TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free | Hacker News Reader

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

propublica.org

1,519 pointsdanso447 comments

I am the developer in charge of CalFile, the free filing software that everyone asks for here for state of California.

https://www.ftb.ca.gov/file/ways-to-file/online/calfile/inde...

I am pushing so hard to make it better and more useful to more people, like being able to add capital gain that is not currently supported.

these are the push backs that I am getting:

1. Last time they tried to do what all of you ask, a ready return. TurboTax and others hired bunch of lobbyist and put so much pressure on people here and killed the project. People are still afraid and don't want to do too much to grab the attention of their lobbyist!

2. Use of CalFile goes down every year and if trend continues, it would be killed in the near future.

when you have your Federal return it is much easier to pay a little more and file your state tax with it too. No body even knows CalFile exist because we don't have a marketing budget to promote it.

3. Even people here buy the argument that free software exist and people could file their taxes for free.

I thought calfile was the go-to place for cal state taxes? I use it every year and I think it's a fairly nice tool

Dude I salute you. There are so many edge cases to support.

For number 2 can you import fed return with calfile?

IRS free returns going down too so you are not alone: https://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/Free_File_Program_Is_Failin...

This is a large reason why Prorepublica keeps digging at this - it’s fucking crazy actual free filing is going down while these paid shenanigan products are holding strong with their ginormous marketing budgets.

Is it really as simple as that? Budget trumps all?

With all due respect to the OP, most state run software operations are complete, utter, garbage. I'd happily pay money to avoid some of the clunky, poor UI/UX, and downright broken web tools that the state of California produces.

TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.

I am tired of for-profit companies hamstringing government using bribes to representatives and funding lobbyists from delivering inexpensive or free services to citizens. If someone wants to pay TurboTax, that is fine. If someone wants to continue to support their efforts to stymie government from delivering said services for free, they should be tarred and feathered.

Intuit's tax products are regulatory capture, plain and simple, and deserve no defending.

Hm that's been a big issue for maybe 200 years. Should the government start its own companies? What happened to the free market? How does a 'free' government company respond to competition (since they have no pressure to be profitable)?

It seems to be working fine in every other country mentioned in this thread where government is free to provide free tax filing services. We do not need bullshit jobs at rent seeking companies that are glorified PDF generators. This is a government feature, not a product.

So maybe this one should be allowed.

Other government competition with private enterprise is not so clear. Paving roads? Providing medicine? Delivering packages? Its been a rocky road.

I'm going to say probably not. I've been pretty disappointed by the attempts of private industry to deliver what should be government infra (tax prep, healthcare, prisons, etc), while I'm super happy with my roads, police, fire, water, sewer, muni fiber, and the USPS (all government provided or backed).

I have 'volunteer' fire service out here in the country. And installed my own sewer. Police are essentially non-existent out here - I see a patrol car maybe once a year go by.

And the USPS has been going broke for decades now. Not a good example of a well-run service.

USPS requires Congressional approval to set rates (as well as pension funding requirements). Your complaint is with your representatives, not USPS itself.

It reminds me of the demonization of the IRS, they just carry out Congress' laws and funding. It's disingenuous when Congresspeople complain as they reduce their funding.

Plays well to the uneducated unfortunately.

Plays well to everyone because most people hate representatives but like their representative.

My complaint is with 'government-run businesses', which will always have such issues. It stems from not being responsible for efficiency or profitability.

This is a strawman argument. Being "government run" does not automatically equate to being irresponsible or inefficient. Your complaint holds no water: Social Security and Medicare are incredibly efficient programs for their scale, and both wildly popular with their participants (per Pew Research as well as direct survey data from SSA and HHS). If they can achieve such results, why would other large orgs such as the IRS not? Rhetorical of course! They can, with proper political and logistical support (as has been seen with USDS/18F executing at the IRS, DHS, and VA).

I don’t know about social security but the claim that Medicare is more efficient than private insurers is not correct. It only appears to be so due to accounting procedures that do not expense services from other govt agencies on Medicare’s pnl. So for example, a different department of the government handles billing, all the costs therein are not included in Medicare’s bottom line, thus inflating its efficiency.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep... (Comparing administrative costs for private insurance and Medicare)

Medicare is still more efficient than private insurance, even allowing for Social Security handling a lot of the administration you mention. Social Security must exist, and must provide the services it does, so you would of course rely on their infra if you're Medicare.

So the government is incredibly inefficient at everything... except health insurance?

Those weren't my words at all.

But USPS is focused on efficiency and profitability. They have streamlined many of their operations and created new profit making initiatives (e.g. Informed Delivery), all while having the mandate that mail cost the same from Alaska to Florida as from New York to DC. They just have the aforementioned budget burden to fund retirement funds no other organization, public or private, would ever bear upon themselves voluntarily. And they can’t set their own rates. And they have to deliver to every address once a day six days a week no matter what.

I mean, honestly, yeah? I'd rather not my roads focus on being profitable. I'd really prefer the opposite of my police force focusing on being profitable. I'd really start freaking out if my voting system(the actual counting of votes) focused on turning a profit, and probably take to streets if my public schools were trying to profit off my children.

Efficiency, sure, what's inefficient about the USPS? I sent a package over my lunch break today, and my package delivery is 10x better delivered by a USPS mailperson than someone hired by amazon. (A USPS mailperson leaves a package at my door, but I've had packages from amazon thrown into my bushes, or dropped beside the street)

Yeah but a website/accounting function? It should be accurate, efficient and legal. Which our tax office is sometimes seen as not-those-things.

And this whole thread is how TurboTax lobbied to make it inaccurate, inefficient, and no doubt have tried to make it illegal.

Why is profitability important for a government-run entity?

Because we pay for it. So it should be run without egregious cost overruns, huge administration costs and old technology.

That sounds like breaking even, not profiting?

it is telling that the only way you seem to judge entities is through the lens of efficiency and profitability on a short term basis.

could you please share your thoughts about internet access in the US of A? it seems that despite the best efforts of Saint Market, long may he reign, and all of this wonderful competition and efficient allocation of resources and so forth optimizing for short term outcomes has led to mediocre speeds and monopoly-ish behavior/choice in most areas.

or that Saint Market has led to pretty poor health outcomes in the USA despite spending massively amount more per capita than other nations

or that Saint Market's desire for profitability and efficiency leads them to, say, not replace lead pipes which ruin health of various communities (probably far away from yours, so it's OK .... for now)

it's almost like evaluating things based on extremely myopic criteria that people use to judge for-profit companies leads to outcomes that optimize for local maxima but are horrible when viewed from even slightly more far out, like, i dunno, a few years.

can you acknowledge that some things are best evaluated on performance outside of "profitability" and "efficiency" in the time span of 3 months?

Ok, how about cost overruns, administrative costs, technology upgrades and on and on? Its only as regards these things, that I regard profitability to be an important pressure.

Management responsible to the bottom line will sometimes improve those things. Management responsible to … I don't know what a government agency is responsible to? rarely upgrades, review, improves. It is axiomatic of government agencies that they exist for their own sake. And cost a bucketload of (our) money.

All of this /could/ be provided by the private market or by volunteers, but the things you're describing have a huge operational expense--especially in more rural areas. Something like tax software has more of a capital expense paid upfront. It doesn't cost significantly more if its widely used or used in more rural areas.

With taxes you're interfacing directly with the government; that's either as a citizen or Turbo Tax as a proxy for the citizen. To me, that seems more appropriate for the government to handle than fire, police, or sewer service. Whether it's the citizen or Turbo Tax, it costs money to implement Congress' tax code and build out a "UI" (tax forms). It still costs money to audit. So you're outsourcing one portion of the interface, you still have to build/maintain an e-file protocol, and you're doubling up on the auditing.

History bears this out as a band-aid. The program started in 2001 under GW because other countries already had online tax filing and engaging the private sector was seen as a way to "catch up" quickly. 20 years later it's still miserable for the average citizen and there are countless examples of other countries showing how much easier it can be.

USPS has also lost a massive amount of money due to being required to accept shipments from China at extremely low rates.

This is misleading. The USPS has an operating budget of about $70 Billion dollars per year, and loses about $150 million per year as a result of lopsided "terminal dues" under the UPU. So about .2%, and not all of this is due to China. While there is legitimate fear that this loss will continue to increase, relative to their budget it is not "a massive amount of money". This link has more complete numbers: https://www.lawfareblog.com/withdrawal-universal-postal-unio....

The only reason USPS has financial trouble is Congress mandated huge advance on payments for benefits many years into the future.

It runs excellently otherwise.

Congress did that. It's political. It can be undone.

Free market people want the USPS gone. Trouble is the Post Office is in the Constitution, must exist barring some Amendment, and must be run by the Federal Government.

None of those are bad things. The Post Office has been exemplary.

The trouble began during the Bush administration. Two things were done:

1. Rate changes that turn big bulk mailings for companies into a subsidy. Deep discounted rates. That was coupled with significant increases for ordinary people and smaller publishers. None of that made much sense.

2. Forced advanced payments on benefits. At the time it was done, there were people not even born yet, who would end up working for the Post, whose benefits were being paid now, basically.

It's crazy.

USPS is a really well run service. They need to provide universal service, even to country folk at a loss, handle foreign parcels, etc. Most of their woes are created by a republican congress setting out a path for privatization. (Weather is next)

In terms of the self-reliant rural communities, you’re not factoring the very significant cost that the entire population pays to support your rural lifestyle. As agriculture continues to decline and consolidate, those externalities costs will continue to grow.

but if private enterprise is more efficient than govt, what do they have to fear?

A breakdown of a belief system.

It's not a right to be free from competition from the government. The reason we allow corporations is so they can serve the public good, but if the public good would be better served by the government providing that service then there's no reason society shouldn't do that.

> How does a 'free' government company respond to competition (since they have no pressure to be profitable)?

The leadership of government organizations has pressure to get re-elected, or to get someone from their party elected.

I'm not sure whether you are simply ignorant how representative democracy is supposed to work, or whether you're feigning ignorance. Is it really so unfathomable that people might be motivated by something other than financial gain? Are we expected to take anything else you say seriously if this is the starting point of your ideology?

Is the vote of the election ever: "Can you make this one website that is messy better?". People are more focused on big issues and annoying software won't often make the platform.

The vote of the election isn't "Can you make this one website that is messy better?" because the politicians are incentivized to never let it get that bad.

One only has to take a look at the Obama administration's apparent panic over healthcare.gov to see this at work. When it wasn't going well, it very much was a political issue at the forefront of political conversation.

I worked for a self-sustaining government entity for a few years. There was no direct appropriation, all funds re recovered via fees. We were able to compete successfully with commercial entities in a variety of ways.

A big advantage is overhead. If the work scales out, government employees get paid less, especially executives. The disadvantage was that you couldn’t make money to re-invest, and capitalizing new services was difficult.

