
TurboTax Maker Intuit Funnels Millions to Lobby Against Easier Tax Returns - acjohnson55
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-millions-to-lobby-against-easier-tax-returns/
======
bpeebles
Virginia's Department of Taxation used to have a pretty decent online tax
website. It was shutdown because of lobbying such as this. There was a year
when _no_ free online filing so I took the extra effort to do a paper return
that year. Even FreeFilableForms are run by the Free File Alliance which is
part of the group that lobbies against the IRS and state taxation departments
from doing their own filing websites for personal profit. So they make sure
that their own free filing options are just good enough to be barely
acceptable while making their paid (for filers with income over ~$58k) options
seem much more attractive.

Between this and intentional complexity of the tax system that hinders making
the IRS more efficient and hides true tax rates that corporations and higher
income people... I dunno, it's one of the blacker marks against America in
this aspect of policy.

But I've without doubt decide I'll try as hard as possible to never, ever pay
a company like that to file tax returns.

~~~
rayiner
> Between this and intentional complexity of the tax system that hinders

Can you give me an example of this "intentional complexity?"

The income tax is complex for two reasons: 1) it's inherently difficult to
define "income" in a practical way; 2) it's a tool used to further all sorts
of economic and political policies.

The best class I took in law school was Federal Income Tax (I'm not a tax
lawyer). It really showed me that things which seem unnecessarily complex,
like depreciation schedules or the treatment of capital assets, exist to solve
theoretical problems that can be analyzed mathematically.

Finally, it's not like accounting, pursuant to GAAP, is simple. And it seems
obvious, to me anyway, that tax law must be at least as complex as accounting.

~~~
Shivetya
Surely we can define what is income, what is not, and how its treated for
taxation purposes in less than seventy thousand pages?

It is complex and it is intentional, this is how politicians reward those whom
they appreciate and "punish" those who they do not appreciate. You can move
from the non appreciated column through proper donations either directly or
through advocacy groups or lobbying firms hiring the correct people. No, I am
not being cynical, I wish I were

~~~
patio11
An example of the problem: Describe in appropriate level of detail what a
"royalty" is and where it originates. Please note that you must be as robust
against edge cases as a login form or you will cost the country hundreds of
billions of dollars.

If you can do this in under 100 pages, you're doing really well.

~~~
JoshTriplett
It doesn't _matter_ what a royalty is or how it works, any more than it
matters what any other income source is; it's a payment you receive. Why
distinguish between royalties and other forms of income?

The problem only gets complicated when you try to set policies using the tax
code, to incent or discourage specific behaviors by making them more or less
beneficial. A tax code that treated all sources of income as identical would
get far simpler.

~~~
rayiner
But not all payments you receive are income, and not all income is a payment
you receive. See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haig%E2%80%93Simons_income](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haig%E2%80%93Simons_income).

Say I'm a shopkeeper. I sell you a candy bar for $2.00, and receive a payment
for that amount? Is that my income? No. The credit card processing fee, the
cost of getting the candy bar delivered from the wholesaler, and the cost of
the candy bar itself must be paid out of that $2.00, but do not represent
changes to my own wealth. Deductions exist to go from "gross income" (the
payments you receive), and "taxable income" (the amount that your wealth
actually increases).

Now, say I'm a farmer. I buy a new tractor. I should be able to deduct the
cost of that tractor from what I make selling my crops. But should I get to
take the deduction for the full value immediately? No! Unlike a candy bar,
which is gone as soon as the customer purchases it, the tractor is a capital
asset (an asset that is used to produce income). When I buy a tractor, my
wealth just changes form: I have less cash, but I have a tractor. Over time,
the value of the tractor will decrease. Eventually, the full cost of the
tractor should be deductible, but because the tractor will help produce income
over many years, the deductions should be taken over many years. Otherwise,
because of the time value of money, the taxes paid will understate my actual
increase in wealth. This is what "depreciation" is all about. Because it's
impractical to actually sample the change in value of the tractor each year,
it happens according to fixed "depreciation schedules." And when you sell the
tractor, the difference between its market value and its value according to
the depreciation schedule generates income or loss that must be accounted for.

Now, say I own a house (or stock). It's value goes up every year, which
represents an increase in my wealth. Should I pay the IRS a tax each year
based on an estimated amount? That would be very inconvenient, so we have a
whole system of "realization events" that define when continuous changes in
wealth must be "sampled" and tax paid.

As I noted in my post, a lot of this complexity just falls out of accounting.
You're right that the various measures to use the tax code to create
incentives/disincentives also complicates the situation, on top of the
inherent complexity. But it's not a given that the value of these
incentives/disincentives is less than the burden of the additional complexity.

------
eli
This TechCrunch post is a rehash of last year's ProPublica investigation:
[http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-
turbotax-...](http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-
fought-free-simple-tax-filing)

Might as well at least mention this year's revelation, which is that they fund
fake Grassroots campaigns against tax reform:
[http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-
to-g...](http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-
grassroots-campaign-against-free-simple-tax-filing)

