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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, the IRS is still stuck in the dark ages, it's pretty disgusting. California's return is online and hasn't required a third-party for several years now, so we know what is possible.

By comparison, I've seen the online tax system in New Zealand and it is a breath of fresh air, everything is already entered for you, and of course a lot simpler. It's just a matter of following a short wizard to add additional exemptions or what have you. It takes about 30 minutes to read the instructions and finish, very doable for the lay person. Their banking system also makes the US look like it's in the stone age, but don't get me started.

Overall the situation in the US is quite shameful for the country that invented the internet.

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And the sad part is that the IRS wanted an automated easy file system but the special interests pretty much broken any promise of that. [1]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill...

Why blame the company, instead of the individuals that voted for these representatives that are essentially getting "bribed".

Because the company is the one who "bribed". I honestly do not understand this thought that a company should be able to do whatever they want, with no consequences, because they're trying to profit.

Who is saying that a company should be able to do "whatever they want", "without consequences"? For profit, or any other reason. Not even Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists believe that. So either you have some odd way of thinking about it, or you're constructing a fictional straw-man.

You're the one asking why the company should be blamed. You wouldn't be doing that if you didn't think that a company should be able to do stuff like this.

> Why blame the company, instead of the individuals that voted for these representatives that are essentially getting "bribed".

Out of the three actors (well, one is a heterogenous set of actors, but still) involved (company, reps, and voters), only one is not engaged (at least, as far as this transaction goes) in a corrupt act.

So, while certainly they would be well-advised to impose some accountability at the ballot box for the corruption, they are the least to blame for the actual corrupt act (unless, of course, evidence is presented, that has not as yet been, that they should have expected that the particular representatives were more likely to engage in this kind of corrupt behavior than the alternatives they actually had when they elected them, and they elected them anyway without legitimately supervening reasons.)

Heck, the IRS actually had an automated easy file system[1] but it was discontinued in favor of making you file electronic returns with for-profit third parties.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeleFile

My favorite is the online, automated EIN application system which has office hours[1].

[1]: https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Emplo...

So believe it or not, there exist legit reasons for applications to have office hours, and they're spelled Legacy Systems.

Imagine you've got a crufty COBOL mainframe somewhere, of which the IRS has lots. (The Social Security Administration has millions of lines of production COBOL, even in 2015. See: http://oig.ssa.gov/sites/default/files/audit/full/pdf/A-14-1...) Like most systems of the era, it differentiates interactive jobs and batch jobs. The batch jobs are designed to run when the interactive jobs are not, and they're not designed to be safe to run when the interactive jobs are running, because what IRS clerk needs to input data at 2 AM in the morning?

The people who've coded the systems are long-since retired. The systems are known to work but nothing is known about whether they can support requirements which didn't exist in 1970, like 24/7 access. There exists no money in the budget for blackboxing them to determine whether they are in fact safe for Causes A National Calamity If We Make Any Mistakes concurrent usage. 24/7 access is not a hard requirement, for anyone in decisionmaking authority.

Thus: office hours for web apps which are fundamentally just a front-end into an interactive job.

Oh wow! In that case I'm impressed that the service is as timely as it is.

COBOL isn't sexy, but the stuff it's powering is designed for reliability and stability. It's common in anything that needs to be rock solid; I came across it in the telecom industry, where it still powers billing systems.

There can be another reason why COBOL hasn't been replaced. No manager wants to be responsible if the new system has a problem/bug, especially if it was in a case where the old system worked fine.

The problem with pre-populated online forms is that if there are issues with the data that the tax authority receives from third parties, proving it wrong is difficult, and the burden of proof shifts to the taxpayer.

A few years ago, I resigned my job and I transferred my pension to what's called a Preservation Fund. In South Africa, you can get your pension paid out when you leave a job. Getting a pension paid out incurs tax, while transferring to a preservation fund is tax free.

However, the company that administered the pension fund screwed up, and issued a tax certificate that treated the pension transfer as a taxable payout, and submitted it to the South African Revenue Service (SARS). The pension administrators proved to be incompetent, and were incapable of fixing the issue.

After months of battling, I managed to get the issue sorted out, and I got a refund from the taxman, rather than the hefty payment that was initially assessed. Other colleagues who also left had less energy than me simply paid the tax caused by the pension company's administrative error. I'm sure there were hundreds of people around the country affected by the error, and most must have rolled over and paid.

I've read that one of the objections to having a pre-populated system in the US is that people are less likely to object if the forms are pre-filled. My experience would seem to confirm that view.

In the US system, the IRS still has all of that third-party data. If it's a significant amount of money, you'll just find out that something was wrong after you submit your tax return (when you get audited) rather than before.

Norway has been on a pre-populated system for all tax returns for a few years now, and last year transitioned to "silent consent", i.e. if you don't register any changes before the deadline, it means you accept the prepopulated values. From the statistics I've seen, ~60% don't register any changes, while ~20% register additional information, ~10% correct errors and ~10% register both additional information and correct errors. A lot of the additional info and corrections is stuff like kindergarten expenses (which are tax exempt up to a limit of $3000/year) or donations to charities, since it's up to the kindergarten or charity to register these, and they often forget or get things wrong.

This doesn't seem to be a problem with online-forms, rather a problem with policies, procedures, and not handling edge cases.

I work at a think tank specializing in tax policy, and I've seen/heard all kinds of technical problems at the IRS. My favorite story I heard was about the "hip replacement gang". These are the IT guys who retire on Friday, and come back on Monday as consultants at twice their previous pay. They can't simply be left to retire, because nobody else knows how anything works.

It's not the IRS's fault, it's Congress.

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