
IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax - danso
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-reforms-free-file-program-drops-agreement-not-to-compete-with-turbotax
======
granzymes
>Now companies are barred from hiding their free products from search engines
such as Google, and a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online
filing system has been scrapped.

>Under the new rules, participating companies also have to standardize the
naming convention of their Free File version as “IRS Free File program
delivered by [product name].”

Respect to ProPublica for their commitment to this issue. I first learned of
the Free File deal from their reporting and enjoyed the HN comments on their
articles.

On the 20-year fight to stop Americans from doing their taxes for free:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411)

On hiding Free File from search engines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126)

On tax industry lobbying:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393758)

~~~
jfc
ProPublica reported that after they published this story, people eligible for
free filing contacted TurboTax to get refunds. At first, they were able to get
refunds of the fees that they paid but once word got out the customer service
reps stonewalled them. So ProPublica invited readers to submit stories of
their experiences with TurboTax customer service.

Quality journalism.

~~~
epmaybe
Not only quality journalism, but a really solid look at what modern data-
driven journalism should be like.

------
xtracto
This USA tax thing has always baffled me... it is the exact definition of why
we pay taxes: for the government to provide services that are common to the
country´s citizens.

There´s nothing more common than tax collection: rich, middle class or poor.
Why wouldn't citizens demand a public tax filing process? Even in Mexico we
have an automagical tax filing process that makes:

a) The great majority of the population who perceives a salary not needing to
file taxes.

b) For the rest of the people, those who don't do anything fancy, just click
one button in a portal to do the filing, and everything is calculated by the
tax authority.

c) For the small percentage that do more complex things (I'll say it is
between 5% and 10% of the population) still can do it in the portal for free,
or hire an accountant.

~~~
jacurtis
Most countries have this "automagical tax filing process". And what kills me
the most is that __America actually secretly has this same system too __. Yet
every year we have to go through the charade of filing taxes ourselves, when
the governemnt already knows what we owe without us needing to round up
paperwork, W2 forms, 1099 forms, and so forth. Yet they make us do it anyway.

Don't believe me? Simply don't file your taxes next year. You will get a
letter from the IRS sent to you that literally tells you what you owe. They
know all of your income down to the cent, they know what you owe. This
automagical system exists. Yet the only way to "use" it is to either not pay
your taxes, or to pay them wrong.

Yet every year, the IRS makes us go through the charade of putting our taxes
together and all the work (and money) that it entails, when the whole time
they know what we owe already and expects us to pay that unless we can prove
them otherwise.

~~~
burfog
If it was automatic, income would be missed. The government would be revealing
what it doesn't know about, and people would not supply the missing
information.

Under the current system, people aren't sure what the government is aware of.
Because we get in trouble for leaving things off, we are more likely to report
everything.

~~~
Thorentis
This is why the Australian system is better.

Make people file a tax return, but auto-populate it with the data the
government already knows. And at the end include a tick box clause that
essentially says "I have included everything and reviewed the autofill info,
and if I have omitted anything later discovered I will be prosecuted".

20 seconds to file your taxes if there's nothing unknown. Very easy to add
extra info. Covers the tax departments back of you intentionally mislead them.

~~~
concerned_user
Same here in Europe, my tax form is auto-filled I only have to check the
numbers and confirm, with same warning and laws to back it up in case you
decide to hide income.

------
dang
75 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411)

6 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119916)

8 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725)

9 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673)

2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751383](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751383)

2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150)

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381437)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380232)

2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7595440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7595440)

2013:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203)

I'm sure there are others...

The current submission passes the significant new information test, so we
won't count it as a dupe.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
choppaface
There's a large backstory documented by (mostly) propublica, some of it is
here: [https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-
turbotax-20-year-f...](https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-
turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free)

Essentially: * IRS wanted to open tax software business to private companies.
* Intuit has a variety of products with similar names and each has a free
offering for a specific set of tax payers (e.g. income below some number). IRS
+ US Gov bought the story. * Intuit caught doing a variety of false
advertising, misleading documentation, adversarial website editing, etc. They
make it impossibly hard to find which is the free version of whatever you
need.

