of the population, I just
wanted to add some more pathways a person might get such a tax form.

~~~
astura
>Am I correct in understanding that interest paid to deposits at a credit
union get you a 1099-DIV?

No, income from interest paid on deposit accounts is reported on form
1099-INT, not 1099-DIV.

1099-DIV is for dividend income. 1099-INT for interest income. They are are
reported different places on your tax form.

Nowadays most people don't get 1099-INTs from their banks or credit unions
because interest rates are so low most people are making no more than $1-$2 a
year in interest because rates are so low and financial institutions aren't
required to issue 1099-INTs for interest income below $10. I used to get them
from my credit union back in high school when rates were higher.

~~~
Consultant32452
Ok, the confusing bit for me is that credit union deposits are called shares
and the earnings are called dividends. However, you still get a 1099-INT, I
believe because these shares are not considered securities.

[https://budgeting.thenest.com/report-dividends-credit-
union-...](https://budgeting.thenest.com/report-dividends-credit-union-
account-24324.html)

~~~
astura
Ah, yes, I can see how that would be confusing.

I never bought into all the credit union jargon ("share," "share draft", etc.)
so I forgot they pay "dividends" instead of "interest."

In short, I believe this is the way it works: because credit union members are
owners of the credit union, the profit paid to members are considered
dividends by dictionary definition, however, the IRS considers them interest
by their rules. Just like VA disability, getting a check from the government
every month is obviously income, but the IRS doesn't consider VA disability
income by their rules.

------
CalRobert
Meanwhile, California makes it pretty easy to file your state taxes for free,
with no intermediary
[https://www.ftb.ca.gov/online/calfile/index.asp](https://www.ftb.ca.gov/online/calfile/index.asp)

~~~
mars4rp
I am the developer in charge of this, thanks for promoting it.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Thanks for your work, I'm a big fan of Calfile for the years when I'm eligible
to use it. Out of curiosity are there any plans to support returns with
capital gains?

~~~
mars4rp
Thank you for using it, unfortunately no. I don't qualify to use it myself
either.

------
linsomniac
I've been using TurboTax for the last 4 years or so but I'm getting pretty
tired of this story. I read an article a few weeks ago that mentioned
CreditKarma has free tools for tax prep, so I signed up for it and I'm
planning on using it next year.

I used to use an accountant because my taxes were kinda complicated, but once
I sold my business they got really easy. Turbo makes it slightly easier, but
honestly the IRS should just be telling me how much to pay or refund, given a
small amount of input (like this year, change me from single to married with
this other person filing jointly).

And worst, the last several years I've gotten letters from the IRS late in the
year saying "You owe a few thousand dollars", this after Turbo got me a fairly
big refund.

IRS: If you have a number in mind just tell me.

Oh, and you know that upsell Turbo does for "have your filing reviewed by a
CPA and talk to a tax expert to answer questions on your filing"? I tried it
this year: Couldn't find an option to have it reviewed by a CPA before filing,
and when I asked one of their tax experts about a number related to an IRA
disbursement last year, basically all he could tell me is "Yes, you have put a
number in a box on the form".

~~~
jakelazaroff
I've used Credit Karma for the past two years, and I'm planning on using them
again next year. I have paid zero dollars for things like investments that
TurboTax would upsell to me, and as far as I know Credit Karma doesn't do any
unsavory lobbying. Highly recommend.

~~~
linsomniac
Can I pay Credit Karma to do lobbying AGAINST HR Block and Intuit? :-D

------
tantalor
Arguably their agreement to "offer" the free service necessarily requires it's
discoverable by normal means, including search.

 _“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I
did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a
disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”_

------
maxmcd
I learned a little while ago that H&R Block makes a substantial amount of its
revenue from "refund anticipation loans" (no citation, I couldn't find it
here: [https://investors.hrblock.com/static-
files/4293dedf-951d-454...](https://investors.hrblock.com/static-
files/4293dedf-951d-4541-b4a8-ac80daded417) maybe my information is
overblown).

Is there a reason there isn't a "Robin Hood for Taxes"? A service that makes
all of its revenue off of refund anticipation loads and provides all tax
services for free to entice customers to join?

Ignoring the problematic conflicts of interest involved in issuing loans it
seems like this would align a lot of incentives. The company wants tax filing
to be as simple and easy and free as possible, just as long as you do it
through them.