~~~
dan_bk
How realistic would it be to produce an open source replacement? (Maybe a
Kickstarter-funded one, to speed things up, given the fact it concerns every
US household?)

~~~
raquo
Someone please do this. You can charge for online chat with a professional,
maybe business filings, etc. All glory will be yours.

~~~
Ygg2
Uggh, from what I've heard IRS makes time management look like a simpleton
banging toy trains and making "wuwu" sounds.

And time management is notoriously hard. Not to mention this will need
security up the bum.

How much would it cost just to read all the documentation and have the program
certified, so it can do what it's supposed to do without writers getting sued?

------
nixy
I lived in the US last year and just finished my taxes. It was unbelievably
complicated and confusing—even using Turbo Tax. Never seen the likes of it.

This is how I do my tax return in Sweden:

1\. Receive equivalent of W2, but all returns are already pre-calculated since
the Swedish IRS knows all it needs to know to be able to prepare my returns.

2\. If I'm happy with my W2 and pre-calculated returns, I simply send a text
message with a PIN code to submit my returns.

3\. If I'm not happy with my pre-calculated returns, I make the necessary
changes in a simple form and mail it back to the IRS. Most people never do
this.

~~~
rayiner
I don't know what Sweden's tax code looks like, but at least here in the U.S.,
the IRS simply can't know a lot of the information necessary to calculate your
taxes. How would it know how much you paid in daycare expenses, tuition and
tuition interest, home mortgage interest, etc?

You can say that we just shouldn't have deductions for these sorts of things,
but that's a very programmer way to look at things (we need to get rid of
these features because they would be hard to program). It's also not
theoretically sound. An income tax is supposed to be a tax on net accretion to
wealth. Expenditures that are non-consumptive should be excluded from taxable
income because they don't represent an increase in wealth.

~~~
Spoom
This is solvable through policy: Have the daycare, educational institution,
lender, mortgagee send the IRS (and you) a form detailing the amount you paid.
Hell, this is already the case for most tuition and mortgage interest
payments.

~~~
smackfu
And there's the policy debate, since people don't necessarily want to give up
that much privacy.

~~~
scott_s
The IRS is already privy to much of that information, either directly or
indirectly.

------
SeanKilleen
This is probably better left for "Idea Sunday", but I keep coming back to the
fact that:

* We have languages for defining business processes & workflows (e.g. BPMN/BPML);

* We have open-source workflow engines (such as Activiti in Java and others all over the language spectrum) that utilize BPMN and terms;

* We have open-source ways of maintaining changes to these things over time.

I know it would be a monumental task, but why not start an open-source org to
tackle Tax visibility at Federal and State levels?

With enough civic-minded hackers and accountants (both of which I believe
exist), we could begin the process of transcribing the tax code into an
interchange format. Then as we begin to see the updates each year, we can
track the changes via source control.

Does anybody know if efforts like this have been undertaken anywhere else?
Otherwise, I may have found my passion project.

Furthermore, does anyone know anything about the process by which Intuit makes
this happen? They clearly have workflows and inputs into them; they had to get
there somehow. I'd be interested in any/all knowledge that could be opened up
on this.

~~~
gfodor
it's a great idea, but there's a slight catch. in theory if this were to get
so successful it drives TurboTax et al out of business, then the lobbying
dollars evaporate, and suddenly we get legislation to simplify the tax code
rendering your project unnecessary. (though I suppose there will always be
some advantages to software to prepare taxes, regardless of how simple the tax
code is.)

then again, it could depressingly turn out this is the only viable strategy to
actually get the desired outcome of a simpler tax code.

~~~
snowwrestler
There seems to be a misconception that intuit is lobbying to keep the tax code
complicated. In fact all they're lobbying against is federally-funded e-filing
systems.