.gov orgs get a lot of grief, but if you compare them to an average large company, they aren’t as awful as most people think.

I've worked in a private sector (publicly traded) fortune 500 company, a large government contractor, a non-profit state government subsidiary that was quasi-independent, and now for a state government.

My experience is that in the public sector, things often move slower, but the range of productivity seems to have a significant overlap with an average large company. I think the cost of nobody believing in what they are doing is an underappreciated drag on many private sector workplaces. The fact that failure is not an option in the public sector has several oft repeated negative consequences, but it also means that you have a reason for coming to work and making an effort, (other than not starving) even if nobody appreciates it, management is terrible, working conditions are lousy, pay is poor, co-workers are idiots, etc. That counts for something towards effectiveness, if there is a core group that hasn't descended into nihilism.

Government is forcing people to pay their taxes, so Government needs to provide a free and easy way for people to pay their taxes.

Why are you solely blaming the companies? Are the government officials doing their jobs? If the government officials are being corrupt by accepting lobbying money and helping the corporations; they are as much (if not more) to blame for the situation as "for-profit companies". At least, for-profit companies exist to make a profit. The government, on the other hand, exists to defend the citizens.

I did not include representatives accepting donations and lobbying money as villains in my comment. My apologies, thank you for pointing this out.

> The government, on the other hand, exists to defend the citizens.

Never a truer word spoken.

I personally think the Calfile UI is better than TurboTax for what it does. CalFile's UI isn't shiny and Web 3.0, but it is nice and linear and easy to understand. IMO TurboTax can get a bit weird if you skip around sections or need to manually look at the generated forms. CalFile doesn't have all the features that TurboTax does, like being able to say "I donated a microwave to charity, figure out my deduction". However I've found that the two actually work pretty well in conjunction with each other— do Federal taxes in Turbotax to figure out my deductions and get my W2 #s collected, then copy all that info into CalFile.

"but it is nice and linear and easy to understand"

I never wanted "linear". My ideal tax software just has the forms to fill out on screen, but applies all the constraints and rules so that the return is either consistent or you have a comprehensive list of discrepancies. And cascades any fields that can be derived from others. Really, just like a compiler for taxes.

Edit: TurboTax used to work like this...

"Intuit succeeded so I'm happy."

> TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.

For this tax year I used TurboTax. I have a relatively simple return, but editing stock sales was extremely tedious and I was constantly upsold on random products when I just wanted to go to the e-file page.

TurboTax is getting worse and worse every year.

One example where it worked well before and became a complicated mess now: for some deductions you need answer a lot of questions just for it to tell you that you are not eligible because of your income. Why not to check this in the very beginning?

If they told you sooner that you weren't elligible, your return would be lower, and maybe you'd feel you could "get more back" by using a different tax preparation program, but at the juncture where you're told it isn't possible, you already feel more invested in using Turbotax and ultimately filing with it.

I file my taxes in Australia using a government-run web application. It's not perfect (like all big government systems it has outages, etc etc) but I can't really complain about it, it's more than adequate to get the job done and I certainly wouldn't want to pay for something that's only marginally better. There's a few UX tweaks which would be nice but it's fine, really.

Can you expand on why people are "afraid" of lobbyists? The way you write that makes it sound like the elected officials the lobbyists are trying to convince, are afraid of those same lobbyists. What I assume you meant is that ground troops like you are afraid lobbyists will notice your work and pay more attention to your given team of elected politicians.

Can you help me understand?

My intuition is that the elected officials are wary of choosing positions blatantly opposite of the interests the lobbyists are pushing for since the lobbyists could easily support a different candidate and put a lot of money into supporting them. So if you don't behave in the way the powerful lobbyists want, they'll get you kicked out of office.

It is exactly this.

You look at donations to people from corporations or through lobbyists and they don't look that large, $15-20k and they are getting big bills passed.

That $15-20k isn't buying the politician or their vote. The threat to give millions of dollars to the opposing politician that will support them is.

There are limits on how much you can donate to a candidate's campaign; however, you can contribute unlimited funds to a PAC, but the PAC's advertisement efforts must be separate from the candidates; they can't be coordinated.

Which is perfect for a company like TurboTax who wants to lobby for an issue... they don't care about the candidate, they don't have to coordinate with them at all... they just tell the representative, "if you don't vote my way, we will fund a PAC that will attack you". No candidate coordination, no problem.

Conversely, people opposed to TurboTax could get their own lobbyist and do the same thing.

As I said in another comment, no one cares about free taxes as much as TurboTax cares about not having free taxes. It is a minor annoyance to every citizen, but it is life or death for TurboTax.

The people who are hurt by not having free taxes certainly can't afford lobbyists, and even if they could... they would have to spend so much more than they pay in tax preparation fees for their whole life to compete with TurboTax money. Who would do that?

Collectively, people spend billions annually on TurboTax. They could, instead, all chip in $25 for their own lobbyist, if they cared enough to not spend $100 on TurboTax.

If they can afford TurboTax, they can afford the lobbyist.

Couple of problems with that... one, not everyone would chip in. Why would they? If there is a fund paying lobbyists, my $25 is not going to make a huge difference.... they aren't going to win or lose based on my contribution, so why contribute? Your money wont change the outcome, and you will get the benefit even if you don't participate... standard Free Rider problem.

You might say that you should donate out to the fund out of moral principle of a just cause, but there are a million just causes, a million small rent seeking industries that do this sort of thing. Which of them do I donate to fight against? Why income tax and not one of the others?

TurboTax is going to be willing to spend a LOT of money to fight this... you are going to have to get a LOT of people to choose your moral cause, and donate to the PAC.... and then find even more when TurboTax spends even more on lobbying to counteract your PAC. Who is going to give up first?

Lobbyists often threaten to fund whoever will campaign against the elected official at the next election. They say "we will allocate $1M to a PAC benefiting your opponent if you advocate for free tax filing".

It never ceases to astound me how this is allowed and accepted in the U.S. America is the first to complain about corruption in other countries around the world... yet here we are.

Corruption is legalized here. Changing these laws is hard!

We privatized corruption and turned it into a business model

A lot of people are saying that the fear comes from lobbyists and the interest groups they represent giving money to opponents. That is partially true, but money is just part of the overall influence that the interest groups lobbyists represent wield.

In the case of ReadyReturn, one of the key players is Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist. (see https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t... for some of the older history here) He has this incredible network of anti-tax groups, media figures, and others that can be activated to attack and take down politicians, particularly republicans, without spending a dime (altough they also have money to spend).

It might seem wrong, but it is fundamentally the same mechanism by which liberal action networks (like human rights campaign or NARAL) drive their political influence as well.

It is these networks of influence that politicians really fear, because they are so much more effective then money.

so let me elaborate a bit, all the people that work on this agencies are employees, they are not politicians.

If a politician influenced by a lobbyist start to question the decision of an agency, have hearings, grill the management on the reasons they decided to waste tax payers money, etc. that is not fun for those employees.

There is no incentive for that trouble and people try to avoid it as much as possible.

Is CalFile an open source project that anyone can contribute to (and if so where do I go?) or is the FTB paying you to develop it as a closed-source product?

Seconded. I wouldn't mind contributing to it. Maybe if even the rules engine was released.

Hey, your work is super interesting and I'm wondering if you have blog posts or papers somewhere that talk about the work involved in writing an application with complicated legal scenarios like this. I assume lawyers and tax professionals are involved with requirements and approving workflows, but I'd love to read about specifics.

Hats off to you, sir. Please don't stop the work you do. Thank you!

After college I quickly weaned myself off TurboTax in favor of filing taxes for free with CalFile & Free Fillable Forms with an occasional paper mailing of PDFs that I download and fill out. Much like my opposition to using proprietary word processors, my disdain of paid tax return services that own your data is deep and profound.

While a bit painful and limited in feature set, the mere existence of a free filing option is crucial to keeping Intuit from forcing me to pay to file my returns. I find Intuit to be a rather evil company. Filing a return is mandated by law with steep penalties. They intentionally keep the process complicated and convoluted. It's a plundering of everyone's time for unproductive work and overspending on something that should be quick and easy.

> I find Intuit to be a rather evil company.

Heads up then because Intuit is behind Free Fillable Forms.

In fact, when confirming phone numbers the calling number is from Intuit.

That is not unexpected because they are part of the consortium running Free Fillable Forms.

It's just one of those things where the USA lags behind the rest of the world, not being able to file directly with the tax authority.

> Heads up then because Intuit is behind Free Fillable Forms.

Thank you for pointing this out, but yes I am aware. It is the only method to electronically file federal taxes for free. If FFF gets dropped due to Intuit's posturing then I will have to resort to paper filing.

Is there anything like this for of the other big states like NY, Texas, and Florida?

One for NY should be pretty easy, just a splash page showing the user how to send the state everything in their bank account.

You're doing great work! I'd love to try it next year. If I do, what do you recommend for filing my federal?

Virginia used to have free online filing until the tax prep industry got one of their people elected and killed it off. Now our state efile options are more expensive than federal efile options.

Thanks for the info, will definitely use it next year !

Given that open-source has given tough competition to every area of business software what, in your opinion, is the reason for a lack of open-source options to prepare taxes?

It's very costly to keep up with changing rules and is mostly a once a year need that has to be bullet proof at filing time. Not a good recipe for open source.

I thought I heard Brazil had open source tax software. It would need to be sponsored and managed by the government in order to work. With open source software the liability is on the end user and a corrupted Word document is a bearable risk. Businesses pay for Red Had and system engineers to reduce the risk their systems won't boot. In addition, tax laws change all the time (and are honestly a bit subjective).

I would imagine it would have to be managed by the government (or someone with liability) but accept contributions that would be vetted and approved by the government.

It is not open-source. It is free and runs on the major 3 operating systems.

I don’t think your assertion is true. 99% of business software is helped by open source, not in competition with it. Business software = business logic = people gathering requirements. Not really compatible with open source

> Given that open-source has given tough competition to every area of business software

Huh?

Open source word processors and spreadsheets? Open source ride hailing apps? Open source social media? Open source chat applications? Open source consumer operating systems?

Only in a few niches (mostly developer tools or platforms) is open source giving "tough competition".

This year it took me over a week of full-time study to file my federal taxes! Correspondingly, my Calfile submission was done in perhaps 20 minutes. Thank you for your service. Reminds me of filing in New Zealand, a breeze.

Question, the site and now you mention it does not support Capital gain/loss. I used it anyway, it asked for Adjusted Income from federal return, which takes those into account? So it appears to support it after all. Still confused about that.

(I refuse to share my financial info with a malicious third party, and continue to.)

One nitpick on the Calfile UI, it puts the "Continue" buttons on the left instead of the right side, which seems odd for folks that read left to right.

You sir, are Awesome! Keep up the good fight!

Now that I know about this, I'm definately going to use it. Can I use it for federal too? or do I need to use something else for federal, then I can use CalFile for state.