~~~
mortgagemonster
Credit Karma does legitimately free filing

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
I prepared my taxes with Credit Karma, then with Turbo Tax, and CK was showing
me a significantly higher return that TT. Upon investigating, I found that I
had accidentally claimed my mortgage interested deduction twice, and didn't
enter my 1099-G from my state tax refund from the previous year.

CK makes it too easy to make a mistake. TT is a much more polished product,
which makes sense since they've been doing it for decades. I trust TT more
than CK.

That said, TT doesn't charge you until you file. So I use both, make sure the
numbers match, then file with CK for free.

~~~
colejohnson66
Credit Karma just added free audit defense to their tax prep

------
noer
This goes way beyond dark patterns and ux strategies to push people towards
paid options. This is manipulating search engines to hide their services when
searching for "free tax filing". If they're going to offer free services, but
hide them from potential customers, they might as well not be offering them.
if they're not offering them, then they're not holding up their end of the
bargain with the IRS.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Yeah, this isn't just a dark pattern, this is a black hole pattern, this is a
scam. With a dark pattern there is a way, if you're careful, to navigate
through things and get to the desired outcome. Here there was no such route,
you had to have entered from the correct starting place to begin with to have
a chance at all, and that entrance was hidden from the public.

------
Zenst
I popped "file free tax returns turbotax" into Google and found the page
directly listed. The page in question is
[https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-
editi...](https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-edition.jsp)

The robots.txt for the intuit.com domain is:
[https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt](https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt)

Not listing in robots.txt to block the personal-taxes folder, which has many
offerings and a sub from that is the free one.

I'm not seeing the block that the story is on about in search and in
robots.txt

What am I missing?

[EDIT ADD] Thank you for all the replies, I see what they did there now.

~~~
morley
As the article mentions, it's set in the metatags of the page
[https://turbotax.intuit.com/taxfreedom/](https://turbotax.intuit.com/taxfreedom/):

    
    
        <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noodp" />

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
An archive of both pages in case they try to play the "revise history" game.

[https://archive.fo/0WTCE](https://archive.fo/0WTCE)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190423172440/https://turbotax....](https://web.archive.org/web/20190423172440/https://turbotax.intuit.com/taxfreedom)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190426004701/https://turbotax....](https://web.archive.org/web/20190426004701/https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt)

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Good thinking, and nice username!

------
thomasfortes
It's an idea so dumb that you need to pay for a software that the only reason
to exist is for you to pay your taxes, Brazil gets a lot of things wrong, but
at least our government provides a software available for every platform
(windows, mac, linux, ios, android and even a jar, so if it runs java, you're
fine) for us to do our taxes.

You need to pay an accountant only if your taxes are complex, and even them
will use the software, they just know more about how to structure your data to
insert in the program, it is honestly insane that a company like turbotax is
needed, but lobby is really a powerful tool.

~~~
tantalor
Software takes time to develop, and time is money. Tax software is especially
bad because 1. the rules are insanely complicated and 2. the insane rules
change every year requiring updates.

The real question is why don't we have open-source tax software? I'd argue
that since 1. IRS is publicly funded and 2. they have to write code anyway to
enforce the tax rules as they change, then they should just publish that code.

At a first step, the tax rules could be published in a machine-readable
format.

~~~
ultrarunner
I get what you're saying here (and generally agree), but I really think it's
worth taking a step back when "the law is too complicated for humans to follow
it; machine-readable versions should be available" starts making sense.

Imagine if the speed limit was a function of current local wind speed (as
measured by one of three airports, depending on the time of day), tire
pressure, the azimuth of the sun, etc, and that large companies had digital
speed limit signs outlawed. Saying, "Oh, we'll just mandate that all cars
carry the necessary equipment to calculate the current speed limit" is
probably the wrong approach. The solution is to do away with the convoluted
calculation because it doesn't add value in the first place.