The tax code is complicated because of all the other lobbying by every
interest group in the U.S. For example, banks and realtors lobby super hard to
keep the mortgage interest deduction.

Tax simplification is politically hard because any change creates winners and
losers, and they all fight hard one way or the other. One man's loophole is
another's reasonable exemption, deduction, or credit.

------
bbanyc
Many foreigners are puzzled about why we Americans complain so much about our
taxes, when they aren't particularly high by global standards. A major reason
is that our taxes are particularly intrusive and annoying by global standards.

This also goes for consumption taxes - a 9% sales tax added at the register
feels more intrusive than a 20% VAT included in the price tag, even though the
VAT is much higher.

~~~
StavrosK
I've been to the US a few times, and it puzzles me why you don't add the sales
tax into the price. I mean, it's a certainty it will need to be added, you
can't _not_ pay it, so it's a sane default for 99% of cases (if you have some
sort of reason not to pay, you can just think of it as a discount on price).

Why waste all this time from millions of people tens of times a day just to
add 9% to a price?

~~~
MrFoof
Part of it is that sales taxes are set by the state, and in some cases,
municipality/city, since there is no federal sales tax.

For example, in Massachusetts we pay a 6.25% sales tax. Though across the
border in New Hampshire, there isn't a sales tax at all.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, you mean it's easier for inter-state businesses to have unified catalogs?
I think local businesses wouldn't care much about that, since they're located
in one state, no?

Or do you pay different amounts of tax based on where you live, rather than
where the business is?

~~~
eli
Sure, it also makes the prices look lower.

------
ryanobjc
It's really too bad, their basic product - turbo tax free file uses the 1040
EZ form and can be confusing.

My gf who is a student was told by turbotax she owed over $300, after doing it
on paper, the old fashioned way, the tax liability was 0. Why? The tuition
deduction didn't apply on the EZ version of the form.

Ultimately turbo tax takes a conservative, strict and rigid approach to taxes,
but as anyone knows this isn't the reality of doing taxes. For anyone with a
moderately complex return, I think it's better to hire a tax professional,
then at least you'll LEARN something for your money (which can be about the
same amount!).

~~~
ams6110
I also file my taxes on paper and I do all the calculations manually (well, in
a spreadsheet). Even though my tax situation is far from the most complex, it
is more complex than TurboTax can handle. Also I like to keep tax preparation
painful as a reminder of the burden that the ridiculous complexity of the tax
code places on me.

That said, I do agree with Intuit here. I don't think there's any evidence
whatsoever that the government is capable of making software to either provide
a service similar to TurboTax or to correctly pre-calculate your taxes. They
don't have the technical expertise so they'd have to contract it out. We saw
how well that worked with healthcare.gov. They are not incented to "find every
deduction" like a private tax preparer is, quite the opposite in fact. They
also simply don't know enough in many cases. They don't know what my self
employment income and expenses are, for example, until I tell them.

The only way that government can make taxes easier is to simplify the tax code
itself.

~~~
bpeebles
I'm not sure you actually agree with Intuit. They're saying that the IRS and
state-level agencies should _not_ provide free online filing services--even
though they already provide free paper filing systems.

As far as I've seen, no one has done a movement to ban tax paperers (either
online or in person). If Intuit or H&R Block can provide a better website for
$39 or whatever, they can. The question is if the agencies in question
shouldn't develop their own replacements to paper tax forms.

Can you imagine it was 30 years ago and if, instead of getting tax forms
mailed to you every year (or photocopies from the local library for a pittance
5 years ago), you had to walk down to the local H&R Block or other private
company and pay them $40 to get the forms they wrote based on the tax code to
file your taxes? It's pretty much the same thing.

~~~
ams6110
From a pragmatic standpoint, the forms already exist. They have to be updated,
but the changes from year to year are not huge. Governments have a lot of
experience creating forms. We don't hear about massive budget overruns and
failed government projects creating forms. We do hear this about almost every
software project they undertake.