> Can I use it for federal too?

You may want to read the ProPublica article.

> 1. Last time they tried to do what all of you ask, a ready return. TurboTax and others hired bunch of lobbyist and put so much pressure on people here and killed the project. People are still afraid and don't want to do too much to grab the attention of their lobbyist!

This is insane. Where are the actual citizens at the negotiating table?

Pushed out by money.

There are efforts to fund politics on small donations. I'm on board.

Consider looking into them.

Honestly, the citizens will have no place at the policy table, until they take some seats on their own dime.

So, that's happening. Ideally, other changes can be made, but to even get at those, some power is required.

Here's a great podcast that goes over what happened. There is a transcript too.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

This is always the problem with these sorts of things... TurboTax cares a LOT more about this issue than an individual citizen... sure, it costs each citizen $50-100 every year to file their taxes, and they would love to have a free public option... but it is literally THE ENTIRE BUSINESS for TurboTax. They are going to fight so much harder than the people who pay the $100 a year. Concentrated gains and widely distributed costs create this imbalance.

I had no idea CalFile existed, and I've been filing taxes in California since 1997. Thanks for weighing in!

The Pro Publica reporting about TurboTax's efforts to suppress the free option is eye-opening.

Posted it on Twitter. I encourage others to do so too. #freepromotion

Who is/are Turbotax's lobbyist/s? Who do they put most pressure on? It's hard to take action without knowing who the players are.

I tell everyone I know about CalFile. It is awesome. You are awesome for working on it.

Thanks for your work! I've used it and it is simple and just works. No fake loading bars to boot.

You literally have office politics. I salute you.

The linked site is not mobile friendly BTW as text is cut off (OnePlus 5 Chrome).

You are amazing for building and running this program. People like you are what give me hope that we can build a better government! Thanks for all you do!

Just for comparison: in Brazil the _Receita Federal_ (IRS equivalent) provides a free multi-platform* Java desktop app for filing your taxes.

The UI isn't great* and if you do complex stock trading it can be a pain to add the necessary information, but for the vast majority of people it works just fine.

It also shows if it is better to use the standard deduction or the itemized deductions for your particular case and also calculates your effective tax rate.

In fact, the Java App has for years been the only way to file personal income federal* tax. The paper forms were abolished because (almost) no one used them and they had a large rate of mistakes.

* The Java desktop app runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. (And possibly others) * There is a separate mobile app but I haven't actually used it. * In macOS there was bug in last year's version: it used ctrl instead of command for things like copy and paste. * There is no state income tax in Brazil.

Fun fact: the official tax filing application in Germany which has been around for a few decades is called "ELSTER" (apronym for Elektronische Steuererklärung, "Electronic Tax Return") which literally translates to "MAGPIE", as in "thieving magpie" ("Diebische Elster"). This is a form of self-irony which is quite unusual for the German tax offices.

OS portability has greatly improved with their online app [0], which is actually very good and easy to use. Before, the only stable way to run their Desktop application on Linux was through wine.

[0] https://www.elster.de/eportal/login

Here in Brazil the mascot of the Income Tax is a Lion, it's of an old ad campaign the government ran, comparing taxes with lions and saying "the lion is tame".

It's because of an old popular joke in that the government is a lion that will always take a lion-sized bite from your income.

It's really an old joke. On any reference I have ever found, no matter how old, the joke is already old and the readership is expected to know it.

Oh of _course_, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion's_share

Which is obviously intentionally ironic considering that

> The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which refers to the major share of something.

I wonder what other countries tuck these kinds of harmlessly blatant humor in similarly unexpected places. It's nice.

ELSTER is one of the few examples that come into my mind in terms of "software done right": It's stable and "just works", at least for me.

It's first version was released to the public in 1999, so... Yes, ELSTER is around for almost 20 years now, getting constantly refined at least in the front-end.

All in all, it's something you wouldn't have expected here in Germany in terms of software projects from the government.

AFAIK, it is mostly developed in-house, at least the original version was developed by the Bavarian tax office. In my experience, if government software (for schools, tax offices, political participation, etc.) is developed by an external company, the primary objective of the company often quickly transforms from "creating usable software for all citizens" to "drain the most amount of money out of the infinite resources of the federal government".

It still is developed there but they have external consultants helping them.

I have to say that the UK's HMRC web-based self-assessment site has always struck me as being a really good example of tax returns done right.

It presents as the equivalent of the paper form but with many of the fields autocalculating for you, and offering contextual help. Quite nifty.

Yeah its pretty good when you consider the complexity it has to cover.

> This is a form of self-irony which is quite unusual for the German tax offices.

Love it.

The danish tax authority is called skat. It has a double meaning of taxes and loved one, it's as if the German one was called Schatz/Schätzle, I think it's cute.

In English, the word "skat" is used to refer to animal droppings.

technically it is spelled "scat"

Isn't skat more like treasure that's also used for people? At least that's how it is in Norwegian. No idea why taxes use the same word, it sure so in Norwegian too.

In Holland we have the word schat which also means treasure (and loved one).

As an extension of schat we also have schatkist, which means treasure chest, which is also used as the translation for treasury.

When I look up the meaning of schat the dictionary says: A large collection of valuables. I see how an organization gets named after the very thing they are supposed to handle.

skat/skatt is common to danish/norwegian/swedish, and in all countries it means both taxes and treasure. In danish/norwegian it also means loved one, but swedes would miss that point.

The danes have chosen to name their tax authority not "skat authority" or something like that, just "skat" which evokes the friendly/funny pun.

Having moved from Sweden to Germany I appreciate Elster existing (and not being solely paper based unlike the other many many German beaurocratic exercises one has to Wade through).

However it misses the most important part. In Sweden your tax declaration comes pre-populated with data they already have, like salary/pension/savings/stock sales/etc., and you can either just accept it as it is or make changes to the already existing data.

It's so easy that you in fact just can send an SMS (that is verified to be from you) to the taxation agency saying that their suggestion is right.

In Germany, it's actually similar. You can opt in to include the data submitted for you by various sources and include them in your tax declaration. The only drawback is you need to select each one (salary, basic info, church tax info) to import it into your declaration, and that you need to wait until end of February since that's the deadline for third parties to submit your data.

Also, some things, like capital gains, you don't even need to declare if you used only German brokers, since they are legally required to submit it for you.

It's called "Vorausgefüllte Steuererklärung" (see https://www.elster.de/eportal/infoseite/belegabruf_%28privat...).

It takes many clicks and requires to wait for a letter once but Elster offers that too (under the term "Belegabruf"). It then prepopulates the tax return with the data they have.

Banks send you letter the weeks before with capital gains, interest payments and employers send you letters with totals of taxes paid. They note if anything needs to be done manually.

The total time spend combined for me filing taxes for the last 10 years is less than 15 minutes. And the reason it isn't less than 3 is because I've logged in (using biometrics and password on my phone that is a hardware token to my bank wich is used for instant secure identification) to check that everything looks OK and to add the commuting at least 10 km/day on bike deduction.

In Brazil we have that option, but one must have a cryptographic token accepted by the government to access it. People usually don't have them, while companies are required to have one.

Brazil is going that way too. Currently only public servants and people with an expensive X.509 certificate get this pre-populated tax return, though.

Similar case in Spain.

In Sweden, the government does the work for most normal cases. They send you a suggestion of “this is all we know about” and you just say “yeah, seems right” via SMS.

In Ireland you don’t do anything in the usual case, unless you think it’s wrong, everything is taxed at source by the employers/banks.

Both cases different if you’re a company ofc.

It seems a bit naive of the government to reveal to you your income sources they know about. If you have any hidden ones you can confidently not report them and pay less taxes than you would otherwise.

Not really. Everyone is aware of what is automatically reported to the tax authorities.

I assume this would still be a crime, and you'd be held responsible for lying on the past forms in discovered. The only difference is, this is optimized for making the common case easier - the case of typical income of regular, honest individuals.

It's the same in Denmark and it feels right to me. It's not like they are doing detective work (per default). If you have a concealed source of income, I'd expect them not to know about it. Of course, you'd still be breaking the law by not reporting it and it could turn up if they notice something that doesn't add up somewhere.

Until you're selected for a random audit and quickly get charged with tax fraud.

They only know what they sent you. So an audit wouldn't turn up new information just force you to prove existing information.

Do note that it the responsibility of the employer to report who is employed, so if anything is missing, then it will generally be the company that is the one in the wrong. Especially as the company also pay employer fees for employees, so it would be a flagrant case for the tax agency anyhow.

Brazil has started offering pre filled income tax declarations.

However, they require a digital certificate to download (probably for privacy reasons) and I don't have one so I couldn't test it.

> Brazil the _Receita Federal_ (IRS equivalent) provides a free multi-platform Java desktop app for filing your taxes.

Other fun stuff about that desktop app...

* Originally, it was a DOS-only program (yes, it's that old). Then for a while, it was Windows-only, then for some time (probably due to the Linux users complaining) there was both the Windows-only version and the Java multi-platform version, and later the Windows-only version was discontinued.

* The original way of sending the output of this program to Receita Federal was to write it to a floppy disk and take it to a bank, which would read and upload it. Later functionality was added to send it through the Internet instead, and some time later the floppy disk option was removed.

> probably due to the Linux users complaining

For a while a lot of non-aligned countries were mandating the exclusive use of open-source software by government agencies, because the idea of their government being beholden to a US corporation was anathema. I suspect this was the motivation behind eliminating the Microsoft-only government service.

I haven't heard much about that open-source requirement lately. I suspect the Long Reach has been making quiet moves behind the scenes, and the ascendancy of neofascist regimes in many of those countries will do what fascist regimes always do (ie. cater to the cartel making up the fasces).

> The original way of sending the output of this program to Receita Federal was to write it to a floppy disk and take it to a bank

My cousin started work as a company messenger back in the early 80s and these are the sort of tasks he used to do. Its amazing that the profession has died out in in such relatively short space of time. I guess courier companies have filled in the slot but courier companies would never have coped with the number of documents that needed to be ferried about town in the old days.

Short recap from somewhere else:

In the Netherlands we had (for a very short while at least as far as I remember) a DOS program as well on diskette. I never used it but my dad did when internet explorer was not yet evil and msn was a network. You could send it in via modem (9k6 baud yay!) and it would work ... sometimes or hand it in via the diskette. Once the internet got going you could send it more easily as you could send the created files directly instead of relying on the modem dial-in via dos.

For myself I never filed on paper (2002 first one). After the introduction of windows programs they ported it to linux the next year (filed the first one on windows only on a library pc, program might have existed earlier) and have now switched to web based. If you had a company which did their taxes on time everything was (and is) filled out mostly correct. You check it and sign off. As a student it took a while to fill in all the deductibles but if you just have to pay you are done in minutes.

Is/was it perfect? Far from. Does it work for most people? Yes.