------
jahabrewer
Fuck Intuit. Shame on engineers who work there.

~~~
craftyguy
I'd rather shame the government that allows Intuit to have their way with
taxpayers. Intuit exists primarily because of the convoluted tax filing
process in the US afterall..

~~~
ppseafield
Intuit lobbies to keep taxes complicated so they can continue to have a
business model.

[https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-
fre...](https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-free-simple-
hr-block-intuit-lobbying-against-it)

~~~
ahallock
And this is surprising because? It would be surprising if they didn't do that,
honestly. The government is at fault here for selling political power and not
representing the interests of the people. We could boycott Intuit, I suppose,
or use different products, but aside from that, the fault and source of the
problem lies squarely with the government.

~~~
jakelazaroff
I truly don't understand this logic. If I found some legal loophole by which I
could indiscriminately murder people with no repercussions, no one would
excuse it with "well, technically he was allowed to do this so why are we
surprised?"

And if I were working with the government to _create_ that loophole… I mean,
in this scenario, I'm still _murdering_ people, right? Should my conscience be
clean because the government wasn't representing the interests of the people?
How is any of this ethically exculpatory?

~~~
ahallock
> If I found some legal loophole by which I could indiscriminately murder
> people with no repercussions

That's a pretty absurd argument. And the government can actually kill people
legally, by design.

All I'm saying is that Intuit is a symptom of a larger problem with gov
selling political power. Intuit is trash for what they're doing, I agree.

------
kup0
TurboTax was free for me up until I tried to report $10 in interest paid on
student loans, which is a small, barely necessary form.

TT doesn't include this very common form in their free bundle and wanted me to
pay $40 to upgrade.

While H&R Block also gets criticized- I have to say that they include this
form, and I was able to file completely free for both federal and state,
without having to hunt for a link- just started on their normal site. They
also allowed automatic import of W2s, easy import of TurboTax previous years,
etc.

~~~
mywittyname
What happens if you just add $10 to your AGI and omit the interest payments?

My thinking is the IRS will send you a "corrected" return and a $0 bill for
the difference. Since that's what they do if you fill out incorrect
information anyway.

~~~
homero
It's a deduction so don't report at all

~~~
kup0
As far as I know, reporting paid student loan interest is a "required" form
according to the IRS.

I remember looking up information about it at the time to see if I could just
not report it, and that did not seem to be recommended

~~~
homero
Really odd, it's like failing to report donations. But i guess they filed it.

------
rdl
I wonder what the minimum-effort private organization would be which could
comply with IRS rules to offer free filing of extensions, 1040ez, etc. I'd
happily throw in $1k toward it (even though I'm not eligible, and thanks to
Puerto Rico, don't need to file federal taxes, probably, after 2019).

Just offering a simple, responsible, and stress free process for these
filings, ideally with zero advertising, or just a brief "fuck turbotax, this
is why..." message, and good infosec/anti-fraud (to protect against the EIC-
claim-scams against the poor) would be great. The downside is a lot of those
people need immediate access to cash, so a shittier commercial option offering
instant refunds for a high fee would probably still get a lot of victims.

A big company like Walmart could possibly offer this to users, too, for free,
and offer instant-refund as store card or savings accounts.

~~~
astura
I think CreditKarma is attempting to do this.

There's been other efforts in the past/currently.

Some examples:

Open Tax Solver:
[http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/](http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/)

1040 Spreadsheet:
[https://sites.google.com/site/excel1040/home/instructions](https://sites.google.com/site/excel1040/home/instructions)

------
DangerousPie
Planet Money had a great episode a while ago about how much more complicated
tax returns in the US are than in any other country, and how TurboTax has been
fighting to keep it that way:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episode-760-tax-
hero)

------
rdiddly
Who wants to just start writing a free version and start putting them out of
business? Filing taxes is not the Linux kernel, I mean how complicated is it
really? It's still just a matter of following directions and doing basic math.
Computers are great at that. No rocket science needed. I even thought of a
name: Caesar (as in "render unto..."). Caesar.org is available.