Nothing the government does is free, and implemnenting online filing services
would be something they (and by that I mean we) would pay billions of dollars
for, and it would be poorly implemented, insecure, and it would crash
constantly from overload during the month of April and especially on April
15th. I'd rather let Intuit do it for 1/1000 of the cost, and even at that, a
cost that I would only pay voluntarily.

~~~
Retric
Several states already offer a high quality, secure, stable, and fast online
filing so your clearly mistaken.

------
brianstorms
This should not come as any surprise, really. This is what mature companies do
once they achieve any level of monopoly that could be threatened with new
legislation that benefits the public (and other businesses) but could hurt the
monopoly. This is what the auto dealers are doing: after enjoying decades of
control and a cozy relationship with legislators, they're threatened by
upstarts like Tesla. But then at some point, if and when Tesla wins, it'll
have to deploy _its_ own army of lobbyists to keep the new status quo going.

It is what every web and mobile startup, it seems to me, deep down aims for: a
monopoly, an unfair advantage. It is what, between the lines, you are taught
at YC and what every VC expects of the "unicorn" portfolio companies that
strike it rich. Fight to get to #1, wipe out the competition, reap the
winnings, and, oh yeah, strike down any threats from, you know, up-and-coming
competitors. So it goes.

It's business. It's ugly. If you don't like it, why are you doing a startup?
If your startup is wildly successful and IPO's and turns into a giant, you
don't think you will have to pay a lot of lobbyists to control the
legislators?

~~~
mattgreenrocks
> If your startup is wildly successful and IPO's and turns into a giant, you
> don't think you will have to pay a lot of lobbyists to control the
> legislators?

It seems weak to beg the government to protect your precious company. It also
smacks of hubris to believe your business is somehow so special that it needs
to always be raking in cash despite 'progress.'

Disclaimer: I don't understand business.

------
japhyr
I don't mind paying taxes. But I was definitely cursing this last week as I
spent hours filling out forms to calculate numbers that the IRS has already
calculated on its own.

I want a letter in the mail saying, "If you don't fill out any paperwork, this
is the amount we will return to you/ bill you for. If you get a different
number, send in your paperwork by 4/15."

Doing taxes is a ridiculous waste of most people's time.

~~~
Figs
California's ReadyReturn program does this already for state taxes. I wish
federal taxes could be that easy...

~~~
ghouse
They can be this easy, but companies like Intuit lobby (successfully so far)
against it

------
clogston
Disclaimer: I used to work for Intuit/TurboTax and am now building a product
in the same space. On topic: They rightly get beat up for this, and get beat
up for their lack of pricing transparency, but somehow manage to always
receive a pass on the software itself. IMHO it's pretty atrocious... Sure, the
math is almost always right but the math is a commodity. The experience itself
is overly-verbose and littered with repeat questions, confusing questions,
open-ended questions.

I don't know anyone who genuinely _enjoys_ using TurboTax. I'm surprised there
isn't more legitimate competition in this space.

~~~
dlevine
I don't particularly enjoy using TurboTax, but hey, who enjoys doing their
taxes. However, after using it for 10 years, I'm pretty used to it. When I
have a question about how to do something, I can just look a a previous year's
return and find a similar situation. While it isn't the most straightforward,
at least it's relatively consistent.

I've been told by friends that there are less expensive programs out there,
but the ~$80 that it cost me to do my taxes on TurboTax (Deluxe + State eFile
fee) doesn't seem horrible (ie it isn't worth it to switch to something else
to save an insignificant amount of money).

It does seem a bit backwards to have to pay to eFile in CA - I used to mail in
my returns to get around this. But, at the end of the day, it's easier to just
pay to eFile, and it only costs me maybe $20 more (plus I save a trip to the
post office).

Overall, I've optimized to just using TurboTax, and I'm sure there is some
laziness involved in that decision, but overall, unless something else is much
much better, there isn't too much impetus to switch.

~~~
clogston
> Overall, I've optimized to just using TurboTax, and I'm sure there is some
> laziness involved in that decision, but overall, unless something else is
> much much better, there isn't too much impetus to switch.

And in fairness, there's benefit to sticking with them year over year: that's
a lot of data that gets transferred automatically. Most of the less expensive
alternatives are horrid (I've used almost all of them). There's a good reason
they're the king of their market. My point is simply that no one's giving them
legitimate competition in the space and that surprises me. My evidence was
only to point out the low-hanging fruit to go after (and while that low
hanging fruit wouldn't be enough to sway a 10-year user, it's potentially
enough to sway earlier users)

------
onislandtime
So pathetic to have to even have to debate the benefit of IRS providing a
website to file taxes. The free filing for income lower than $58K is a scam.
If you have a 1099 for $1000 or capital gains of $500 you are out of luck, it
is impossible to know what they will charge until after you enter the data.
That's what this assholes call innovation. The only explanation is that Intuit
is influencing members of congress with money, that's a crime. There is no
possible argument to justify forcing 100 million people to waste time on
something that should be trivial for most people.

~~~
ewams
It creates jobs.

