Thank you, DOGE brainiacs who decided I had to keep doing it the inefficient way.
What I read in the article is an account of corruption on a staggering scale, permeating the democratic foundations of the US.
For private enterprise, the benefits are to encourage more complex tax laws, and to add MORE challenges that they can intermediate.
The incentives for governments are to get it done easily, cheaply and at scale, without differentiation between users.
Plus we know how this is done globally. We even know that tax filing is intentionally made as painful as possible to ensure American voters hate filing taxes even more.
These things are not mutually exclusive. I agree that simplifying the tax code would be a good thing. But I don't think it's any more likely in a world without Direct file than in a world with it.
Easily searched, but I wanted to make an observation, why is it only the government who actually makes use of the hierarchical nature of DNS
Search engine rankings.
TurboTax wants you to be scared of the tax forms, so they make it really hard to see what it is that you're actually doing and signing. FreeTaxUSA actively encourages you to look at and understand the forms you're filling out and signing at every step of the way. After a few years with them I actually feel that I could fill out my taxes by hand, but I don't want to because their interface is a genuine improvement on the tax forms, as opposed to TurboTax's which is very much not.
My understanding of the tax code has shot up dramatically since switching to them, and I feel much safer submitting taxes now than I ever did with TurboTax because I understand every single line I submitted.
The last 2 years, I paid the $8 for chat support to answer some questions I had and both times their answers saved me a lot more than the $8. Very knowledgeable and can see my numbers to give me specific guidance and answers.
Never give money, business or data to Intuit
The killer feature for me is that it provides overall money in/money out, with some good visualizations too. This is nontrivial for anyone using multiple credit cards or bank accounts, and is *critical* information for being a responsible adult IMO.
It also has budgeting, investment tracking tools, etc. But these stay out of your way if you just want to look at overall metrics like in/out over time, or net worth.
I showed my financial advisor and he was so impressed he picked up their advisor product (https://www.monarchmoney.com/for-professionals). So I don’t have to pay for a subscription anymore myself!
I strongly believe everyone should use a tool like Monarch for financial situational awareness.
$15 discount via my referral link (but I don’t get anything because my account is paid for via my financial advisor): https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/b3q5nmkw2r
https://www.sofi.com/financial-insights/
It's pretty decent. I use it all the time.
I know this sounds kinda promo-iy, but they'll do a mutual signup bonus so if you actually want to sign up, it's a $25 bonus for you with this link https://www.sofi.com/invite/money?gcp=b3f052b0-5031-473e-a90...
sorry if that seems spammy -- I've never shared anything like this. Check my history if you want.
I just genuinely like them
I've used it for the past few years, but this year had a more slightly more complicated tax situation due to switching investment brokerages and making more trades than usual and I found it kind of annoying to deal with. I switched to FreeTaxUSA this year and it worked quite well, so I'll definitely be using it instead of Credit Karma/Cash App Taxes next year.
I used to be a hardcore "the government should stop playing 'I'm thinking of a number' and just tell me what I owe", but the rise of these internet tax apps has kind of obviated the need. And with multiple competitors, you can even check the others work.
Edit: A partial answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724779
A small snippet of that conversation. The video recording has much more details -
Do you agree with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report finding that the Direct File pilot was successful and should be expanded?
Answer: As noted during the hearing, I commit that for this tax season, Direct File will be operative to prevent any disruptions for taxpayers. And if confirmed, I will consult and study the program and understand it better, and evaluate whether it works to serve the best interests of taxpayers.
From page 36 at https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/responses_to_qu...
So he evaluated not to expand :-(
They were direct about this tax season but that looks like classic politician for "I'm killing it ASAP" to me.
CashApp taxes is free and had zero upsell. I don't know what information they are farming out of this and if I did it might end up disturbing me, but at least it's free and was easy to use.
I got the opportunity to learn about something like married, filing separately, on a single return or something because of course oomur tax policy is like a jury rigged bug fix on top of a bug fix.