So this is a big first step away from the draconian Intuit monopoly. It would
be interesting to know what precipitated this change.

~~~
danso
The recent movement seems to be heavily precipitated by the discovery that
Intuit was hiding its Free File pages (apparently first found by this Redditor
[0]), with the stories sparking investigations at the federal and state level.

[0]
[https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bgj6oz/turbotax_...](https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bgj6oz/turbotax_is_blocking_search_engines_from_indexing/)

------
danShumway
Excellent news, and congrats to Propublica for in no small part making it
happen.

This wasn't just a shady operation -- Turbotax openly lied to customers about
its free file program, it deliberately suppressed the program from search
results, it lied to veterans. It was 100% acting in bad faith during
negotiations with the IRS.

Sometimes topics like this end up becoming kind of ideological or partisan;
but in this case I feel like Intuit is just very objectively in the wrong, and
that the IRS agreement for the free file program very objectively just was not
working. I myself contacted Turbotax about their free edition and got
personally lied to about the differences between the programs.[0]

> In this call, I was told that the form availability between the Free File
> and Free edition were the same, and I wouldn't be eligible for either. To
> check this, I created a second account and added the same forms to the Free
> File program. I was never charged or told that I was ineligible. All of the
> forms were added successfully.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piuv7KH37D4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piuv7KH37D4)

~~~
cactus2093
There's a good Planet Money episode that explains how surprisingly it is still
a partisan issue. The Republican argument, at least from certain prominent
people in the party, is that if paying taxes gets too easy the average
American will be less likely to push their representatives to lower taxes or
to oppose new taxes that get proposed.

~~~
RandomTisk
Which 'prominent people'? It sounds like an incredibly silly argument, one I
had never heard of before.

~~~
testis321
Honestly, knowing how much taxes you pay is important (and as i said in a
comment above, problematic, if people don't know).

But this can be solved by autofiling taxes, and then sending a yearly report:
you earned X, paid Y taxes, out of those, Z goes to this, Q to that, W to that
other thing, you've used these government services this year, that cost that
much money, etc.

~~~
RandomTisk
No doubt, the thing for most people, including anyone who hates paying taxes
is the bottom line. I don't see any connection though between the bottom line
paid and how forgiving people will be when they discover how easy it is to
file. I suspect the word prominent is a misnomer at best, it just makes no
sense to me.

------
privateSFacct
Fantastic news!

Now let's have the IRS start building out their free e-file program and
IDEALLY put some pressure or at least summarize what parts of the tax code are
the most complex so they can be simplified.

A lot of the tax code complexity comes from congress messing with the logic of
taxing folks on their income.

And yes, simplifying the tax code would get rid of loopholes like deduction
that can exceed the cost of the item placed into service (!) which make zero
sense AND create tax vs gaap difference that have to be tracked over long
periods of time.

Another one to get rid of - phantom LIFO inventory unless the inventory is
real.

~~~
sokoloff
Do you have a reference for the deduction greater than basis loophole? I spent
a few minutes looking for it on google and couldn’t find a reference. It does
seem non-sensical on the face, but I’d like to read more.

~~~
repsilat
One idea I though of in the past: if you have a very high income, your income
tax rate can approach 50% (state+federal). If you donate appreciated assets to
a DAF, and break the effects down by basis+gains, the numbers look like

\- 50ish% back after deducting the given unappreciated basis,

\- Selling the short-term gains would cost you half the profit, so the
charitable deduction gets you roughly 100% of the after-tax profit from the
trade back in your pocket.

(Plus the upside of sending money to charity.)

The math doesn't work out for long-term gains though, and obviously works best
when the asset has appreciated strongly. Not sure about the legal treatment of
partially-donated options spreads or other complex hedging tricks to
manufacture these gains and offset them against a loss.

Not tax advice etc, all just guesswork.

~~~
scottjg
my understanding was that the appreciated value of short-term capital gains
aren't deductible as a donation. only the cost basis.

that said, donating stock that has a long-term capital gain is still extremely
tax advantageous.

------
tunesmith
This is good news, right? I'm kind of amazed that good news is happening and
that the lobbying forces (eventually) got defeated in this case.

~~~
zozbot234
The IRS is perhaps the one government agency that just does not fuck around.
It's always sensible to make sure that filing for taxes is as smooth as
possible, at least for those who wish to abide by the rules. Follow the money.

~~~
Ericson2314
Many agencies are well-intentioned but wear congressional straight jackets.
It's not all Anjit Pai land.

~~~
taurath
Any further examples of regulators not captured by industry in 2019?

------
GNOMES
Not sure how factual Adam Ruins Everything is, but his skit on taxes is pretty
damning for tax software companies: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj4anUL-
LvY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj4anUL-LvY)

~~~
jjeaff
I think they get it mostly right for tax filing. But I find them to usually be
pretty blinded by ideology when it comes to some topics and severely lacking
in objectivity.

~~~
viraptor
Yeah, they range from very accurate to downright dangerous (the one about late
pregnancies stands out as terrible). It's not a consistently good source.

------
macinjosh
Now we're just left with this illogical part of the tax system:

The State: Pay me taxes or I'll put you in a cage!

Citizen: OK, how much do you need?

The State: You tell me, but if you're wrong you'll regret it!