~~~
acjohnson55
So do broken windows.

------
Oculus
This makes me wonder how much of the government's incompetence is from
companies lobbying for the government to keep its old ways.

~~~
asdfologist
Well, you really should wonder much of it isn't.

------
sirdogealot
Recently sitting down and manually preparing my taxes for the 9th year in a
row now... I am not surprised.

This type of tax-code-manipulation must certainly have been happening since
the dawn of time. That, or it was written to confuse the public on purpose.

Finding, reading, learning and understanding the tax code is no mean feat for
a layman that was told nothing of it in school (none of us Canadians were
taught taxes in public school). And this is coming from a relatively smart
person who willingly reads cryptography papers and learns new programming
languages for fun.

How much more difficult does TurboTax propose that the IRS make filing? Should
we get individually filed returns notarized by our deceased relatives as well?

It usually takes me about 12-24 straight hours of work, and this is for a
simple sole-proprietorship that just tallies up income and deducts expenses.

I manage to get it done properly and on time every year, but realizing so many
schortcuts along the way that "they" could be making for us yet fail to year
after year... it's really quite infuriating.

That, and the fact that I have to do the work to figure out how much I owe
them. :/

I am proud to have completed my taxes myself and will strongly urge everybody
I know not to vote for TurboTax with their wallets and why.

------
todd8
The crazy complexity of the US tax system is worse than it appears. There is a
non-linear increase in complexity as one goes up the income scale. Have a few
investments? More complexity. Real estate investments? More complexity.
Starting a company? Even more complexity. Reasonably diversified individuals
that have perhaps sold a company or two can expect a rough time.

One reason the complex system is tolerated is that the people it really hurts
are very few. A friend of mine has never been audited and does nothing shady
but spends roughly $30,000 on tax accountants every year preparing his returns
because they are so complex. Fortunately for the rest of us, we just have to
waste an inordinate amount of time with Turbo Tax.

~~~
stephen_g
It's not just the complexity. In Australia, we have a ridiculously complicated
tax system but the free application that the Australian Taxation Office (ATO)
provides walks you through it pretty easily. Usually it only takes me about an
hour to file it online, and then you have a return deposited to your bank
account (or you get an invoice if you're unlucky) in eight to fifteen days.

The UI is pretty crap but on the whole the app works pretty well. It can 'pre-
fill' quite a lot - stuff like salary that has been pre-taxed (called the PAYG
system here), share dividends and franking information, bank interest details.

I wish company tax returns were similarly simple, but those have to go in
either on paper or electronically through an accountant.

------
cpwright
The current software is also just bad. I used to use TurboTax, but now I'm
using TaxCut. TaxCut has the following issues, which are really just stupid at
this point: \- Even though it could import last years return, it needs me to
tell it how much of my 2012 tax refund from the state should be counted as
2013 income. I have to recalculate my last year's tax liability based on a
lower deduction (because AMT may or may not erase the deduction anyway). \- It
tells you that you have a slightly increased audit risk for one of about 5
different reasons, that are mutually exclusive and only one of them applies to
my return.

This is the stuff that a computer can do very well, but is tedious and error-
prone for me.

Moreover, the last time I used TurboTax and I'm sure this is true with TaxCut
still, it wants me to decide if I want to file jointly or separately. Why in
the world should I have to make that decision or do the returns twice. The
software should be intelligent enough to do the calculations both ways, and
present the better answer, with the option to overrule it.

If the government was making this software you could see it being this bad,
but these companies are supposedly competing to do it; but it is still awful.
Arguably, this is because the tax system is awful, but most of this is just
coasting.

I also would expect that the state software wouldn't be very good (at least
for unpopulous states), but most of my issues are with the federal return.

------
CoachRufus87
Bigger story: our government can be bought for the low price of $11.5 million.

------
001sky
_Intuit has spent $11.5 million lobbying the federal government..._

$10MM seems like a pittance. That's like what...2 minutes of superbowl ads?
Can you really buy legislation for this cheap?

~~~
harryh
I'm sure that their lobbying helps a little but that's not really what keeps
our taxes complicated.

Lots of conservative/anti-tax/right-wing/libertarian types see the difficulty
of doing taxes as a feature, not a bug because it makes people hate taxes in
general and more likely to vote for Republicans/fiscally conservative
politicians.