From https://www.freetaxusa.com/privacy
>> Business transitions
> In the event TaxHawk evaluates or conducts a business transition whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, such as a merger, being acquired by another company, or selling a portion of its assets, the personal information of users will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. Users will be notified, via email and/or through a prominent notice on the FreeTaxUSA.com website, 30 days prior to a change of ownership or control of their personal information.
https://www.intuit.com/privacy/statement/
>> How we share your personal information
> For mergers and acquisitions. If we are involved with a merger, asset sale, financing, liquidation, bankruptcy, or the acquisition of all or part of our business to another company, we may share your personal information with that company and its advisors before and after the transaction date.
> Any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data.
https://blog.23andme.com/articles/open-letter
So the buyer is bound by the same terms but they absolutely do get the data ("be part of the assets transferred" as per FreeTaxUSA's terms that we are discussing).
Do you have another reference in mind?
I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).
They have up selling services like a prepaid debit card and whatnot, but all that is optional.
I'm really happy to use FreeTaxUsa and only pay $20 for my income tax though, because using TurboTax with contractor income it was $120 or more. I got multiple family members to switch to FreeTaxUsa.
(I recognize that not everyone can do this, but if you have the technical skill to handle the math, I do still recommend it.)
It shouldn't be this hard.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/...
But even then, assuming "they'll just sell it anyways", most of that information exists with other orgs anyways that could just as easily just sell it anyways. If I don't trust Intuit, why would I trust ADP or whoever my bank is to not sell my data either?
But sure, I agree, using any third party to file your taxes exposes you to that risk of yet another party potentially leaking/selling data. Once again though, to me that trade off of 14 more hours with my kids versus someone knowing what I paid in mortgage interest last year is pretty OK to me. Data brokers could just glean that same kind of useful information it means through the thousands of other things tracking me anyways.
unless you happen to click "OK" on one of the deceptive prompts TurboTax will show you while preparing your taxes.
It's about reducing the burden on taxpaying Americans, or something like that.
Palantir got the contract and estimates it’ll take a month to index all the IRS data, rip out the access controls and slap a nice search gui on top.
What they probably get now is even more control over how that data is given to them and how much of it they can access.
No need to partner with the IRS, the DOGE dudes have an external drives in a sock drawer at home, ready for their next Fintech startup. For reasons attributed to "world class algorithms" the Fintech will be preternaturally good at targeting financial services to individuals, and assessing credit-worthiness given nothing but a name and zip code...
I too would work for "free" to gain access to that valuable data. If I didn't have a half-decent moral compass.
Also my bank only knows what goes on in my checking account. They have a lot less information than the IRS does (although what they do have is probably a lot more detailed).
I used to work in Intuit's Security R&D business unit and worked on the software that made it so that even if someone at Intuit/Turbo Tax wanted to do that it'd be impossible. Intuit spends a lot of money on cryptographers and very skilled programmers to ensure that. The definition of PII extends all the way to the HTTP logs of filers such that we couldn't even visualize filings on a map as they came in during tax season.
There's plenty of things that Intuit does that aren't good without alleging baseless claims.
At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.
Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.
Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.
On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.
So, at least it’s not 100% bad.
Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
However, knowing it's that easy requires reading a lot of instructions, and if you make enough money (depending on filing status), it suddenly gets much more complicated (forms 8959, 8960, 6251 have income triggers), and if you have 1099s (INT or DIV) you might need to file Schedule B and form 8995. And if you have a mortgage, you should do your taxes twice to see if itemizing with Schedule A is better. And god forbid you sold anything and have to do Schedule D and forms 8949.
Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour.
I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them.
Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
The worst thing about our system is that the taxes are impossible to figure “correctly” (that’s not even a concept that makes sense, given how the tax code works) and there are massive legal penalties for getting them wrong.
You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report
I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.
If you have multiple brokerage accounts, RSUs from an employer or two, maybe some consulting income, etc, it's annoying and tedious.
And if you have a business, doing it by hand basically means you'll overpay by a good extent.
The system prefills 99% of the details that they've obtained from my employer, bank, health insurer, stock broker etc directly. All I need to do is fill out my deductions from a running spreadsheet I've maintained throughout the year.