At the end it generates a PDF for printing & mailing.

After the first _x_ users we lobby for our own connection to the IRS system
like those companies have.

~~~
atonse
It's not hard. It's all arithmetic.

Before people pounce on me for "trivializing it" – I've written, from scratch,
Obamacare Insurance calculators that analyzed hundreds of policies with
various coverages, coverage tiers, and you could type in things like "If i
broke my leg on this policy, how much would it cost?" (all in real-time).

It was a lot of arithmetic but really not that bad (about 150-200 lines of
mainly applying coefficients to standard formulas depending on your policy
tier), but it was all addition, multiplication, and division. And it really
wasn't that bad. Took about 2 weeks.

Update: Just to clarify, an analyst had already done all the legwork of
collecting those coefficients and premiums and costs for me. But all I'm
saying is that the actual formulas are never that crazy.

I've also written similar calculators for life insurance and travel insurance.

I really doubt the tax calculations are any different.

Ultimately you gotta remember that these laws are made by pretty average
humans and have to be enforced by those same average humans. They're going to
be vast, but any single rule won't be mathematically complex.

~~~
jason_slack
So I once worked for a company writing math calcs all day everyday for various
things (real estate, insurance, algo trading, school district budgets,
hazards). If you would be willing to talk more about this email in my profile.
I’ve often thought about the tax sector and how to make it easier. I really
like the idea of a “Robinhood” for taxes. So to speak.

------
thanatos_dem
It’s a bit on the nose to see their robots.txt file state:

> Disallow: taxfreedom

------
miguelmota
The government has a copy of your W2’s and 1099’s so they know how much you
make. It’s a shame that the government didn’t make 'ReadyReturn' [0] the new
way of filing taxes where the government sends you a packet of all the tax
information they have on you and you simply make corrections to it. Many
countries have something similar and it’s a breeze to file taxes. Only in the
US do people hate filing taxes.

Intuit lobbies hard to make taxes as difficult as possible. Their rational is
that they want people to hate tax filing as much as possible so that they vote
against taxes and taxes are lowered for big corporations like Intuit.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyReturn](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyReturn)

------
dakial1
Can't someone create a site, listed, with very good SEO practices and content
that links directly to the Free edition?

------
mherdeg
Huh I didn't realize that ProPublica did blog posts (I'm used to seeing long
articles from them, often with partners, like that great Katrina piece).

I used to be dismissive of newspapers re-reporting things that were not news.
I probably would have been surprised to see an entire news article basically
re-reporting a Twitter message and a reddit post. In retrospect though this
attitude I used to have is unfair and mean. Who cares if the re-hashed
reporting about the tax-filing industry's regulatory capture is brand new or
just a reminder? Reminders are important.

------
quantumwoke
As someone who lives outside of the US, can someone please explain how the US
government has not implemented its own free tax filing system? In my home
country this hasn't been a thing for over 10 years.

~~~
fimbulvetr
If you print out the forms and fill them out by hand, the only cost is the the
envelope & stamp to mail them in.

What the US Federal Government/IRS doesn't have is a free way to e-file taxes
online.

~~~
astura
The IRS has Free File Fillable Forms to e-file taxes online directly for free.

[https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-
taxes-f...](https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-
free)

------
silversub
Has anyone attempted to create an open source project for filing federal
taxes?

I understand e-filing would probably be out of the question but something that
could generate a pdf that you could print out and mail to the government.

------
javaIsGreat
i called after paying 150$, i was a student for most of last years tax filing,
they told me because i signed their user agreement im not eligible for a
refund even though i qualified for free service

------
logn
Google "turbotax free" which returns [https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-
taxes/online/free-editi...](https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-
taxes/online/free-edition.jsp)

This is not recent either. I remember getting to this page from Google on tax
day.