~~~
bnolsen
thats insane. huge numbers of conservatives (everyone i know) want the irs
gone and a flat tax. sorry to burst your bubble.

~~~
bbanyc
A "flat tax" means moving from the current 10%, 15%, ..., 39.6% rates to a
single tax bracket. Tax brackets are one section out of thousands in the
Internal Revenue Code and one line on the 1040. We could move to a flat tax
and still have the current overcomplicated mess of deductions, credits and
penalties in place, and that's what takes up most of the time and effort.

~~~
testrun
There are different types of flat
tax[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax)].
With true rate flat tax there are no deductions. I believe when most people
talks about flat tax, they think of true flat rate.

------
tn13
I filed my returns once with turbo tax since then I have been using that form
as a reference to file my other returns myself!.

------
mleonhard
According to Intuit's 2013 Annual Report page 41 [1] , they had $1.5B in
Consumer Tax product revenue, which is primarily derived from TurboTax Online.
That is 35% of their $4.2B total revenue in 2013.

They're creating a lot of ill-will for 35% of their business.

[1]
[http://investors.intuit.com/files/Intuit%20FY13%20Form%2010-...](http://investors.intuit.com/files/Intuit%20FY13%20Form%2010-K%20r221%20at%2009-13-13%20FINAL%20CLEAN%20to%20RRD.pdf)

------
ecolner
__* Not trying to piss off PG. I honestly don 't know the rules about
gathering supporters on HN, but this is in the spirit of the community I hope
__*

If anybody would like to use their skills to fix this issue with me (ex Intuit
TurboTax engineer) please hop over to this Ask HN and send me a message (email
on thread). Also check the website for a bit more context:
[http://taxcompactor.com](http://taxcompactor.com)

It's a pretty big project, but it's very doable by a small team from this
community. Tax preparation is fundamentally a software engineering problem,
which is convenient.

Need everything from testing to project management with myself floating
between roles. Remote is welcome - I'm in California. We'll use Basecamp,
Github, Jira, Skype? to work - productivity suggestions welcome of course.
True collaboration and fair equity.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599443)

There are a few really great folks that have already reached out. Email me for
details and we'll go from there. I'd love to hear from you.

------
arebop
I've been wondering if there's a PAC I could contribute to that would offset
my Intuit funding.

------
yxhuvud
Swedish procedure (unless you have slightly more complicated stuff like stock
ownership):

Go to tax agency home page and login there.

Go to the form for normal taxes.

All values are prefilled. Check two boxes (if you want to register two very
common deductions).

Save and back up one step.

Submit tax declaration by looking through all numbers again and clicking
submit.

------
willtheperson
While doing my taxes I was wondering why there isn't a startup in this space.

Turbotax: \- Has a terrible UX/UI \- It has to update itself with a 100mb
payload every time you open it from Jan 1 - Apr 15 \- Doesn't actually advise
you how to plan for your taxes. It's reactive to what you did. \- Uses shady
pricing and lots of versions to get you to spend more instead of just being
straightforward. \- Works hard to make you dependent on them

When you hear about the rich only paying 10%, 15% or whatever low bracket;
they did it by putting their money in the right places and sometimes investing
or spending it at the right time.

Where is the startup that is basically my accountant without the cost? Can we
really not programmatically understand tax code and financial strategy?

~~~
mscarborough
> Can we really not programmatically understand tax code

Isn't that what TurboTax does? I don't know about a bunch of different
versions, but the online version works just fine for me, and is pretty snappy.
Sure, they upsell you to file your state taxes, but the $30 or whatever is
worth it to me to avoid the duplicate work.

Their lobbying is a separate issue, but I have no problems with the actual
product.

------
nness
As an interesting aside, Australia's taxation department, the Australian
Taxation Office, provides a completely free piece of software each year called
e-tax ([http://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-
return/E-...](http://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-
return/E-tax/)).

It walks you through filling out your tax lodgement step-by-step and even
calculates your expected return. It's not the nicest piece of software, but
after having read this article, I am greatly appreciative that it exists at
all.

------
wiradikusuma
While we're on this topic, if you're a US citizen and you have a company, I
would like to ask:

1\. If I incorporated a C-Corp on June 2013, and I told my lawyer I want my
fiscal year to end by March 31, when is the deadline to file the tax? Is it
still April 15? (I hope not, I haven't filed)

2\. Is there any free tax filing solution for business? Considering my company
has zero revenue (it doesn't even run, but that's another story).

FYI, I'm not a US citizen.

