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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Filing is always free. Online filing costs money, but you can always mail in a paper form. If everyone did that, the IRS would pretty quickly want to make sure people can file online easily and cheaply.

Stop using HR Block and Turbo Tax. For most people, taxes are not very complicated. The IRS publishes detailed instructions that literally explain what every box means and what should go in it for every form. Just read it, fill it out, mail it in.

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> Filing is always free. Online filing costs money, but you can always mail in a paper form. If everyone did that, the IRS would pretty quickly want to make sure people can file online easily and cheaply.

Nobody at the IRS cares one way or the other. Until a few years ago that was the only way to file, and their machines handled the load just fine. If there's a lot of paper files, and it takes an extra week for somebody to get their return, it's not going to bother the IRS one bit.

The AMT calculation is tedious as hell. Considering that the yearly cost for H&R Block is something like 20$, it's well worth the money just to avoid needing to do that by hand, and that's not even taking into account all of the other time savings features of it. And the cost for the software itself is tax deductible as tax prep costs.

AMT only really affects people who make like $200,000+, right? It's a reasonable point, but I think it only applies to 5% or so of taxpayers.

Nope! You'd be surprised who it might affect. Families with a few kids (lots of tax credits rather than deductions) that own their own home and have a decent salary could potentially owe the AMT.

If you make more than the exemption amount for your category (between 40-85K or so depending on your situation and tax year), then you should be calculating the AMT to determine whether or not you owe. It affects more people than you might think, even if it just requires the calculation to occur to see if you owe it or not.

You underestimate how lazy and unmotivated most people are.

You overestimate how easy IRS instructions are. A 1040EZ is easy, but anything beyond that and it becomes very complicated in a hurry.

You underestimate how much people's time is worth to them.

I've been using https://www.freetax.com/ for the last few years. It's free to efile state and federal, no gimmicks like the ones pushed on the IRS website. I actually did mine in HR block as well one year, they messed up the state portion badly, I would have been overpaid on my refund and had to pay it back.

But every time I do that my calculated return is far lower than the return I get using online tools.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

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