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Comment by riemannzeta | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were more information about what, specifically, the pilot program included. The main detail I got from the story is that the tax returns were pre-filled with income information.

I think that's useful, but I see no reason to expect a priori that the government would end up doing a better job with that than the private companies (like Intuit and H&R Block) whose revenue depends on doing that well.

The comments that suggest that Intuit and H&R Block were lobbying to keep the tax code complex don't make sense to me. Maybe they are, but that's not what they were lobbying for in lobbying to defeat this particular, reform is it? Rather, they were lobbying to keep the pre-filling process private.

Or did I miss something important?

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Intuit and HR block are a bunch of crooks.

They have lobbied for a variety of anti-tax payer causes. Namely stuff like: https://psmag.com/h-r-block-and-intuit-are-still-lobbying-to....

There is a really good reason to think that the government would do a better job -- most peoples tax situation is dead simple. Even if H&R block found deductions every once and a while that the IRS didn't -- which I doubt would happen realistically -- H&R block charges something like 200 dollars. It seems incredibly unlikely that they would save more than 200 dollars on average.

And if that was the case, let the market sort it. H&R block could say bring in the returns, and if the IRS messed up we'll find it and split it with you in some fashion.

I don't have a strong feeling about the statistics here. But I guess a $1,000 mistake on 1 in 5 of all returns does a little unlikely. Bigger mistakes on fewer returns also seems unlikely since the higher the bracket, the less likely you're relying on any default or software.

But I take the point that H&R Block and Intuit could simply start from the filled out returns provided by the gov't. Harder to understand their objections given that.

> I think that's useful, but I see no reason to expect a priori that the government would end up doing a better job with that than the private companies (like Intuit and H&R Block) whose revenue depends on doing that well.

Intuit and H&R Block could of course _still_ provide their services if they happen to be so accurate. In the past, I've used Turbotax only to receive corrections from the IRS (and by the way, the IRS was right). Certainly would have saved me time to have access to that info from the beginning.

> The comments that suggest that Intuit and H&R Block were lobbying to keep the tax code complex don't make sense to me. Maybe they are, but that's not what they were lobbying for in lobbying to defeat this particular, reform is it? Rather, they were lobbying to keep the pre-filling process private.

Of course that keeps it more complex. It means that it's harder for your average tax payer to input information (starting from scratch is always harder than starting from some partially filled point). It unquestionably increases the amount of work required since tax payers have to do work the government has already done (at a much more efficient scale). So yeah basically by lobbying against this, those companies are essentially economic parasites.

You're right about the reform saving work and about it being possible for H&R Block and Intuit to offer their services anyway even after this reform. That's true. I just didn't see how that makes the code itself any more complex. But clearly they do benefit from that complexity in general.

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