~~~
acjohnson55
Please confirm this info with your own research and expert opinions. I'm not a
lawyer or an accountant.

1\. According to [1], you have to file by June 15.

2\. You can do the taxes yourself if you're brave. My company didn't file a
tax return for the year we operated and didn't have revenue. When I shut down
the company this year, I paid for a tax accountant to help close up shop
properly. He said we probably should have filed a $0 return. He went ahead and
filed a late return along with our final return. It didn't really cost us
anything extra, but based on my experience, you may want to find a tax
accountant who's willing to give you some free advice--perhaps one who's doing
good work for someone you know.

[1]
[http://www.taxact.com/reference/library_calendar_fytaxpayers...](http://www.taxact.com/reference/library_calendar_fytaxpayers.asp)

------
gamed
This is a typical example of rent seeking behaviour. Companies spending money
on lobbying without creating wealth. Unfortunately tax is one of the core
functions of government and will always be vulnerable to this sort of
manipulation of the political process.

------
zobzu
in my experience...

in germany filling taxes took me about 5min.. that really because you need to
go get a paper and give it to your company. Its otherwise more like 0 minutes
since theres barely anything to do (which is.. logical, as its pointed out,
they already have the data).

in the US, after hours and hours of reading and trying to do it myself, its
still hell. using turbotax means its going to take 30min instead of a month;
all that for "$30 a year" or close to that.

That's certainly fucked up.

~~~
brazzy
> in germany filling taxes took me about 5min..

I assume that what you meant by that is merely doing what is required for your
employer to withhold taxes from your salary.

The (for most employees optional) Einkommensteuererklärung _might_ be doable
in 5 minutes if you know it like the back of your hand, have all necessary
data immediately available and no special cases apply to you at all.

Otherwise, if you use the Germany equivalent of TurboTax, merely reading and
answering "no" to all the questions that determine whether any special cases
apply to you would take longer than 5 minutes.

~~~
zobzu
if you do the extra stuff its probably 10 or 15min which is fine. Sure the
first time it might take a little longer.

That's a far cry from what the taxes are in the US

~~~
brazzy
10 or 15 minutes?? Maybe if only one or two special cases apply to you, you
know exactly in advance what you're going to do and have everything ready, but
that's not a realistic scenario. Several hours of looking for documents and
trying to understand what exactly you need, then probably waiting for days or
weeks for some third-party documents to arrive, that's my experience.

And the large number and high fees of tax advisors in Germany would seem to
support my view rather more than yours.

~~~
zobzu
well, now you get a better perspective of how bad the US ones are I guess,
because it didnt take me much longer when i lived in germany (for many years)
past the first year / reading how it works. sure maybe i could have saved
20eur more, but not anything sensible.

you guys have it good in comparison, you just dont realize how bad it is
elsewhere.

------
harywilke
i'm surprised how many people do not use accountants to prepare their taxes. i
tried turbotax or one of it's ilk my first year out of college. it showed me
owing 7k. after freaking out i got in contact w/ my brothers accountant. i
ended up getting a refund of 700. it's not my job to know the ins and outs of
the tax code or to keep up on what has changed since last years filings. hire
an expert.

------
nathan_f77
Just moved to the US last year, and used Turbo Tax to file my tax returns. It
was alright, but in New Zealand, we don't generally have to jump through all
these hoops.

I guess it would be nice if there were a free alternative to TurboTax, but at
the same time, I kind of don't really care, so I'm happy to let them get away
with whatever they're doing. I know Lobbying isn't illegal in the U.S., and I
don't think it's all that immoral either.

~~~
IvyMike
> I know Lobbying isn't illegal in the U.S., and I don't think it's all that
> immoral either.

I guess maybe Intuit is just "playing the game" but the fact that our
government is being made purposefully obtuse and inefficient should make
anyone mad.

If you think "The government is purposefully obtuse and inefficient _all over
the place_ ", I agree. I'm just trying to fight the good fight one thing at a
time.

------
mfisher87
I don't understand. I asked them specifically not to do this in my survey
after completing my return.

------
grandinj
Even "third-world" countries like South Africa have e-filing for taxes....

------
thrillgore
Well color me shocked. A company using lobbying to protect its sources of
revenue.

------
novalis78
Tax procedure on Mars: Go to your government's website and send them some
Marscoin on the kickstarter project of the week or equivalent tipping
addresses. Or have some AI distribute a percentage of your funds on your
behalf based on some predefined rules.

------
obeid
WHAT? a corporation that capitalized on the government's incompetence, is
doing everything in their power to make sure things stay the same.

No come on you guys, April first was two weeks ago.

------
AznHisoka
More reason to hate Turbotax. Their commercials are ridiculous too - NO, doing
my taxes is not a way to summarize y year achievements...idiots

