What Intuit knows about its users | Hacker News Reader

What Intuit knows about its users

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84 pointsnwrk58 comments

And if you use an accountant instead, what software does your accountant use, and does the publisher of that software claim rights to exploit your financial information?

(I've been buying the TurboTax personal and small business edition for a few years, on CD-ROM. I've had a protocol with a KVM virtual machine on Linux, in which the image is loaded into a new Windows 7 image, TurboTax installed and updated over the network, and then that image booted without network, and never again connected to the network, before I load last returns' data, and begin entering data for the new return. My sense is that this is probably not sustainable, and, any year, Intuit can make it so that you have to give them rights to your data if you want to prepare your tax return. A couple years ago, I implemented the entire federal form 1040 and some schedules as Scheme code, as an experiment, and it was a huge headache, but doable, for a startup. It seems like an unpleasant/disreputable business to be in, especially if companies are lobbying politicians to make the US tax return process a huge burden, so that people will buy their software/service. And perhaps share their private financial information.)

there is "Open Tax Solver" for US tax returns now, but it's written in C instead of FP, and the code quality is terrible even for C. off the top of my head, two of the biggest problems were huge arrays instead of structs and horribly inconsistent indentation.

It doesn't open any network connections or need any data from anything other than the XML files provided by the author.

I get that bad code is annoying if you want to modify it but I don't see how that's a real complaint here.

as a prospective user, bad code makes me skeptical of the computation accuracy.

>And if you use an accountant instead, what software does your accountant use, and does the publisher of that software claim rights to exploit your financial information?

As it turns out... our CPA sent out a cryptic email saying there “has been a hack”. Turns out the accounting software they use, that company had some malware and “they assure us” that no client data was accessed but the software will be offline for awhile until they figure out what happened, so they don’t really know.

It doesn’t matter how careful we are, or how carefully we select our CPA or how careful they are. I mean, if it were up to me I wouldn’t hire a CPA that used cloud network accounting software, but if I applied that rule everywhere we’d have offline XP machines.

And if you use an accountant instead, what software does your accountant use

Possibly the same.

I really dislike Quickbooks for a variety of reasons, but I have to use it because it's what my accountant uses.

It reminds me of how in the 80's so many small businesses switched to IBM computers because all the other small businesses used Lotus 1-2-3.

Or, you know, have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population.

Tragedy of the Commons at its finest.

Where is the Commons here? This is a case of American politicians selling themselves to private interests, on the (relative) cheap.

Tragedy of the Commons here means that a minority of highly motivated players (in this case the tax preparation companies like Intuit) work much harder to implement a policy that is only mildly annoying for the vast majority of people.

In this case millions of people have to spend between $0 - ~$200 a year so that a few hundred/thousand people can make boatloads of cash to file taxes.

I guess? In the Tragedy of the Commons, the people using the "Commons" ultimately make things worse for themselves. In this case, the people using the "Commons" don't get hurt.

No, that's not at all what "tragedy of the commons" means. What you describe is just run-of-the-mill capitalism, not a "tragedy of the commons."

To be a tragedy of the commons there must be

1) a shared resource (example: the ocean)

2) it must be in an individual's best interest to utilize the resource as much as possible (example: the more fish I catch the more money I make)

and

3) the actions of each individual working in their individual best interest leads to the degradation of the shared resource as a whole for everyone given enough individuals (example: extinction of fish species).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

>The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. The theory originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land.

>In this modern economic context, commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, roads and highways, or even an office refrigerator.

I don't know man, the redesigned 1040 forms are pretty easy to fill out:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf

Serious question from a non-American. Do you actually have to fill that out as part of doing your tax return?

If you do your taxes manually, yes. What the software does is fill out the form for them.

Filing taxes is notoriously obtuse.

This is for very simple cases. It doesn't take much before you end up with hours upon hours of paperwork (usually because of property ownership or investments or similar).