What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.
TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form.
$200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.
If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
It does. I have most the things you have mentioned and it was automated, except for correcting a small situation their OCR messed up by reading an extra blank space from the form.
- Downloading all forms and instructions.
- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.
- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).
- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.
- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.
- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.
2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.
The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.
Freetaxusa is the simplest way but really there are a ton of options that're free.
I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.
the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.
the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.
I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")
I calculate all the fields using my homebrew software. All calculations are done there.
The software produces a report which is organized by form and field. I can go through it and just put the indicated values into the right forms.
The forms are fillable PDFs. I copy and paste most of the values.
The last few years, I had perfect results; no correction came back from the Canada Revenue Agency.
This year, that d1ckhead Justin Trudeau left us with a surprise; complications to the Canada Pension Plan. Something like a 40% of all the line items in my tax calculation are from the new CPP schedule 5. It has multiple brackets now. I had to redo that section of my system (redefine the model). That is tedious. Anything same as last year is a breeze.
I had to model a whole new form this year since I worked for two employers and overpaid EI (employment insurance). The common forms handle CPP overpayment. For EI overpayment there is no "heads up" in the workflow at all. Since there is a deduction for EI payments, you have to do it right; you can easily screw up and naively calculate and claim the overpayment, while keeping the deduction calculated from the the overpaid amount.
Anyway, when I used to work with just pen and calculator, it took me about, oh, a bit over an hour or so. 10 to 15 hours seems crazy for personal tax. Is this for a moderately complicated corporation, where you're saving money by not hiring an accountant?
Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.
I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.
For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours.
Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack.
The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ.
Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.
Just use their website, pick your battles.
The government is going to use software to process your stuff anyway, and whatever contractor makes that software will sell it to TurboTax.
I do my personal, my 2 LLCs in under 2 hours. I also do my roommates W2 which takes 10 minutes. The whole thing costs like $35.
Seriously, how does it take you 10+ hours? I do not understand at all. Lol
I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.
That’s insane.
It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
As to the permutations aspect, this does take a lot of time but it can net a lot of savings. One thing that I would add is that you do have the choice to round to the cent or the whole dollar (at least with the IRS), but generally I have never found that to make any substantial difference, so I just round to whole dollars at this point and don't waste my time trying to optimize that.
You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.
I spend just a few hours doing taxes by hand when it's are similar to the previous year. With an accountant, I have to spend a bunch of time getting things ready, anyway. I only pay them when something weird happens.
Also, fuck Intuit.
Companies, like people, can be evil while not committing any crimes. Intuit is not even that evil when compared to most larger companies in the US. We only remember it exists during tax season.
The really evil companies manipulate markets, evade labor laws, crush unions, exploit vulnerable users, enable authoritarian surveillance, trivialize wars.
All without breaking a single law.
So dark patterns are good? It was good for cigarette companies to discover tobacco is addictive and take advantage of that by selling cigarettes to kids?
After all, this was legal until people fought a brutal grassroots war against tobacco companies to fix it.
This is the exact argument Jeffrey Skilling presented to me to explain his actions at Enron. He further expanded saying, “You would have done the same thing in my position.”
It’s possible to be both evil and rational. Now regardless of the legality of Skilling’s actual actions—when considering whatever viewpoint he convinced himself of—one must consider ethics and whether or not they are intentionally misleading people in their actions. It can absolutely be evil. How many people lost their entire retirement savings when Enron went under?
Corporations need to be redefined to serving society first, a sort of Prime Directive.
No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.
And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.
But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.
Republicans are against easy tax filing because Grover Norquist makes them all sign pledges against it, not because of lobbying.
Government is far less accountable than that. Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.
I’m sure all the workers enslaved in company towns will be happy to know they are free from government meddling.
How do you escape a private business that is (a) big enough to buy up all the competitors, (b) uses IP law to prevent competition, (c) gives it's customers worse service and high prices?
unfortunately, founders never envisioned a congress of career politicians, who would shy away from their duty to actually draft complete laws and enforce them , because politicians want to be friends with everyone.