The old Australian online tax filing system, through to the early 2010s, was an extremely 90s-looking Delphi application, Windows only for most of that time until they released an OS X port towards the end. Linux support consisted of a note on the website saying "some users have reported success with Wine". I don't believe they ever did floppy disk output though.

It's been replaced by something far nicer and web based! Though the old application was still definitely better than doing taxes by hand or having to pay for some third-party thing.

In Australia a sort of spreadsheet-like app is published each year. It pulls in data from a variety of sources (banks and employers mostly, IIRC), fills in everything it can and then lets you do the rest.

Windows only last time I did it (7 years ago?), things may have improved further since then.

It's online via mygov these days. took a couple of steps back initially since it was missing functionality but I think it's mostly there now.

I moved to Australia last year and was shocked that it took me less than two minutes to file taxes. What a dream.

All Web based now, no thick client. It still pools in all of your data from various sources as the old e tax client did. It was only Windows too from what I recall. It's all been centralised in myGov for a few years.

In Israel employee taxes are calculated and paid by the employer.

Only self-employed, people with side-jobs or people who make over a certain threshold need to file their taxes manually (and in that case things are a bit complicated).

Healthcare, pensions and benefits are paid as part of the paycheck if you are employed (they are universal and mandatory, so not the same as in the U.S.), there are no other deductibles that a regular person can claim.

Same in Chile. If you have a regular, salaried job, your employer reports your earnings and all income taxes that have been paid, your bank reports your interest income, etc.

It takes less than 5 minutes to do your taxes unless you have unusual sources of income.

Adding a data point with Mexico:

All invoices are digital. Every person who gets a TaxId also gets a Private/Public keypair and generating invoices means signing the document with that key. The amazing thing is that now accountants talk about the XML, which is the legal representation of the invoice.

As a result, every year if you file your taxes, you go I to the government freely provided website , get into your account and most of the data is there for the exercise, including deducted money that you can get back.

If you are a standard worker earning less than certain amount (very sensible, so the vast majority of workers fall in there) you don't even have to file your taxes.

That's one thing that is good about this country.

What you have just said has thrown me into a tizz trying to understand what you have said. Could you please give a bit more practical details. Say I want to claim rent/transport/medical expenses. Will doctors, car rental place and landlords all issue me an electronic receipt?

Not from Mexico, so it might be different for them, but one way how this works in some places is that the tax office gets all the electronic receipts from all the cash register/POS systems anyway, since that's how they monitor sales/vat/excise/etc taxes paid by the merchant and reduce the risks of "under the counter" sales where fake receipts are issued but taxes not paid on the sale.

So if the doctor's office punches in my legal ID number with the receipt (or if the ID gets added automatically from the billing system that a large hospital would have), then when the office sends all their receipt files to the tax office, the tax office will automatically add that electronic receipt to my tax deduction.

Yes. Not all spending can be deducted. But for the ones you do, you have the right to ask for the "electronic invoice" and the business has to give it to you.

When that happens they ask you for your TAX ID and then the business generates the invoice and your taxid and their taxid makes the tie. The Mexican IRS systems see all of this. So at the tax reporting moment, the system will have all that info.

It is pretty neat actually. However I think it is possible bc in Mexico people are not that concerned with privacy and all that.

>also gets a Private/Public keypair

Tangential curiosity: how is this part done? Do you download the keys from a government website? How do they handle key reissues if a private key is compromised?

You can download a java app which generates the key pair taking mouse movement as entropy and then you to go to a SAT(IRS equivalent) office with the key in a USB drive, they take your biometrics and save the public key to your profile. However, as most people only bring the USB drive, they usually create the key pair in the in the office. If your key is compromised or lost, you have to go to the office and they change it in very much the same way.

It's a somewhat tedious process, but if you keep the key safe, which they very much advice, most of the procedures, including tax fillings, are pretty easy and fast.

I also want to brag about Tax-On-Web for Belgium. Development started over 15 years ago, it's been steadily improving over the years, it even works for linux users, it already fills in all tax details they already know (like wages)

I love it!

Similar in NL; it used to be a desktop app (which IIRC was even distributed via diskettes or a CD-ROM but later just a download), nowadays it's a webapp. Also prefills most information from employers (who already pay your income tax for you every month), mortgages, banks, etc.

The only complexity for me came when I bought my house (some costs are deductible) and when I had to report Bitcoin held at Coinbase (and for that I had to report the (EUR) on January 1st 2018 specifically).

Canada doesn't release its own software, but it certifies a selection of free and paid software of varying complexity.

I'd like it if we could take up other, simpler models of sorting out income tax but I use software out of this pool† every year and its served me just fine:

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/...

† usually StudioTax. I donated to them last year. It's not pretty software but it's effective and easy to use. https://www.studiotax.com/en/

"Our business model is similar to that of a street performer. You can use and enjoy our software and later decide if the experience was worth it and you can afford a donation. However, based on many users’ feedback, you should be wary of recent free offerings from big commercial organizations. To use our previous analogy, they are big circuses that send their clowns out to the street to attract unsuspecting customers to their tents and pressure them in paying for their overpriced shows."

I concur. Studio Tax is not pretty but it gets the job done for most people.

I used SimpleTax for the first time this year and it's a lot more intuitive than StudioTax which I used in the past. It may not be ideal for every situation, but it was much simpler for me.

I was under the impression - perhaps falsely - that taxes in Brazil were nightmarishly complex?

Its simple if your are an employee and complex if you are an employer. For the self employed there is a super simple filling up to a certain threshold. Companies also have additional requirements based on revenue brackets, number of employees and type of economic activities they do. Anything sligth complex eill require multiple agencies fees and byzanthine laws.

There's a lot of players involved. IMO for regular people it's simple/cheap, but for companies/employers it's complex/expensive

Federal government charges taxes on income, production, import/export and over bank operations; states charge consumption and vehicle taxes; cities charge service and property taxes. Then there's also contributions that employers pay for workers, and some that workers pay.

However, consumption tax can compound itself (because of sales between distributors, or taxes over raw materials), so there's a "substitution" formula which can get pretty weird (but companies take care of it).

In Spain it used to be a Java desktop app as well, the last incarnation of a software that started as a DOS program distributed in diskettes back in 1988. Now it's no longer a standalone program, but a website (not sure which technology, but it runs in current browsers without requiring Java installed, AFAIR).

The government makes a draft declaration for you, if it's OK you just have to digitally sign your agreement and provide a bank account to pay or receive your return (if you haven't already done that in the past). Otherwise you need to edit it adding whatever they've missed, but this is only needed if you do complex stock trading, operate with money abroad, etc. For most people it's just skimming through it in case there is an obvious error, and confirming the draft.

Once you confirm the draft, it takes only around 2-4 days for the tax return money to appear in your bank account.

The website's UI is good. Spanish e-administration webapps are a bit hit-and-miss, some are dreadful (digital certificate request, I'm looking at you), but that particular one is fine and has always worked well for me.

Same in France, it's a simple website. You receive a notification email, connect with a simple login and password, check that the pre-filled form is correct, and validate.

UK provides a web form. Pretty well done one considering the complexity. I think you can use your own software too if you like and theres some sort of submission api.

The only out-of-date thing I've noticed on the UK one is stuff like 'this PDF of your tax return is 1.5mb, on a dial up modem this might take 5 mins to download' etc. And I guess some people might still be on that kind of link so fair enough

edit: And yeah in the UK you dont have to file at all if your situation is simple (e.g. you just have one job and one source of income).

It's probably worth noting that most people in the UK don't have to file at all (if you're on a wage and not in the top tax band, it's all automatic in your paycheck), and if you have a dispute/complication you just write a simple letter to the tax office laying out your case.

As an American living in Kanton Zürich, I used both (paid) TurboTax and (free) Privat Tax (straight from the cantonal government).

Swiss one was way easier to understand by far. As a side effect of doing those taxes, it was easy to see my actual wealth and my actual net income for the year. Which in America is a sin.

I've used the mobile app on Android, it wasn't a joy (it still lacks some polishing), but it was certainly VERY straightforward.

Personally I don't have lots of stuff to file, but I did everything under 1 hour, while still discovering how to use the app and learning a bunch of taxes nomenclature.

In Ukraine there is a government webapp where you can fill all possible tax forms, and they come mostly pre-filled. The only small hurdle is getting the private/public key, it's fast, but only happens upon request or if you have a bank account at supported banks. If you were only on a payroll, you don't need to declare anything at all, it happens automatically.

There are proposals in the US to do this.

I think the best I've seen so far is Andrew Yang's plan:

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/making-taxes-fun/

Opt in to have your taxes automatically done. National celebration of projects completed. Ability to specify where 1% of your taxes go.

So not only make it easy to do, but try to make it fun and shift the mindset from burden to societal contribution.

I like propublica's reporting on this but geez, this needs an award for one of the top HN obsessions. Within the past 7 months:

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free; 211 points -- 54 minutes ago

TurboTax to charge more lower-income customers; 144 points -- 3 months ago

Congress Scraps Provision to Restrict IRS from Competing with TurboTax; 82 points -- 4 months ago

Listen to TurboTax Lie to Get Out of Refunding Overcharged Customers; 171 points -- 5 months ago

TurboTax Uses a “Military Discount” to Trick Troops into Paying to File Taxes; 170 points -- 5 months ago

TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat; 355 points -- 6 months ago

TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines; 881 points -- 6 months ago

TurboTax Uses Dark Patterns to Trick You into Paying to File Your Taxes; 608 points -- 6 months ago

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013); 462 points -- 7 months ago

edit: if you _still_ haven't gotten enough TurboTax reporting, there's a great Reply All episode that covers propublica's reporting as well https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nhgol

And yet the cost of implementing a government algorithm has not yet fallen to near-zero.

Furthermore, the government has surely implemented the algorithm itself in order to verify submitted tax returns, so the implementation cost of pre-computing everyone's tax should be comparatively small.

Maybe I’m overly cynical, but creating tax returns for everyone for free would prevent the IRS from allowing you to incriminate yourself by mis-filing (intentionally or not) and then levying huge penalties and interest on you 10 years later.

Everyone is hating on TurboTax for making money, but they’re pretending the government tax machine has no such motivation, which simply is not true.

> Maybe I’m overly cynical, but creating tax returns for everyone for free would prevent the IRS from allowing you to incriminate yourself by mis-filing (intentionally or not) and then levying huge penalties and interest on you 10 years later.

Many countries pre-fill the tax return, but require the citizen to submit it. The citizen is responsible for the submitted information, not the government.

That would expose the level of identity theft that the IRS does nothing about and actively tries to hide by refusing to provide identity theft victims with documentation.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161209003500/http://www.ayotte...

They can't levy huge penalties and interest on you 10 years later. Generally they have 3 years or maybe 6 [0].

[0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/publications...