Google "turbotax" and it returns the free edition link nested under the first
result.

~~~
astura
That's the "Fremium" version. The FreeFile version is here:
[https://turbotax.intuit.com/taxfreedom/](https://turbotax.intuit.com/taxfreedom/)

The "Fremium" version exists to upsell you to death, the FreeFile version
can't do that.

You've fallen for their trick.

------
nnain
Damn, one thing I definitely don't envy about US is the lobbying. This
definitely shouldn't have been left to a private company!

Indian govt websites aren't great and most look dated, and still income tax
site run by govt is just about fine. No reason that the IRS/US gov should have
locked themselves out of doing this.

------
fuzzieozzie
I wonder what Bill Campbell would have done if he were still alive?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Campbell_(business_exe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Campbell_\(business_executive\))

------
could-be-wrong
If taxes were centralized, is it possible that one’s average tax bill delta
would be higher than the average deal value of tax software products?

The point being, one could argue that the private sector has more incentive to
reduce your tax bill in order to take a cut of the savings.

------
b_tterc_p
As I said on an earlier thread, I was able to file freely on turbo tax. It
didn’t require any special effort or searching. I’m not sure I believe this
claim.

I was being bombarded by ads for free TurboTax all over the place and... it
was free, so great?

------
fulldecent2
Much pixels and ink have been spent on this topic.

I am much more interested in first-party services for tax filing in the 50
states.

------
joshmn
I wish there was a place programmers could go to say "hey we're being asked to
do this immoral shit"

~~~
mac01021
Isn't that what journalists and our congresspeople are?

------
atonse
Hopefully we get a Robin Hood version of tax filing software soon. :)

------
Causality1
I imagine there's quite a lot of juicy information hiding behind noindex tags
across the web. Is there a search engine that ignores these tags?

------
sithlord
Wouldn't this need to be listed on the disallow on the robots.txt if they
didnt want them to index the page?

~~~
ceejayoz
No. That's one approach, but the page has a meta tag that has the same effect:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noodp" />

~~~
Zenst
Saw that on every page they have, not scrutinised the sanity of their code,
but looks like it is part of their site template.

Also the site code - egads, 200+_ blank lines as a header, then clearly some
extra padding blank lines here and there.

~~~
ceejayoz
It is not part of their site template.

The Turbotax home page has "yes, do index" meta tags. So does their deceptive
"free edition" page at [https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-
taxes/online/free-editi...](https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-
taxes/online/free-edition.jsp):

    
    
        <meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" />
    

You've been tricked. Imagine how easily people who _can 't_ read source code
get sucked into the wrong version.

~~~
Zenst
Yes, I see the issue more clearly now. So many aspects about American TAX I
never understood, the one were citizens who are living in another country and
paying tax there also have to pay American income TAX always seemed brutal.

Most people in the UK are PAYE and the employer does tax fillings and as such
the need for a individual to file any form of tax return is lower than the
American system that from my understanding - mandates it and the onus for any
tax information is placed solely upon the individual. Which I would of thought
opens up a larger can of worms for fraud potential from the payer and payee as
well as opening up less skilled people into realms they will make mistakes to
their own detrement.

Yet if you're a corporation - tax seems to offer more freedom in expression
compared to individuals. Which is the norm in many a country.

------
exabrial
Sounds like the correct decision to me.

------
linsomniac
Govt: "We need some money from you to buy things."

Me: "How much?"

Govt: "You figure it out."

Me: "Oh, I get to pay whatever I want?"

Govt: "LOL, no, we have a figure that we want you to pay."

Me: "What happens if I guess that number wrong?"

Govt: "You get to go to prison."

~~~
themagician
You only go to prison if you willfully and purposely try to defraud the
government.

It’s more of a, “Pay what you believe you owe based on your best guess and the
laws as you best understand them, and if we disagree we may ask you to pay
more.”

~~~
bunderbunder
> if we disagree we may ask you to pay more

The opposite can happen, too. The last time they disagreed with me on how much
tax I should have paid, they mailed me a check for the difference.

~~~
nickjj
Did they give you 5% interest on the amount you overpaid?

Because that's what they take from you if you underpay (by accident or not).

Living in the US is like: "oh you were born and live in the US? We're forcing
you to give us a huge chunk of your earnings for your entire working life,
make it close to impossible to determine the exact amounts and then fine you
5% interest if you happen to underpay, but we'll never give you interest if
you overpay.".

Edit: Well, as mentioned the tax system is super complex here and I obviously
don't know the rules for every case. It seems in SOME cases you do get
interest when the IRS owes you money but personally I've never seen this,
where as I've always had to pay x% interest if I ever owed anything.