Lack of term limits, lack of randomness, lack of income caps in government (and post government!), have eroded a sense of duty in our congressional leaders , and have gotten us a congress that is solely in it for its enrichment at the expense of the voters
BUT parent was asking for a government solution to the problem of monopolies. I was merely pointing out that government solution already exists.
And as you rightly point out, persistent monopolies are a government-created problem.
We need the IRS to pre-fill tax forms.
Lol no, not at all. They actively try to deceive consumers through propaganda campaigns (marketing) and deception.
For example, did you know J&J knew about the asbestos problem in their baby powder in the mid 70s? They decided to just lie about it, because they knew cancer agents in their baby powder makes it unappealing to mothers and fathers. We didn't find out about this until 2020. That's 50 years of cancer baby powder.
You don't have any insight into how companies operate. You don't vote on anything. You have zero guarantee they have your interests at heart. How, then, are they accountable? They can do whatever they want, whenever they want.
> Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.
Yeah, until the next election.
I mean, how many people "approve" of the CEO of their company? Surely way fucking less than 50%. Most of the time these CEOs are blatantly evil and stupid. But they call all the shots and you don't get any vote at all.
Why don't citizens just move to a different city/state/country when they disapprove, like they do with businesses?
This is a particular sore spot, as Republicans have still not forgiven the IRS in 2013 for admitting deliberately harassing conservative nonprofits without cause.
Call it a stupid argument, but at least it’s not a strawman like the above comment.
Yes, the rationalization offered to those who don't already subscribe to the ideology of privatization as an a priori goal to get them on board is usually that democratically-accountable public institutions lack a motivation to serve the interest of the public to whom they are accountable, while accountable-to-their-owners private interests do have an motivation to serve the public interest.
“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.” Gregory v. Helvering (2d Cir. 1934)
'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.' ― Anatole France
Likewise, tax laws are the same for rich and poor people but rich people can take advantage of more loopholes and ways to structure their income to make their effective tax rate much lower. Even just owning a house gives you access to a pretty big tax "loophole" in the ability to deduct interest on your mortgage.
The problem isn't that people are taking advantage of loopholes but rather that the loopholes were created and still exist.
I don't know what finance and investment regulations were in place when Learned Hand was alive, but I do wonder if he'd take the same position in an economy and tax regime so heavily titled to favor the wealthiest.
Norquist does oppose efforts by the IRS to (partially) obviate TurboTax by having the IRS do your taxes [1].
Separately, he has the anti-tax pledge you mention. The former is not entailed by the latter, at least in any obvious way.
So the parent is right about Norquist opposing filing simplification, but wrong about it being related to the infamous pledge.
[1] For those asking for a citation, here's a recent tweet: https://x.com/GroverNorquist/status/1912592196894630291
That said, ime the RoI isn't that hot for the amount of time and effort spent, as relationships do matter more than money as some point political donations have diminishing returns.
Note that Sri Lanka is a third world country that's currently recovering from a major economic crisis in 2022.
"A glance at Intuit’s 2025 first-quarter lobbying disclosures gets at this continued, quarter-century saga. The company shelled out $240,000 to lobby members of Congress on tax-related issues."
Are we talking about the free tax filing that the tax companies hid behind dark patterns?
https://cd2.justice.org/resources/research/taxes-and-forced-... > Intuit and H&R Block misled taxpayers into paying for a product that should have been free.
Oh and it comes with 1-year of free audit defense as well.
I'm not sure what their long-term business stategy is, but I would rather pay them than TurboTax. I find Intuit's political lobbying distasteful.
How much could any one program be attributed to lobbying?
Other countries like Norway have much simpler tax systems that pre-compute the amount for taxpayers.
It does bother me that if you watch your network requests, You find out it is an intuit product. I mean the IRS has one job, to receive taxes, why do I have to go through a third party company that I do not trust, to do this.
As backwards and stupid as it is in this internet enabled age, I still file paper forms. At least until the irs can get it's online act together, (Based on the information in the parent article, this may be never)