Yeah, that's overly cynical. :) If they switched to a pre-filled system, the revenue from penalties would go down, but it's quite likely the amount they would bring in would actually go up, assuming this reduced tax fraud. In 2016, they charged $24.1 billion in penalties -- but they estimate tax fraud cost them around $458 billion. If they lost 90% of the revenue for the penalties but cut the tax fraud even by 25%, they would be way, way ahead.

The government tax machine is in the business of collecting taxes, not running up fines. I've had several interactions where the IRS was totally with in their rights to fine me but they waved each fine because they understood it was unintentional.

The only times I've heard of the IRS going after people who unintentionally violated the rules, they were intentionally and obviously violating the spirit of the law but thought they were within the letter and were wrong.

In my experience you can make a good faith effort to figure out what your supposed to owe and pay it. In this case the IRS will treat you fairly and waive all types of fines. Or you can try to aggressively avoid taxes that you should owe in spirit. And in this case you have to be damn sure you're within the letter of the law because the IRS will try to hammer you if you color outside the lines. These seem like two fair options to me. And everyone I know who was slammed by the IRS was doing the latter.

I haven't looked this up, but I'm pretty sure audits are way down. There was a recent an article saying the IRS was focusing on auditing poorer people because it's too expensive to audit rich people. Since their budget is completely separate from tax income (and their budget has consistently been reduced), it was driven by their local incentives even if that means total tax income was way lower.

So what? Fuck TurboTax trying to rent seek mine and anyone's ability to pay taxes. What's next? Feudalism?

You know, there’s a paper form you can fill out and send in for free if you’re that angry about it.

Sure, that's always an option, but due the complexity of the tax codes, it's very easy to make a mistake when doing everything yourself.

For example, I used to work in New Jersey, and live in New York, meaning I would have to file two state tax returns, in addition to the federal. There are weird rules that you can deduct one state's taxes from the other, and then deduct the remainder from the federal taxes. The rules get complex really quickly, and even with helpful software I made a mistake one year resulting in a fine. I can't imagine how frequently I'd make mistakes if I had to do it manually.

TurboTax definitely provides a service by making it so that schmucks like me can do taxes, but if the tax code is that complex, shouldn't we have a software like this for free? At the very least, to provide some motivations to politicians to help simplify the tax code?

How much was the fine? What sort of mistake was made?

Fine wasn't that big, on the order of $150.

It wasn't actually directly due to the multi-state thing. I paid for my wife's college, and NY has a thing to let you deduct tuition from dependents on taxes. I had forgotten to attach the proof of payment for tuition, leading to me getting audited (in the most technical send of the word) and fined slightly. The biggest pain in the ass was the back-and-forth I had to do to close my case, which involved me faxing things multiple times.

Horrendous. Australia doesn't fine for making a mistake. They just send you a notice to pay the difference.

> to provide some motivations to politicians to help simplify the tax code?

You speak of NJ, NY, taxes, "mistakes", fines, potential "audits" by the IRS, then wonder why politicians would want to simplify and improve something that many of them likely grift from or cheat on themselves, due to that same complexity...

...and one of the biggest of these tax cheats hails from NY, likely has had his now (on again, off again) lawyer, who used to be mayor of NYC and before that as a US AG - probably ran interference for his cheating and other scams.

But all of them - and plenty of others - benefit from the complexity and other issues, and don't want it any other way, unfortunately. No real good solutions to that.

Hey now, no pointing out that the government has an incentive to keep the system difficult and confusing because it gets them money!

That’s absolutely not acceptable in this thread (I tried)!

Tax code complexity and the mechanics of filing are orthogonal. Fixing both is not a requirement for fixing either separately, or an excuse for not doing it.

There have been a couple of years where I worked several different out-of-state contract gigs, and a couple of years where I received unemployment due to me from an out-of-state employer. I was not trying to do anything monstrously complicated, nor was I some millionaire - I just did the jobs that I was able to land to feed my family and pay our mortgage.

I went to experienced tax professionals to help me with those returns, and _they_ were baffled, spent hours pulling out phone book-sized paper guidebooks, and debating with each other, and making phone calls to colleagues, and I had to file amended returns - in one case, _twice_. Fortunately they never charged me anything to correct the errors, but... wow.

What hope would I have had to get it right myself, trying to fill out the various schedules?

And you are a special case that does truely need an accountant to fill out their paperwork. Majority of people do not.

What form? do you mean just sending letters to my reps?

I imagine the same ones available before computers were widely available. You used to be able to pick them up at the local library.

I do that because I think it's inappropriate that any third party should have access to private financial information that's no one's business but mine and the IRS's.

Still, it's an irksome chore that I would prefer not to have to do.

It's an issue that affects almost every American, why not obsess? I've seen two stories in the past day about Google Nest which affects maybe 10%? What a bizarre obsession.

That's an average of 5.28 months ago, which would've been around the beginning of May, less than a month after taxes were due to be filed. Three of the articles are from 6 months ago (mid-April), and one from 7 months ago (before filing was due). It shouldn't come as a surprise that taxes, and the cost to file them, would be fresh on peoples minds at that time.

Americans are starting to wake up to the fact they live in what is by far the richest country, but that the systems in place just make the rich richer, while nothing is done to improve the lives of the middle and lower classes.

In this particular case, the rich are actively using the system to stop an improvement to the quality of life of regular people.

What's the point in living in the richest country in the world when your quality of life is lower than many countries that don't have nearly so much money?

The fact that America has the 10th highest GDP per capita [1] and huge swaths of it are little better off than a third world nation is a complete disgrace.

1: (its 4 micro city states above it, which are economically special, and 5 nations that could reasonably be considered full sized countries, however all of them still have relatively small populations)

I would argue that there are few, if any, countries in the world that this description would not apply to.

However, I agree with the point that you're making wholeheartedly. There's a very serious amount of wealth disparity around the world, and the rich have gotten so rich that they can't even feasibly spend all of their money if they had to.

You need to spend more time in better countries.

The lives of middle and lower class people in Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, etc. are much, much, much better than Americans, and improving all the time.

Do you think so? I live in Toronto and wealth inequality is still constantly at the forefront of political discourse. Obviously Toronto isn't indicative of the rest of Canada, but I don't feel as if poor Canadians are especially better off than poor Americans.

They are much, much better off. Just having healthcare makes a huge difference alone.

This is a site for "disrupting" anti-competitive bullshit, what did you expect?

A few weeks ago I started an LLC in New York. I followed all the simple instructions online and the process was actually very straightforward and easy. I had an official digital copy of proof my LLC existed within an hour. I went to sleep with and thought that there is hope for our government.

Within a few days I received a letter from a private company informing me that unless I pay them $1000 to publish the name of my LLC in two public newspapers for six weeks, one daily newspaper and one weekly newspaper, in 120 days my LLC would need to cease doing business in NY. I pull out my phone and did a quick online search. Lo and behold, there is a law that says the same.

In this golden age, the government has chosen to require me to pay a private archaic company to print in ink thousands of times on paper the silly name of an LLC I just came up with, then proceed to distribute it by truck to a bunch of old people that then proceed to throw it in the garbage.

No fancy tax algorithms would be required for NY to simply drop this nonsensical requirement. Maybe this process exists because there are groups of people making a small fortune from it?

There’s a ton of this little silly companies delegated by government. It’s akin to lobbying in a way. They depend on inefficiencies.

Best argument I’ve heard is “gotta keep people employed somehow, can’t be too efficient”

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why can't you just call up the newspapers directly and list whatever it is that the law requires?

The newspapers will charge you to run the ad. They have no reason to print that info for free.

Of course, but surely that aren't going to charge you anywhere near $1000.

”unless I pay them $1000 to publish the name of my LLC in two public newspapers for six weeks, one daily newspaper and one weekly newspaper”

Reading that as “one daily newspaper and one weekly newspaper”, that would be 6 (weeks) times at least (6 + 1) = 42 adverts in a newspaper (I can also read it as “2 public, one daily and one weekly”. That would increase the number of adverts). Price per advert would be about $25.

I guess most LLCs get incorporated in an at least somewhat large city, so the circulation of the paper will be somewhat high. $25 per advert then doesn’t sound that bad to me.

I know zilch of advertising prices, though, so let’s google it. Reading https://fitsmallbusiness.com/newspaper-advertising-costs/ (a link that google gave me, but that I don’t know the quality of), I see the price per “column inch” go down from about €18 to about €13 when you advertise more often.

⇒ it could well be that $1,000 is a fair price, giving the higher price you would have to pay and the amount of work you would have to do if you did it alone.

(Still seems a weird law, though. I can imagine that one should give people to object if your company will be noisy, stinky, or the like, but then, the city, IMO, should require a permit)

I think the law made sense in the past so that the formation of a company would be well-known and not a secret. Now that everything is available online, less so. That the publication servicing companies know you exist, advertise directly to you because of that, and need no other information than your payment to do the publication is proof that the law is no longer useful.

I think part of it is the assumption that affected citizens (who might object to the new shop/cafe/…) are more likely to read such papers than government publications.

That likely still is true, but less so (fewer people subscribe to papers), and the assumption that people who read the paper would spot your advert probably only held back in the time when papers had reasonably small coverage (so that your advert wouldn’t appear in a large section of the paper, but stand on its own), and were about the only source of news (which made them much better read)

You can do it cheaper through a publication company, because they've already negotiated rates with the publishers. Though $1000 seems excessive. In Westchester County, I paid $300. There is a large spread in fees that will be charged.

I wrote to my state assembly person; she wrote back saying A8125 was introduced to repeal the requirement, but no action taken. I would encourage you to write to your assembly person and senator, because this is just a drag on NY businesses.

2017-2018 A8125 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2017/a8125

Unfortunately the numbers are year specific.

In VA, if you want an alcohol license for your restaurant, you are required to print an ad in a local newspaper stating that you intend to get a license. I'm guessing it's so some prohibitionist can call up the ABC and complain? It's completely ridiculous. I wondering what will happen when print newspaper ceases to exist.

I've noticed a lot of "public notice" laws. Either a physical sign on the property or something published in the newspaper. I'm not quite sure what the digital equivalent would be--a government run "announce" page that gets indexed and archived? Not really much different from press releases governments and businesses already do required by other laws.

I do see the value in publicly announcing things, but I do see newspapers as archaic.

Most modern states just post a sign over the door prior to opening that X company seeks Y license and this location.

Yeah, that works for changes at a physical location. What about founding of an LLC or other less tangible changes? Even with a physical sign it would be nice to have a searchable long term record. That seems to be what newspapers fulfilled; public broadcast and a reasonable long-term archive.

Around here the Company Court (which decides that a company formation was lawful and registers the company) has a journal/gazette, and that's the official record. Nowadays it's of course fully on-line. And lawyers (who submit the paperwork of the new company) do it exclusively on-line (they basically upload a signed ZIP of the scanned pages and an XML)!