~~~
dmoy
If you mess up your taxes, the IRS actually has a very reasonable process for
making amends, with penalties that aren't egregious at all. It's mostly a
small interest (like a couple percent above prime or something), which caps at
25% of the unpaid amount.

In fact it's the same interest they _pay you_ if you were due refund and they
were slow giving it back.

My main complaint is that it's a super, super slow process. They'll follow up
years later, and each back and forth takes like three months.

~~~
Keverw
Yep, I've heard that too. However, the states are much worse. Someone was
telling me about how he made an error, and New York was much more aggressive.
He decided to take his family and company to Texas instead, so in the long
term, New York lost a lot more money. Plus his kids when they grow up will
probably stay in Texas too, so they might as well lost an entire generation
they could have taxed. Plus New York isn't a business friendly state in the
first place along with New Jersey and California.

Then California is the same way too it sounds even going after former
residents as they went after the inventor of the microprocessor who moved to
Nevada, and even broke Nevada law while doing so since they sent state
officials across state lines to stalk him and dig through his trash. He sued
California in Nevada and was granted millions of dollars, but due to a
loophole, California didn't even have to pay as much as the judge in Nevada
ordered. California says living in an apartment isn't a permanent home, you
must get a mortgage and buy a house to no longer be a California resident...
Well, of course, that isn't the actual law, so the state of California abused
their power.

I wonder how California would view someone getting into YC, doing the program
for the 3 months and then going back to where they were originally living or
moving to a totally different state after such as Austin, TX since they had no
intent of living in California? I wish YC would expand to Austin. San
Francisco looks nice to visit, but due to it being expensive, and politics
it's a turn off for some people. However it seems like Austin is starting to
have some of the same problems with cost of living rising since it's growing,
Apple is expanding there to be the largest employer in Austin.

------
ChuckMcM
From the article: _The addendum also expressly bars the companies from
“engaging in any practice” that would exclude their Free File offerings “from
an organic internet search.”_

Note the term "organic" which suggests the page "naturally" ranks in the first
few hits. The agreement doesn't seem to prevent Intuit and others from both
buying ads to populate the top of search results and SEO'ing the crap out of
it to make their stuff rank at the top "organically."

I see this as a good example of how policy makers write policy with good
intentions but without a fundamental understanding of how gamed Internet
search is in order to make it profitable.

~~~
randallsquared
> _I see this as a good example of how policy makers write policy with good
> intentions but without a fundamental understanding [...]_

I agree with your argument in the general case, but in this case that seems
like what they would want: not to exclude the possibility of advertising or
SEO for the other products, but to rule out doing reverse SEO (or just
robots.txt to exclude it from search engines) on the Free File pages.

------
ortusdux
We need pre-filled tax forms.

[https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-
fought-t...](https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-the-
tax-lobby/)

~~~
CivBase
If the government can pre-fill my tax form, why should I even have to file
taxes to begin with? Just send me the pre-filled information each year and
tell me I need to correct it if it's wrong. Otherwise, I shouldn't have to do
anything.

~~~
ChainsawBaby
Basically how we do it in Norway, and probably lots of other countries that
does it automagically.

1st of April every year we get our pre-filled tax form (digitally), which we
have to look over. If we find it to be alright, we don't have to do anything
(deadline the 30th of April) and the taxes have been filed. All financial
institutions sends data to our tax office, so it's all there.

------
gtirloni
_> a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system
has been scrapped_

What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from
creating software that helps its citizens?

There's a lot wrong with Brazil but here I just download the government-
provided software (that runs on Windows/Linux/Mac) and fill my taxes in 10-15
minutes. Every year they release a new version that is easier to use than the
previous one.

~~~
zymhan
The idea was lots of people could file for free using a private online
service. Not many people at all ended up using it, since it wasn't in the
company's interest to have people not pay them.

~~~
ppseafield
More accurate: Intuit told the federal government they would absolutely offer
a free e-file tax service next to their pay service, and then they used
several lies and manipulative techniques so that folks could not find it or
even discover its existence.

~~~
sct202
Or if you do find it, you get intermodals with dark patterns upselling the
paid service, and once you upgrade you can't downgrade back to the free-file
version.