~~~
jaynos
Also, their constant reminders that I can pay for their software out of my
refund or get an extra 10% refund by having it all placed on an Amazon gift
card. Really annoying to see (and have to click through) when I OWE money.

------
christemmer
How can lobbying such as this _not_ be seen as corruption, but as a perfectly
legal (but most importantly "right") thing to do?

~~~
vbuterin
Intuit's argument generally is that if the government was allowed to create
their own online filing system then that would create an imbalance of
incentives, since the incentive of the people setting up the tax form would be
to try to screw people into paying more if possible. Keeping it to a pure
private market of tax preparation companies ensures that companies compete to
make their returns as favorable to you as possible, thereby counterbalancing
the IRS.

I still think the lack of easy government-provided online tax systems is
insane, but that's how the other side justifies itself.

------
sseveran
And anyone is surprised because...?

------
joshdance
As the witch from Princess Bride would say, "Booooooooo! BOOOOOOO!".

------
whoismua
Before this is settled, the tax code should be made simpler with black or
white options. A tax preparer saved me a few thousand dollars once by asking
the right questions (school tuition). The same for my corp CPA.

The "free" tax return would serve who exactly? What if the government "forgot"
to mention a few tax breaks? Maybe the government should offer free tax
returns for the plain and simple ones or for those with very low incomes.
Paying $50 to $100 to do your taxes when you pay, say $10K in taxes, isn't
much.

US axes are very low compared to Sweden and most EU countries.

------
obeid
WHAT? a corporation that capitalized on the government's incompetence is doing
everything in their power to make sure things stay the same.

No come on you guys, April first was two weeks ago.

------
snowwrestler
I question the idea that the government could build better tax prep software
than Intuit or other private companies. I don't think the Feds are known these
days for performant, efficient, easy-to-use large scale consumer web
applications. At a minimum I think discussion along those lines should wait
until federal IT procurement is reformed.

It's also worth noting that the article is not talking about the actual
complexity of the tax code itself. As far as I know, Intuit is lobbying on the
subject of tax preparation technologies, not lobbying against tax
simplification in general. (As some comments seemed to imply.)

~~~
teacup50
California did a trial run of no-file taxes. They simply sent a copy of your
return, and if it was accurate, you didn't have to do anything.

The government already has the information to do _most_ people's taxes for
them. They don't _need_ end-user web based tax prep software.

~~~
snowwrestler
A lot of the comments here are not talking about return-free filing; for
example the top comment mentions the Virginia state form, which was a simple
web form that replicated the fields of the paper form.

California is still offering ReadyReturn but it only covers the simplest
cases. Likewise a federal return-free system would only cover a fairly small
portion of taxpayers unless there were significant changes to tax law and/or
IRS operations.

------
webwielder
I used to boycott TurboTax because of this. But then I realized that Intuit is
just playing the game. Why wouldn't they do everything they can to sustain
their business (well, a sense of moral decency, I guess, but that's a big
ask)?

The real root of the problem is of course our broken political process.

~~~
kennywinker
Boycotting TurboTax is in your OWN best interests, is it not?

~~~
betterunix
That depends on how good you are at filing your tax returns. Intuit is
lobbying for a complex tax code because that reduces the likelihood that you
can actually do your taxes on your own without losing lots of money or getting
in trouble with the IRS.

~~~
kennywinker
I guess it's a matter of balancing your short term interests against your
long-term interests, and the likelihood of a boycott succeeding.

------
sunsu
If you were running Intiut, would you do anything differently? The TurboTax
product is built on the fact that the Tax code is complicated. Of course
they're going to lobby against tax reform.

~~~
prawn
Yes, I'd like to think that I would.