The clerks at this court look at the scanned pages and confirm that yes they do say what the XML says, and then this gets published.

People can search for company histories, look at their bylaws, etc.

Similarly there's a different gov service for publishing corporate yearly financial reports.

Why isn't something like that for US states?

In Palo Alto we would receive notices in our mailbox whenever a local business was applying for a liquor license.

I think this is fairly common.

Don’t falter that easy. If the law is stated so clearly, then start 3 more LLC’s and offer the news posting service for $10 in your new publications that only publish new LLC’s.

Every episode of “Nathan for You” is amazing. The episode about this phenomenon is no exception. “The Diarrhea Times”...lol

Link to a preview of the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU1U2Eyep_4

Don't forget about the publication certificate fee too:

> After you get done publishing, the newspaper will provide an Affidavit of Publication, and you send that to the New York Division of Corporations with a Certificate of Publication that carries a $50 filing fee.

I live in NY but never filed an LLC, but I Google'd that. I can't believe such nonsense exists to get money in a state that already has high state / sales taxes.

In the UK, if you want to close a company you must do the same (pay ~£300 to post notice in a paper that your company is closing).

I think the idea is that anyone who the company owes money to can file a claim before any remaining funds are distributed.

Of course there are much better and more cost-effective ways of doing this (even pre-internet). It’s just absurd rent-seeking by unproductive leeches on the economy as far as I can tell.

It's not a notice in just a paper. It's a notice in the paper of public record. Which in the UK is the London Gazette, that you are almost certainly never going to see in a newsagents. There are laws requiring notices in that publication, and IIRC it's still government owned.

They publish notice of all laws, all insolvencies, all changes of name, new holder of certain public offices etc. I don't think there is any news or anything beyond the UK.

I bet it would be 5x more if you had to take out an ad in the Times or Telegraph. :)

Ah, this.

1. Please ignore almost all the mail you get initially. There are public companies that troll NYS business registration logs and send TONS of false and highly misleading if not illegal advertisements. "You totally need this $900 OSHA poster you can just print for free and paste on the wall". "Ignore the fact we copied NYS' letterhead but aren't a governemnt entity", etc.

2. The NYS tax department will send you one real piece of mail as a questionnaire.

3. Yes, the newspaper requirement is real and fucking terrible. It's a very old holdover however politicians don't want to get rid of it because quite literally, it's a handout program for newspapers. It would make alot of "local" papers nobody reads, close up shops.

4. Shop around, there are a few ways to save money on it. Honestly, I made a LLC 2 years ago in NYS and haven't even used it business wise. I have yet to do the publicatinon requirement. You just can't legally do business until you do so BUT it doesn't give a deadline.

I wonder how many laws/rules there are, that made sense long time ago but not anymore, or those that never made sense to begin with.

Running for office on a platform of "removing useless laws" has been a dream of mine since childhood.

Maybe I'm totally wrong here, but I don't see much of a difference between extorsionist tax filing software and scam callers warning me about the IRS suing me.

Can the government please make something that's easy to use? Filing taxes isn't something that requires a separate company to help with, and I see no reason why these products have a right to exist (and especially not be canonized), especially with how exploitive they are or can be.

> I see no reason why these products have a right to exist (and especially not be canonized), especially with how exploitive they are or can be.

But if we remove the annual pain of dealing with taxes, then Americans will get complacent and may stop being bothered by having to pay taxes.

- The serious ideology of a major American political party vis-a-vis taxes.

This. It is a special combination of sadistic and stupid, an American classic.

I'm skeptical. I think more likely its an intentional diversion to create and protect sophisticated loopholes for high income earners and companies. Its a reasonable strategy that obviously works and clearly explains their otherwise contradictory position.

Porqúe no los dos? One thing I've learned about American politics is that if there's a sadistic answer that screws the poor and a greedy answer that advantages the rich, often _both_ are correct.

While sadism and stupidity may be two of the reasons for the US tax code, there are surely others. I also suggest extending special privileges to the rich without making that obvious to the poor, forging a weapon to use against political enemies, creating a huge number of bureaucratic jobs, benefiting a legislator's constituent state at the expense of the others, obfuscating the sources of government revenues, and as a means to launder dirty money into clean. There are almost certainly others.

I sort of agree with the pain guys. I'm currently self employed (US) and have to separately pay estimated taxes quarterly. Since I've been doing this, I'm a lot more sensitive to politicians who want to raise my taxes.

Similarly, there is a group in the US whose main goal is to change the law so that employers can't pay your taxes on your behalf. Instead, you would get your full salary, and then have to write a check to pay your taxes. The group believes this would raise tax awareness.

I'm just imagining applying this principle more broadly. Perhaps before every meal I could be forced to calculate the number of calories in each item, total them up and submit them. Maybe before every car journey I could fill out an estimate of the wear and tear on the tyres, gearbox and suspension, and record that in a big log book of car events.

Doesn't seem like a particularly useful way to approach life, to me.

> Perhaps before every meal I could be forced to calculate the number of calories in each item, total them up and submit them.

That's called Weight Watchers. The general principle was pretty effective for me. Most people don't keep a log of wear and tear on their car, but we definitely operate airplanes that way. That also seems pretty productive to me.

But yeah, it's not the only way to operate. I don't really like the idea of putting more responsibility on people in order to "raise awareness". I take that to really mean someone would like everyone to be more upset about taxes, and would like to make them less convenient to increase upsetness.

The technique is actually used a lot in diets and budgeting. Manually writing down everything you pay for helps you to notice that taxi you take every day or how often you "splurge" for coffee. Same with calories and that afternoon or midnight snack.

But forcing it just wastes everyones time, adds red tape, and additional bureaucracy they purport to rail against.

I don't understand why the pain of filing is connected to the pain of spending money.

If a politician raises taxes, and all it does is change the value of a annual withdrawal on your account, I think that pain would be the same, regardless of difficulty of filing.

The pain is estimating and filing 4 times a year.

Here in the US there are actually individuals who view their IRS tax refund check that they get back each year from filing their taxes as "getting free money from the government".

They simply do not understand the fact that, no, that check is not "free government money" but is instead money that the government took, held onto for free all year, interest free, and then let you have back after you filed the proper forms.

So the suggestions to have people cut checks to the government (quarterly, monthly, annually) is generally made from trying to overcome that viewpoint that too many folks view their tax return as some form of "gift" from the government, and instead get them to recognize just how much tax money is being consumed.

That sentiment makes sense to me. Investing in real schooling makes a lot more sense, though.

Conversely, on my property tax they itemize where the money goes. Presumably showing what I'm getting for my tax money. Or maybe just making me angry how much local schools cost if I don't have kids? (that was the vibe I got when living in FL)

I appreciate transparency like that, but I hate other examples that add additional steps or paperwork to the process.

I am not denying your experience, but I am from the US and this is not my experience at all. It's called a "refund".

Which individuals? How do you know these people?

Also I don't agree with your perspective on tax withholding. If you don't want your employer to withhold taxes, I think they have to stop withholding taxes. It's a convenient default, in my opinion.

I understand where their coming from, but adding useless paperwork just inhibits business growth. I'm more sympathetic to writing a check, like you say, but people are horrible with budgeting--which is why you pre-pay quarterly instead of just paying a lump sum at the end of the year.

I've often heard (and like) the suggestion that this annual payment be due the week before Election Day.

That'd be interesting!

I suggest we stop taking taxes out of paychecks and have people pay their full taxes once a year. It would help them see the total amount of taxes they pay. It would have a positive effect on government policy.

It used to be that way in France until last year. The income taxes are now substracted directly on your paycheck. I personnaly prefer having a small amout taken each month than an enormous sum as a one-time payment.

You can already see this on your pay stub (if you look at it, I know I don't bother with mine)

In principle I like your suggestion but in actuality I think many Americans will not like their "yearly tax bill." Just think about people who are already living paycheck to paycheck; not saving much, or just overall spending every penny that comes into their bank account. They would be in trouble come April if they had to pay it at that point.

Perhaps they could do a monthly installment payment for last year's taxes... And the taxpayer would auto pay once or twice a month when they get paid... But then, we're back to where we started.

Tldr in an ideal world where every citizen is disciplined about not spending every penny they get, this suggestion would be great.

...in an ideal world, they wouldn't have to spend every penny, either.

I would argue in an ideal world money wouldn't exist but I think people have different ideals in that sense :)

I know some people _have_ to spend every penny because they need to to survive, but there are also plenty of people who spend every penny because they just have no discipline and buy anything they want without regard to whether or not they could afford it. Ideally the people in the former category would get some sort of welfare. Not sure what, if anything, to do with the people in the latter.

You live paycheck to paycheck and still ineligible for income tax exemptions? Seems like a pretty USA-specific issue.

You can set your withholding to nothing and end up with a fat bill every year. Financially, this makes sense. You could be making interest on the money you owe in taxes. However, not everyone is really able to be that disciplined or just financially need every dollar coming in. I think having both options, withholding and no withholding, is the best way.

FYI, if you do this you will incur penalties. The United States requires payment quarterly. You cannot pay it all at the end of the year unless you want to pay penalties.

This is bad advice for many people. Depending on your income you might be subject to penalties if you don't withhold or pay estimated taxes: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

Can we do the same with health insurance premiums? The average cost of an employer plan is up to $20,000+/year in premiums alone but most people are oblivious to the true cost.

Your idea is great for people who make good money and are able to set aside money into a savings account.

But it doesn't work for low-income people that are already living paycheck-to-paycheck.

> Can the government please make something that's easy to use?

To be frank, the government has issues making things usable, and "usable" is a pretty small target when you're talking about the entire US workforce.

18F has really changed the game in government IT and software. https://18f.gsa.gov/

They brought in a bunch of dedicated experienced software pros who among other things rescued the federal health insurance exchange site.

I think they could do a fine job with tax software.

Thanks Obama

One of the best sites to 'do stuff' in the UK is gov.uk

I've just filled in a new ESTA application on the US gov site too, simple (albeit stupid), and worked.

This morning however I tried using enterprise b2b to book a hire car, it took 6 attempts before it actually worked. Almost all corporate tools seem to be terrible.

The government has issues holding private companies accountable when they fail to deliver.

Tax lobbyists like Intuit benefit too much from all of this really. Planet money podcast episode that outlines some of this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

Also Reply All did an episode recently on the Propublica Intuit story.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nhgol

Filing taxes does not actually require a separate company to help with. You can download the PDFs (or go to the post office), read the directions and fill them out yourself.

I have never actually done that; but my parents did well after I was using software, which sure is more convenient.

I think if you make under $70k or so you can do it online as well, there's a few sites that officially help you on behalf of the IRS.

Like TurboTax?

Turbotax appears to have one of the lower limits, and also are supposedly very difficult about doing the free option.

https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp

My point was more that these companies offer a solution that is just barely workable so that the IRS does not just create their own usable, free software. I honestly consider them a leech on the economy.