That's the bare minimum you'll have to fill out. If you have investment accounts, you tack on more forms. If you have an inheritance, there's more paperwork. If you withdraw from your retirement accounts, you could have more.

not to mention filing state returns

WTF? I honestly had no idea that state returns were a thing.

I don't know man, the redesigned 1040 forms are pretty easy to fill out:

Anyone whose life is so plain and simple that they can do their taxes with just a 1040 or a 1040EZ form really doesn't understand how taxes work.

I don't see how "hide all the complexity with a million attached schedules" is a meaningful improvement in ease of use.

> have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population.

Yes! 100%!

> Tragedy of the Commons at its finest.

ok, now you lost me

It’s not tragedy of the commons, it’s just plain old corruption.

The law can address this problem. If you work at a tax agency, the various secrecy acts establish a tight controls on taxpayer data. Like go to jail for doing the type of things that Intuit does.

Oh sure, I'll just get right on having the federal government do that.

What is the legitimate argument against this, besides knee-jerk fear of government? They already have all this data and do this work.

I'm totally for it. I'm just saying it's not that easy for an average citizen to actually do anything about this. It's not like I can call 1-800-GOVERNMENT and say "Hey how about preparing my tax return for me? kthnx!" and then it will happen. It would require a massive, coordinated grassroots effort to overcome the lobbying by Intuit, H&R Block, etc.

So saying "Hey just have the government do this!" is fairly useless.

That's exactly what the IRS used to do (I used it for my after-school job in high school in the 1990s):

> The IRS may be saving money as a result of its decision to shut down its free TeleFile program for filing taxes returns by phone, but the move is costing taxpayers millions of dollars, according to a report released by the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2542655/report--shutdo...

What is the legitimate argument against this, besides knee-jerk fear of government?

Fear of government is engrained in American culture. It is literally what the nation was founded on, and enshrined in the documents which established the country.

That’s not an argument against the idea though.

1. Tax payers will pay more because the government will optimize for revenue when making decisions/interpretations on their behalf

2. Errors are likely to go unnoticed as people will be loathe to “check the governments work”

Also not really an argument, but a consideration is that by keeping taxes “painful”, they are more unpopular than they would be, making higher tax policies less palatable to the public.

Both of those points are FUD in my opinion.

The government is already equally as able to optimize for revenue today as you claim they would be in a situation where the IRS mails you your 1040 with your income pre-printed.

Ultimately most people’s income taxes are withheld from their paycheck, and you get a refund at the end.

Do you know how much you pay in taxes now? Do you think other people know how much they pay?

How would your knowledge of how much you pay change under a proposed system where the IRS mails you a pre-filled 1040?

You say there’s work to be checked — it’s literally “did they get my w2 right?” and “do I want to take the standard deduction?”

If you don’t want to take the standard deduction, the process reverts to what it is today - you fill out your own tax forms and send them in. Nothing changes for that situation.

Your second point assumes gross incompetence or straight malice, which is unfair.

Edited for clarity

They did support this. It looks like they're getting rid of it.

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/before-starting-free-fi...

Or, you know, have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population

And what about the other 20%, which could be upwards of 75 million people?

It's so very SV/HN to reduce every problem to a numbers game, and anyone who doesn't fit into the larger figure is marginalized as an "edge case" to be ignored and discounted.

Presumably the remaining 20% would still use an accountant or tax software, so they'd be no worse off than they are today.

... are you suggesting that the millionaires and billionaires who wouldn’t be covered by a self-filing online federal taxes would then be “marginalized, discounted, and ignored?”

This is not a tragedy of the commons situation.

The political jargon term you’re looking for is “logic of collective action.”

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

This is why I wrote free, open-source budgeting software. All of the source is available on Github, and it is available on all OS-es.

https://github.com/reZach/my-budget

I'm tired of people being sneaky and selling all of our information and making billions off of us. Of course, we let them, but only because it's very confusing reading (and understanding) all the legal jargon.

(FYI - I'm actively developing this software, so if you have comments or wants, let me know and I can see if I can make it happen for you. Thanks friends of HackerNews).