~~~
RubberSoul
Yes, the IRS will pay you interest under certain circumstances. Two examples
are when they are late processing a refund or when a prior return is amended.
I got a 1099-INT from the IRS in 2018. The interest rate is not 5%, however.
Also, 5% is not currently the risk free rate of return.

Also, it sounds like you're referring to the penalty for underpayment, which I
believe is currently 3.6% of the total underpayment for the year [0]. This
only kicks in under certain circumstances.

[0]: [https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2210.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-
pdf/f2210.pdf)

~~~
nickjj
What circumstances will they pay you interest? That has never happened to me.

Because this year I got hit by some underpayment penalties (with interest
added on top) but at the same time I also got a refund which had no interest
applied to it.

That is being self employed and paying estimated taxes every quarter.

~~~
perl4ever
Once I was getting a background check in which I had to certify all my debts
to the government were paid.

I realized that several years back, I had worked at a temp job for a very
brief time and I probably never got a W-2 and therefore never paid taxes on
it. Thus, I called up the IRS, got the W-2 information which they had, and
duly filed an amended return with a check for something like $20.

However, in a rather short amount of time, I got a letter from the IRS stating
that they could not accept a payment for a return more than a couple years old
and here was a check for the amount, plus interest.

So I can tell you they not only pay interest on your money, but they pay it on
money they are returning even though you actually owed it.

------
mruts
Why do low income people need any software to file taxes in the first place?
If you just make a wage taxes are trivial.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
It is true that lower income folks _tend_ to have simpler taxes and really
don't need software. The taxes are easy on paper.

But e-file still wins. Most poor folks could really use the money they get
back from taxes and it is definitely quicker. E-file also saves folks from
doing things like making copies, buying stamps, and mailing. On top of it all,
there is a fair amount less chance of mistakes. Not to mention that there is a
sizable number of folks that cannot figure out the legalese the IRS uses for
_slightly_ complicated taxes and the IRS helplines are generally of little
help.

~~~
mruts
Poor people don’t pay any taxes in the first place. So the point is moot.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Quick question, do you know the difference between paying taxes and filing
taxes?

Also, do you understand how withholding works and how you _pay_ taxes with
every pay check not just every year? And that if you have too low of an annual
income to actually owe any federal tax you _need_ to file in order to get your
withholding back?

~~~
dragonwriter
Even if you file as exempt and have no withholding, you may need to file
because of refundable credits (mainly EITC).

~~~
InclinedPlane
And even if, for some reason, you have no withholding, and aren't expecting a
refund, you may still be required to file just because your income is above
the threshold (which is about 12k I think).

------
0x262d
dictatorship of capital

------
czbond
And this is news worthy, how?

~~~
danso
Congress is debating a bill that would bar the IRS from creating an official
free filing system, and instead, mandate that the IRS have private companies
fill that role. The concern has been that private companies use dark patterns
to upsell users into buying unnecessary paid features:

[https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-
ban-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-
government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax)

~~~
vonmoltke
Bar it from creating free filing _software_. Free e-filing pf fillable forms
already exists, and would continue to exist.

Not that this makes such a measure palatable.

------
mlindner
The IRS already provides a free-file option, you just need to spend more time
reading instructions. [https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/before-starting-
free-fi...](https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/before-starting-free-file-
fillable-forms)

Not sure what all the hate is here. If you're not completely uneducated, you
can figure this out yourself.

~~~
cabaalis
> In exchange for the IRS promising not to create its own free, online filing
> tool, Intuit, H&R Block and other companies signed a deal to offer Free File
> options to lower-income Americans.

Hence the hate when they attempt to hide such an option. _Signed a deal._

~~~
mlindner
There's no income limitations for what I linked.