I used to do that. Because I'm a proud software engineer and why should this stuff be complicated? It's just numbers you add or subtract...

wait, does the Transmogrifier Deduction for Frobnubilors apply when you claim to be Single-and-Only Highlander? pauses and takes 1 hour to read up on the IRS rules for this and compares with the advice of $random_internet_guy

And after the personal satisfaction of having completed everything myself, I file and a few months later get a letter from the IRS to the effect of "Dear Mr Bonehead, you totally forgot this obvious item, so we're going to refund you a bit more. You're welcome."

Taxes are not hard if you know how all of the rules apply to your special situation. If you don't, like most people, you're in the dark and it becomes a very poor use of time, with lost money at stake—or worse if your intentions are deemed to be fraudulent.

One of the problems I have with the software is you need to mostly understand a lot of this arcana anyway. It's just that it makes entering things into the form slightly easier.

The only time I didn't do my own taxes and paid a CPA, he messed up even though I told him that I withheld more than required (and gave him last year's return so he could see what last year's taxes were and that I had more than 110% withheld).

He still filled the form out wrong so that I would have had to pay a penalty. Then when I told him he filled it out wrong, he just took the penalty off, without properly updating the 1040. When I ended up getting the inevitable "you owe us a penalty letter", I just ended up dealing with it myself rather than use his boneheaded explanation basically "pretty please" as opposed to the actual "I made more money, and withheld enough more money, so penalties are waived."

Honestly, the IRS makes these kind of questions pretty much impossible.

For example, I've been considering installing solar panels on my house. There is a federal tax credit for installing solar, and it includes associated costs like repairing your roof to support the panels. But as a normal person the entirety of the guidance is this:

"No costs relating to a solar panel or other property installed as a roof (or portion thereof) will fail to qualify solely because the property constitutes a structural component of the structure on which it is installed."

So if you get a new roof to support the panels will the tax credit cover the entire roof job, or only the part covered by the panels? I've heard from two accountants on this who had two diametrically opposed opinions on this. And if I guess wrong it's potentially Felony Tax Fraud, the kind that put Al Capone in jail for 11 years. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

So I call the IRS help line to get the official guidance on this and the official IRS position is: "We can not give guidance on this subject." It's not like TurboTax is going to have any more official of an opinion on this either. The only way to safely handle this is to pass liability off to a third party, which makes filling out your own taxes not an option.

Do you think that Al Capone was imprisoned for making an honest mistake on his tax return after receiving conflicting advice from two accountants?

I did this for the first time a few years ago, and it took me about eighteen hours to figure out all of the forms and terminology. And I'm not even running a business, or anything extra-ordinarily complicated. So possible, but time-consuming.

How many pages of the supposed eight thousand plus pages of tax law apply to the majority of those who file taxes? The IRS certainly can tell me when I am wrong but they won't do it except when the result is in their favor; in my case I was improperly not filing HSA expenditures which would have resulted in me getting more back.

It comes down to this and I do not blame Turbo Tax or any other company in this area. The Federal and State Tax codes are weaponized by politicians and until that stops the system will be too complex for many to do the the filing on their own and some of that is because there is always that "did I forget something" feeling.

At least the changes made recently helped the lower and middle classes out a lot, that doubling of the personal deduction was a god send in reducing the work needed as many will never need to itemize again

> The IRS certainly can tell me when I am wrong but they won't do it except when the result is in their favor

Yes they will. I don't know why you bother to make up a lie so easily disproved.

On September 9, 2019, I received a CP16 that stated

"We believe there are miscalculations on your 2018 Form 1040, which affect the following areas of your return:

- Tax Computation

We made changes to your return that correct these errors. As a result, your overpayment is $21,886.35.

Information was changed because of the following:

We changed the amount of tax reported on your tax return because the tax rates on Qualified Dividends and Capital Gains are generally lower than the standard rates. It appears your tax was not computed using these rates or the amount of tax was computed incorrectly. (211D)"

Holy shit talk about a humble brag. You overpaid by $21k? You must be balling.

At a 15% rate, that's only 140k in capital gains. Significant, but hardly "balling" if it's a one-time event.

What world do you live in where $140k in gains on an investment is not a huge amount of money?

Silicon Valley... Would it be nice to have an extra $140k? Yeah. Would it be life changing in any way? Not really. I still wouldn't even be able to afford to buy a house.

USA minimum wage is $7.25/hr which is only $15K/year if you work full time, and we've got people that will refer to 140K and prepend it with "only".

I would sure as fuck would blame TurboTax, assuming you filed with them. Why else would you (be forced to) pay them if they can't perform their primary function of navigating overly complex tax law correctly?

I've gotten refund checks that were bigger than I expected, along with a letter saying that their math says I was owed more than I thought I was.

I find it interesting that these scam callers warning about IRS suing only works in countries where making an honest mistake on your taxes can result you being threatened with or going to prison.

Which countries are those? I've never been in the position personally, but everything I've ever read says that the IRS is very unlikely to do anything more than demand that you pay the taxes you owe in the case of honest mistakes.

I use the free fillable forms. Happy with it every year so far. If turbo tax makes them go away, I'll get real politically involved real quick.

A private company stills gets your data. You are not filling directly with the IRS.

> Can the government please make something that's easy to use?

Many law makers don't want the Government to make this process easy on the assumption that the easier it is for the Government to tax, the more it will do so.

I really don't understand why I have to file my taxes to begin with.

I have a W2 job, and my employer presumably has sent my paystubs and tax information to the government already. I then have to copy down the information from my W2 into some kind of tax filing software, and then they have to check to make sure that what I typed matches what they have, presumably paying someone to do that if I make any kind of serious mistake. Why do I have to do anything?

I'd understand if I have a lot of complex deductions or if I were running my own business, but as it stands I do the basic standard deduction (or whatever the default options on TurboTax are).

I'm genuinely asking this...is there some utility that I'm missing here to me doing the taxes myself?

You are dealing with a consequence of TurboTax's 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free.

There have been proposals to mail cards to taxpayers with their financial information (as known to the government) pre-printed, and if everything is accurate, the recipient does nothing at all. TurboTax (and a few others) lobbied heavily to make sure such efforts were defeated, and so you have to keep doing your own taxes.

But please, stop using TurboTax to do so!

It's not terribly difficult to construct circumstances in which the government doesn't know how much you owe them. It's simpler to have a single policy for everyone. Therefore, everyone has to do their own taxes. I really don't think it's more complicated than that.

Simpler for who? It's not simpler for the vast bulk of people whose only significant income is from their employer. It's not simpler for the tax authorities either, who now have to process a lot more tax returns rather than just doing something more straightforward for the common-case.

Of course it's simpler for the IRS. Simpler does not imply less work.

I wonder what percent of taxpayers actually owe a different amount than the IRS can compute on its own. My guess is it’s not much more than 30% (the percentage who itemize deductions).

Is it really worth making 100% of taxpayers do their own just to handle the edge case of people who actually have to?

Capital gains, gambling winnings, and state use taxes aren't completely accounted for.

Nope. In New Zealand you log into a website and it shows all your employers filings. You can send in requests for corrections if things are wrong, but it shows you taxes paid and anything you owe the IRD. It has an interface for transferring money to/from your bank account for payments/returns.

It's a little more complex if you own a business, but I think you can file and maintain all your business taxes throughout the year using an IRD website as well.

The US IRS has all the information to do the exact same thing. It's lobbying from the tax software companies that's kept them from doing so.

The US does too, you can login to social security administration and see all your earnings history.

Think of it like a high school test, you submit your test to the IRS, who has the answers, and they tell you if you are correct. Also, the US is the only class who's teacher doesn't either show them the key or skip the test entirely.

When I realized that some other countries have no concept of a tax day and don't understand the yearly hype train of US taxes, that's when I got really bummed out on how broken our system is.

I guess this is why some voters are eager for someone like Elizabeth Warren to get in office and stop some of this anti-competitive behavior. It's odd to me because TurboTax is good software (at least when I used it) and it saves time. So to me it's worth the money. But to force someone who as a job and no real deductions to not simply file a 1040 EZ online is just a rent seeker making sure they get paid.

Your statement:

> ... it saves time. So to me it's worth the money.

is (unless I'm missing some alternative), based a in comparison to paper-based forms, which are in turn a horribly inefficient way for the IRS (which all taxpayers pay for) to operate.

The question is not only the anti-competitive behavior of entrenched 'supported electronic filing services', but that these are 'required' and facilitated due to horribly inefficient processes that the IRS refuses to fix properly by simply creating a way for individuals to e-file in the first place.

>Elizabeth Warren to get in office and stop some of this anti-competitive behavior.

Warren is a run of the mill middle of the pack Democrat. She only looks good because at present the GOP looks so bad.

The government needs to be reformed, electing one party or another President isn't going to change much, unless you set the bar really low (Trump)

Based on recent history Warren certainly isn't a run of the mill middle of the pack Democrat. Her positions on banking, big business, healthcare and big tech companies is a leftward lean even when compared to Obama's tenure.

> The government needs to be reformed, electing one party or another President isn't going to change much

And pontificating about how "the system is broken" doesn't change anything. There are no actual concrete steps to reforming government that doesn't involve elections and gradual process, or revolution and sudden progress. If you think the latter is in any way likely then you're deluded.

Obama held almost all those positions during the primary in '08. Why do you trust Warren to follow through when Obama didn't?

He didn't, though. He advocated improving healthcare, but not to the extent that Warren does. And he castigated the banking industry but never proposed anything at the level Warren is proposing.

Besides, this isn't even the question. The OP said that Warren is a middle of the road Democrat. Compared to the positions held by the average Democrat Senator/Congressperson she isn't at all. Whether she'd follow through on those promises when elected is a valid question (though much like Obama, it wouldn't be under her sole control), but that doesn't mean she isn't left-leaning.

To what extent does Warren advocate improving healthcare? She went from "medicarefor all" to "actually medicare is just a framework" in just a month. On her platform page she seems to have abandoned single-payer entirely.

How can you trust a candidate who changes platform from progressive to milquetoast centrist so quickly? How can you trust a candidate who said several months ago that she wants to eliminate billionaires, and yet who continues to get major contributions from at least twenty billionaires?

I find it very hard to believe that Warren is genuinely left-leaning. Based on her behavior, it seems to me much more like she is a centrist candidate wrapping centrist ideas in left rhetoric.

You probably haven't met Warren. She's a force of nature. She's data driven, and extremely tenacious.

Both parties are constantly changing and jockeying for position in response to shifts in the political tastes of both the general public and the general public with money.

Warren might have seemed barely to the left in historic eras. She only seems left now because the recent stretches with the "left" party in control have all been very centrist. Big businesses have been allowed to grow bigger, and organized labor unions have been just treading water federally, as the individual states have been pulling their teeth with "right to work" and "at will" employment laws.