~~~
colejohnson66
Well, you _can_ “downgrade”... You just have to start all over. Which IMO is
absolutely atrocious.

------
jjeaff
There is no reason the IRS shouldn't have a simple, online fillable 1099EZ
that makes the calculations and validations for you. And while their at it,
match the SSN to the w2 info that they have on file. This would take care of
80% of the population.

Just don't outsource it. I'm sure USDS could have it ready in less than a
year.

~~~
rdtsc
100% agree. To me they seem to be playing this perverse game of knowing how
much you owe based on your W-2s then not telling you, waiting for you to file
and guess how much you owe just right. If you guess wrong tough luck, you get
penalties years later.

~~~
creato
The "penalties" are just what you owed plus interest. I think the IRS will
only charge an actual penalty if they think you were deliberately trying to
avoid taxes.

~~~
rdtsc
> The "penalties" are just what you owed plus interest

Sure, interest after 6 years can accumulate into a nice penalty sum on top of
what is owed. If IRS ends up owing you, and they discover it 6 years later,
would they send you the refund with an interest as well? I am guessing they
won't.

~~~
nightski
Yes the government always pays interest on money it owes you.

~~~
briandear
Not true. They don’t give you interest on your payroll withholdings. If you
overpaid taxes by $5000, you get exactly $5000 back as refund, despite them
having that money for a part of the year.

~~~
creato
They do pay interest that accumulates some time after the filing deadline.

This is probably just a practical matter, because accounting for interest
during the tax year would be complex/impossible because you would need to know
when the various amounts of withholding exceeded the amount owed. I'm not even
sure there is a single consistent way of doing this.

------
xrd
It's so insane to me that Grover Norquist somehow lobbied against free tax
filing provided by the IRS. It escapes all logic that he didn't pay attention
to what other countries do. It escapes all logic that he didn't think for a
moment about what the cost would be to citizens in (more or less direct
payments to Intuit) and that's not considering the incalculable cost of just
gathering up all this documentation and put it into TurboTax.

Billions of dollars in lost man power? Billions of dollars in wealth transfers
from middle and lower class people? Probably more like Trillions.

Norquist didn't succeed in drowning the government in the bathtub. He DID
successfully manage to keep the entire US citizenry drowning in billions of
hours of wasted effort and billions of dollars of unnecessary expenditures.
Good work, Norquist!

~~~
danieltillett
It is not insane, just not obvious what Grover’s aim is. He is anti-tax for a
large number of reasons. By making paying tax painful for the majority of
people he is trying to increase the percentage of the population that hate the
IRS and taxes. All very sane if your aim is to lower taxes.

~~~
stonogo
Only if you don't care who you hurt on the way to your goal. We may have
different definitions of sanity.

~~~
danieltillett
Now we are getting to the question if his aim is ethical or not. I think his
obsession with reducing taxation at all costs is misguided and often
counterproductive, but it is not insane.

------
ourmandave
I always use TurboTax online to complete my taxes and then copy all their info
into freefillableforms.com to file for free.

------
neolefty
Wow I would love to hear the inside story on this one.

I think we're all motivated by both survival and doing good, and I see an
overall trend towards more doing good, as survival gets easier. Is this a case
of that? Who drove it? What internal processes allowed public service to
overcome corrupt lobbying pressure?

------
wnevets
I just want to move to a system where the IRS sends me a bill, they know how
much I owe them.

~~~
hanniabu
Yeah there's no reason that in 2019 we should even have to file. Everything
should be automated for 85% of the population and they just receive the bill.
Only a small percent would actually need to file due to certain circumstances
mostly by people that are using special business structures to minimize taxes.

------
pkaye
They should implement something for the simple cases first. Like the standard
deductions, no investment income, no business income scenario. That will
probably handle 40% of the filers with one page of input.

------
PaulDavisThe1st
My pet peeve: I've used freefillableforms or whatever it is called for several
years. It's the only (free, online) option (I think) for someone in my income
bracket. It's not a bad system, but it is deliberately hobbled: it will do
about 90% of the math for you, and about 90% of the "put this computed value
on line N of some other form".

But ... not the remaining 10%. And there will be no errors if you fail to do
them (other than your return being incorrect).

I don't know if it is better or worse to offer a deliberately crippled system.

------
ars
The article says the IRS will make its own free filing system.

So how is there still a "deal" with tax software companies?

Isn't the whole deal that the IRS would not make such software?

------
astura
This is great news!