Mining user data on Mint seems relatively understandable as Mint is free service. However, why bother do the same on TurboTax? TurboTax sells $60-$150 per copy per year, it has 31 million users in 2016, that's about $3B annual revenue. Isn't that profitable enough?

You know what’s better than $3B? More than $3B.

I don’t like my information being brokered for someone else’s profit, but the incentives are pretty clear.

People always want more man

People always want more

Automated stock trading platforms operated by massive Wall Street investment banks always want more.

"Profitable enough" isn't really a thing. The owners/share holders will always happily accept a bigger dividend payment landing in their bank accounts and then reward senior management for it. Everyone within the company will also happily accept the budget increases and job security that are more likely to happen when profits are growing.

So when someone comes into a meeting and says "here is a way we can bring in extra money" no one is likely to say "no thanks, we make enough money."

No, under greed it is never enough. The greed of the rich and powerful is never sated.

Is there anything like a self-hosted alternative to Mint? The automated balance and expense tracking is really nice but it's obviously a security and privacy nightmare.

As the author of a free open-source budgeting software, you yourself own all your data, nothing goes off your computer. Of course it's not as fully-fleshed out as Mint yet, but it's getting better every commit:

https://github.com/reZach/my-budget

The GP expressly mentioned the only selling point of Mint: "automated balance and expense tracking," Mint imports data automatically without any user action. Unless your software does this, your audience will be extremely limited.

Budgeting software has been ubiquitous since the dawn of personal computing, that's a solved problem.

There's support for this, but it's limited at the moment. Getting OFX supported is a priority of mine (in the meantime, it uses screen scraping to pull transaction data).

Having looked into this before, the big issue is actually the web scraping. If you don't mind pulling the data manually there's software like GNUCash that can do not only what Mint does but even more. Maintaining the web scraping rules for numerous banks is a full time job (probably multiple) in itself though.

I'm using GNUCash. I used to manually go through receipts and check against bank transaction history. That wasn't exactly sustainable so I wrote a python script to take the CSV that most banks will export and spit it back out in a nice and consistent format for importing into GNUCash. I could potentially explore the scraping capabilities of GNUCash, but with my current method it reminds me to pay down my current credit card balance while doing the exports.

I love Mint but wow do they have more data on me than Google and Amazon combined.

I used to think that selling me credit cards is fine but now I'm sure my analytics are sold every which way.

I used TurboTax for Windows for the first time this year to do my taxes. Since I don’t trust them as a company, I set firewall rules to block all internet access to the program and all its other helper programs. It refused to run until I connected to the internet update it. So I let it connect and update and then blocked it again before starting to enter my data. I got everything entered and then tried to output the tax return for printing but it wouldn’t let me finalize everything until I connected it back to the internet to do another update. Why even bother buying locally-run software if it requires an active connection to the internet? Very frustrating experience all around.

(Also it’s super crappy software besides, I would not recommend it even if you get it for free. And even after you buy it, they upcharge you at the last second so be ready to pay more than expected. It’s the Comcast of tax software.)

If you don't trust TurboTax as a company why did you use their software? It's not like they are the only tax prep software in existence.

I wonder if Mint is GDPR compliant? I am an EU citizen with an American bank account that’s linked to Mint

A quick look at their privacy docs tells me there’s no chance they’re GDPR compliant. They use the phrase “comply with all applicable regulations” liberally (instead of saying they “comply with GDPR”) which I suspect means they’ve taken the position that for one reason or another GDPR is not an applicable regulation. I suspect any plans to become GDPR compliant will be implemented as slowly as they can manage to get away with.

I hope mass users/customers of such applications start caring about things like GDPR compliance

GDPR doesn't apply to US citizens in the US, and I think no other country has a tax-filing software lobby that successfully keeps filing taxes as difficult as possible.

Speaking from a german perspective (who has lived and taxed in the US as well), let me point out to you that US tax forms are a piece of cake to fill compared to the djungle we have here.

Agreed.

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