I really hope the IRS creates it's own site, they would need to advertise it
heavily though, way way too many people think eFile = TurboTax. There's
already vastly better options out there but very few people use them or know
about them.

Edit: I think the real killer feature would be to pre-populate the "IRS
e-file" with the information the IRS already knows about you. That would get
people paying attention.

~~~
mulmen
Care to mention any of these better options?

~~~
astura
I can only speak to myself.

TaxHawk ( [https://www.taxhawk.com](https://www.taxhawk.com) ) is what I've
been using for like almost a decade. Federal filing is free, state filing is
only is $15. You're free to use the free federal option without having to pay
for the state option. No tiers, no dark patterns, no upsells. The UI is
fantastic (and the UI is the entire point of using software, otherwise I'd
just fill out my 1040 by hand like I did for many years). You can pull up the
1040 for any of your previous returns.

I've mentioned it on HN before and one reply said they used it to file because
of my recommendation and it was both better than TurboTax and saved them like
$100.

~~~
griegm
Thanks for sharing, I'll try it out this year!

------
mucholove
One of the sad things behind the story: Bill Campbell was Chairman of the
board at Inuit while this was going on.

His story is inspiring. I’m a capitalist at heart. But I’m not a monopolist or
a crony—and hope not to become one.

The best among us aren’t perfect. We should take this as a cautionary tale.

~~~
everybodyknows
The vexing question: Why does there seem to be no space in the market for an
honest, quality vendor? As in Fastmail, Costco, or the pre-Amazon Whole Foods?

Are there so few customers willing to pay a truthful, higher sticker price
that such a business cannot be sustained?

~~~
froindt
Freetaxusa was a very easy experience last year. Federal is free, state is
$10.

I haven't read their privacy policy. Perhaps a profile of me was sold to
dozens of companies - but I think they fit your criteria pretty well.

------
msolujic
This is great news. NPR Planet money podcast cover this topic in detail past 2
years

[1]
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/episode-760-tax-
hero)

------
Waterluvian
So in Canada I pay about $15 CAD to file for my household. It takes 20 mins
and is submitted digitally.

Is this the equivalent of the issue in the USA or is it more expensive or
something? I get that free filing is kind of obvious as a right, but the
online service really does give me $15 of value so I've never thought to be
upset by it.

~~~
cbowal
If you're in Canada I can't recommend SimpleTax [1] enough. Donation-based, so
free or what you can pay. Was recently acquired by Wealthsimple.

[1] [https://simpletax.ca/](https://simpletax.ca/)

~~~
Waterluvian
Thanks so much for sharing. I wasn't aware and will try it this time.

------
monkeycantype
This is at number two on the front page, I'm wondering how much this is driven
by a specific interest in this story, or whether other people are having the
same, probably childish emotional reaction that I am, an almost dumbfounded
disbelief that a major institution is not charging headlong towards death cult
dystopia. A public institution has acted seemingly for public good. Regardless
of whether its driven as much by shame as by duty and altruism, - I'm deeply
confused about how to think about this.

Is this a trick? Sleight of hand to distract, to funnel the non wealthy
towards a presentation of the tax code that obscures the existence of
incantations to the elder gods known only to operating thetan level VIII
accountants?

Is this a bellwether of positive change, or a an eddy current in the river
Styx?

Is this just normal institutional behavior? Is Ragnarök 2020 just a delusional
end-of-days narrative I've bought into? I can't believe we've made it this far
- Y2k didn't kick off, I was sure at least Agile would be dead by now, am I
'dude you\'re overthinking this'?

Am I in a distributed doomsday cult?

oh, also - happy new year.

~~~
CivBase
Politicians aren't _evil_ , just self-interested like most people. It just so
happens that the nature of their job sometimes means serving others' interests
is in their own best interest. Sometimes.

Happy new year.

------
smadge
Great. I hope the IRS is serious about this and finally makes the tax software
industry obsolete.

------
EamonnMR
In the constant stream of bad news, it's easy to miss a positive update like
this.

------
OrgNet
The IRS already have all the information it needs to automatically file
returns for many Americans... does that mean that some of us will just be able
to confirm that our automatically generated return is correct?

------
pascalxus
And, don't forget, there's always CalFile. I've heard it's provided by the Gov
for Free!! One of the posters here had mentioned it earlier in the year and I
don't want to forget

------
nvarsj
Now if only I could file my expat taxes via some public service. The filing
requirement in the Obama/Trump era for expats is literally insane, and I'd say
even Kafkaesque in the truest sense. The way the government treats its expats
w.r.t. tax is inhumane and makes me really dislike being an American.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
How did filing requirements change since 2008? I didn’t notice any
differences. Also, you can use online tax preparations now as they seem to
support 2555 and 1116 forms now, which wasn’t an option in 2008.

~~~
nvarsj
I believe 2008 saw the start of mass enforcement of FBAR/FACTA, stricter
requirements on foreign banks to report American accounts, etc. Things got
much worse with Trump and the Republican congress - with sections 962/965
(transition tax/GILTI tax), and 5471 complexity going through the roof. Anyone
with a small business, or any sort of ownership stake, was hit hard by these
terribly written laws and their onerous filing requirements. Being an American
expat is a giant liability these days, which is sad, because I enjoy being
American. Expats will unfortunately never have much of a voice, and I don't
expect things to ever improve, only get worse.

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m0zg
Just fucking send me my filled out tax forms, like they do in other countries,
you already know everything, and where you're wrong, I'll contest.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
Doesn't work so well for the self-employed, alas.

~~~
m0zg
Only if working with individuals. If I, as a consultant, work with a company,
that company requires a W9 from me, and they have to report what they paid me.
And I also report what I paid myself in salary and pay federal taxes from
every paycheck I make out to myself. So at least for me, they know everything
there is to know.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
I sell stuff (software, so not really stuff). I certainly file my quarterly
estimated taxes (state and federal), but until I file my annual return, the
government has no idea how much I've actually earned, nor what my expenses
were. Consequently, they're in no position to tell me what I owe them until
I've filed my entire return.

Perhaps what the commenter meant was "we should fill out forms detailing
income + expenses (where applicable) and the government should compute our
taxes for us". I'm mostly good with that idea.

~~~
m0zg
Yes, this won't be 100%. But I'd say easily 99% of people could get all this
tax bullshit automated away and they wouldn't have to pay Intuit a single
penny.

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cable2600
Turbo Tax only works with Windows 10 and 8.1 with the 2019 version. Shutting
out Windows 7 and under filers who can use the IRS free file system.

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schredder
This probably explains the TurboTax ad I saw on YouTube today where the only
word spoken was “free,” over and over again.

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Trias11
What kind of bribe and to whom does private corporation need to make to make
IRS sign non compete agreement with them?

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dartdartdart
BEST NEWS OF THE DECADE

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darthreid
wow, this is great towards fixing the US tax system and the byzantine means
most Americans have to go thru to simply file taxes

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gigatexal
This is the best news to Start the new year!!!

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jdorfman
I just donated to ProPublica. Amazing work.

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kpennell
propublica is a good one to donate to!

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zacharycohn
Good riddance.

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girishso
TurboTax will be remembered as a classic example of extreme capitalism.

~~~
nojvek
or extreme lobbying

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dang
HN has always been at war with TurboTax.

Edit: looks like this line didn't go over so well. To avoid distractions, I'm
going to move these links to another post and mark this subthread off topic.

Links moved to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21924055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21924055).

~~~
SilasX
>HN has always been at war with TurboTax.

"Snarky trivialization of activism on this issue" seems like the very kind of
thing you'd normally discourage.

~~~
Infinitesimus
Assuming positive intentions, it's unlikely that this is a snarky
trivialization and more likely that it is acknowledging/praising the
persistence of the topic.

~~~
dang
Precisely. But what we always tell users is that intent doesn't communicate
itself on the internet, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate.

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alistairSH
In the US, we've had decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government
can't do anything properly. A substantial portion of the population believes
it.

As noted in a sibling comment, the IRS could pre-fill forms that would be
correct for the vast majority of tax payers (who take the standard
deduction/don't itemize, have a single job, and no other edge cases). These
people should not be paying TurboTax either way - the forms they need to
submit are relatively straight-forward. People who do need a CPA would have to
hire one regardless. TurboTax is literally just ripping off average tax
payers.

~~~
marcrosoft
> messaging that the government can't do anything properly

I would love to hear about things the government has done exceptionally better
than private companies. Please go on.

~~~
nix0n
Healthcare comes to mind since we're discussing US politics.

Roads might be the canonical example but I'm not familiar with any examples of
privatized roads.

~~~
jakear
Toll Roads? Generally better maintained and provide a shorter pat for a small
but willing-to-pay segment of the population that government programs
overlook.

~~~
nix0n
I do pay several hundred a year in tolls but as far as I can tell it all goes
to state or local DOTs.

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gdy
Here is an idea from Russia: flat 13% income tax with deductible educational,
medical, real estate and some other expenses.