Media consolidation and campaign finance has been driving it. The median voter does not have a reliable, unbiased source of information to drive their decisions, so it's "Garbage In, Garbage Out" politics. Control the inputs to influence the outputs. One faction seems to be experimenting with packing all the main channels with misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and psyops, and that seems to be worth about 40% of the vote, if the polling is honest and accurate.

The antipodal position to this would be to invest more into public education, independent journalism, legislation penalizing prevarication or material omissions by public officeholders and appointees, anti-secrecy and public disclosure (or "sunshine") laws, and overhaul of broadcast licensing. The issues Warren is focusing on seem more concerned with the flows of money than the flows of information. It's the latter that will produce government reform in a democracy.

Going after Facebook is easy. They're a big, obvious target, and Zuckerberg isn't tremendously charismatic. But Facebook is just one business. Political disinformation is an entire industry.

Well, that run-of-the-mill democrat helped make CFPB a reality and that's pertinent to what OP was trying to say. She's much more vocal about these anti-competitive practices than most other politicians.

Okay, fine, but "your taxes are automatically filed for you" is a specific campaign issue for Elizabeth Warren, and in addition she's introduced legislation specifically aimed at this issue (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/912). Pointing her out as a potential solution in a thread about this particular issue is appropriate.

On the other hand, "everybody in every party sucks and it doesn't matter who anyone votes for because it won't change anything" is a comment that could go on any post about any aspect of politics and doesn't contribute to a productive conversation.

Their efforts to block return-free filing is the important issue here. Filing taxes, even on paper, would be orders of magnitude easier if the government had to pre-fill it before sending - removing the complexity that makes tax filing applications necessary for most.

Free fillable forms[1] has been around for a number of years and van be used by anyone regardless of income level.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_File#Free_File_Fillable...

Haven't read the article yet, but I assume they're probably talking about the lobbying to remove free filing or TurboTax's attempts to hide the free option as much as possible with a thousand ways to upsell you by using dark patterns during the tax filing process.

This, a thousand times over.

It's hilarious how groups like Intuit market their tax filing product as free, then make it nearly impossible to go through a free path to filing for pretty much anyone.

Personally, I avoid companies that use dishonest practices like this and hope they go under, but so much for "voting with my checkbook" in today's society. Power has shifted too much that it's going to be quite hard to pull it back to the average citizen.

I'm only responding so others who decide not to read the article don't make incorrect assumptions like yourself. The free file-able online forms are easy to find and are not part of turbo taxes offerings. Turbo tax uses shady tactics to hide their own free offerings which they are supposed to be offering as part of a deal with the government. Free file forms are basically digital tax forms and are much more convenient over paper. Up to certain incomes they will even do most of the work for you.

It does not have the dialogs to walk you through the weird parts of filing a tax return. It's not really comparable to something like TurboTax.

What parts are the "weird parts of filing a tax return"? Not trying to come across as combative, I'm just genuinely curious.

There are a few things that are always extremely odd to figure out (or at least, I always waste a lot of time on them) when preparing the forms. What's deductible vs what isn't with retirement accounts, student loan repayments, and - for the love of God - the Health Savings Account stuff. It's been a long time since I had to think about it but I'm sure some hn users have struggles figuring out their stock options.

TurboTax asks you questions and guides you through entering the data. It's all fairly intuitive and you'll have a feel for whether you've done everything completely. Free Fillable Forms, which I've used the last couple of times, is just one step up from doing everything on paper. It is not bad if you know what you're in for, but it is not the same experience as something like TurboTax or the H&R Block tool.

Copy line 13 of form 8765 to line 32 of form 5432... This is more tedious, except that it gets very easy to miss one of those steps in the list of things that don't apply. (most people have never worked for the railroad and skip a bunch of steps for railroad retirees)

Think of these "free fillable forms" as a spreadsheet. Numbers go in boxes, other boxes compute themselves and nothing more.

Now go look at the IRS instructions for a typical schedule. Here's a common one, Schedule A for itemized deductions:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040sca.pdf

It's a mere 17 pages including lookup tables. Pretty lightweight. Some go way longer.

Now, is all of this information and logic put into the free form calculator? It's not. So you need to read along with these instructions and follow all of the conditionals and detours described inside.

This is what you're buying when you buy a tax prep program, and this is what's missing from the free options.

> Free fillable forms[1] has been around for a number of years and van be used by anyone regardless of income level.

The article focuses on many issues, and the existence of such forms doesn't diminish from its importance.

They are still an unnecessarily painful solution.

I did do these last year to finally kick TurboTax to the curb. However, they’re shamefully complex especially considering how they’re already a piece of software. They barely do basic arithmetic.

The restrictions are entirely artificial, and the system is gamed so that you either spend a lot of time learning tax form rules and lingo or you just pay TurboTax to do it for you.

The IRS could very easily send a pre-filled tax form for most Americans to verify and sign like other countries do. All the relevant information is already reported to the IRS. Only business owners and people with exotic tax situations would ever have to fill anything out - especially considering our now-higher standard deduction that most people don’t hit.

Despite my complaints I still highly recommend everyone use free fillable forms. You’ll actually understand what is happening with your taxes by the end of it. And without that understanding you have no idea if TurboTax is doing it right.

What about the free forms is painful? I have only ever filed via these forms - I've never used TurboTax, and my AGI exceeds the limits on the federal free file software.

To me, it's pretty simple: you read the instruction book and go through it line by line. If you have odd forms to complete, like paperwork for an HSA, a quick google search will set you in the right direction.

People with more complicated tax returns will always need a professional's expertise. But for 90% of people who have one income source for one household, the paper forms are very intuitive.

I think people think they are "painful" because they need to read and comprehend more.

I think they are "painful" because they are tedious and unnecessary assuming the government can already pre-fill the information.

You also have to understand that many people may not have the same reading comprehension skills as you do.

That's not what intuitive means.

('intuitive' is over used as a goal, but a form where you look up the instructions line by line in a separate book and where you occasionally have to search out how to fill out a subform is not intuitive at all.)

Painful compared to other countries which send you "this is what we have on you" and you say "yep" and that's it.

I'm with you. The instructions on how to fill out every form come with the form.

>What about the free forms is painful?

The first time I used FreeFillableForms, it was also my first time doing taxes manually. Reading all the instructions and then going off and computing whether or not the AMT applies to me, researching whether I was eligible for this and that deduction, etc was very time consuming. I estimate it must have taken me over 12 hours which was definitely not worth my time financially, but I did it anyway as a matter of principle.

THEN I ran into a nasty snag: I had put a "0" in a bunch of the fields that I'd decided didn't apply to me, but the IRS validation script expected those fields to be blank and repeatedly rejected my submissions with cryptic error messages about form validation errors. It takes at least a day to hear back after you submit, so it took me weeks after I was "done" with my taxes before I could figure out the problem and get all the fields changed from zeros to blanks that the IRS needed in order to actually accept my taxes.

>I think people think they are "painful" because they need to read and comprehend more.

That's part of it, but FreeFillableForms is not user-friendly at all. The whole federal tax process is an absolute mess. Doing my state taxes is so much easier, thanks to CalFile doing 99% of the work for me. It's a shining example of what our federal tax returns process should be like.

The painful bit is having to fill out anything at all. I lived and worked in the UK for 11 years and I didn't have to fill out a form once in all those 11 years.

My brother who had rental income only needed to fill out a small form for this additional rental income.

Your point about how the IRS already has all of the relevant information is something that has always puzzled me. Why are we performing this bizarre, ever-changing ritual with the threat of IRS audits hanging over us if they already know everything?

I think that is part of why TurboTax has such a foothold. I use it because it walks me through the frankly byzantine process and explains a good deal of the arcane terminology for me.

TurboTax creates the problem and then sells the solution.

Planned overtaxation?

The IRS doesn’t have all the relevant information though.

A lot of deductions and credits are based on events or transactions that aren’t reported to the IRS. State and local tax deduction, charity deduction, medical expense deduction, and so on. There are also various penalties that need to be self reported - the IRS can find them, but only if they do an audit and are looking through bank accounts and other stuff they normally don’t know about.

I’m not sure if the IRS even knows how many kids you have for the child tax credit. How would they?

> I’m not sure if the IRS even knows how many kids you have for the child tax credit. How would they?

You have to report the SSN of your dependents on your tax return, still open to fraud but it’s not like you just fill in a number. This was actually a huge issue for the IRS before they co-opted the SSN as a tax identifier, and pretty much the only reason people get one assigned at birth instead of when they begin working.

CGP Grey’s video on the US’ lack of a national ID covers a lot of this, worth a watch.

> You have to report the SSN of your dependents on your tax return

The point is that the IRS does not have this information available to pre-fill your form with.

They'll have it from the previous year. So, for each dependent, you'll likely only send a correction to the IRS twice: the year you gain the dependent, and the year they stop being a dependent.

Then provide a pre-filled declaration based on what tax office knows and let taxpayers complete the rest by sending the corrected form back.

> The IRS could very easily send a pre-filled tax form for most Americans to verify and sign like other countries do. All the relevant information is already reported to the IRS.

One of the current problems is that the information is reported in parallel by those providers. Many small businesses print off their employees' W-2s at the same time they print their own tax returns.

Yes, the IRS knows eventually. They don't know by April 15th under the current set of filing deadlines, though. That's a solvable problem, but not as trivial as you make it sound.

IRS has your W2s and 1099s by February. It could compute and suggest your takes based on your previous year age & family profile. It already does this verify your filing.

You could miss forms like AMT and NET with FFF. Until recent tax reform I was borderline most years, so defer to tax software to determine if I had these taxes. ACA penalty a mess too.

Free File Fillable Forms is made by Intuit.

Credit karma tax is (actually) free. I’ve used for past 3 years.

Why is it free? Because credit karma uses your financial data (including tax returns) to make better credit card / loan recommendations to you. So it ultimately benefits me as well, that’s why I share my return with them.

BUT you don’t have to share your tax return with CK to file. There’s a box you can uncheck when starting each year.

I gave Credit Karma a shot last year, and it worked out pretty great.

It's definitely a good alternative to Turbo Tax

Sadly you can't even file a simple quarterly estimate tax return online without paying a fee. If you want to do it for free, you have to print it out & mail it. Not sure how that benefits citizens or the IRS.

Intuit's main argument has always been that if the government provided such a service many people would overpay their taxes.

Honestly it's much cheaper, easier & better to just find a good accountant to do your taxes instead of Turbo Tax.

The government could do a lot to make filing taxes & starting businesses easier. All the politicians talking about being pro-small business could really start at these 2 steps. Otherwise, imho, their talk is nothing but empty promises. Creating hurdles like this is just a way of gate-keeping lower incomes out of small businesses.

> Intuit's main argument has always been that if the government provided such a service many people would overpay their taxes.

If that's true, then most people would use Intuit anyway, once they realized how much they'd save.

> if the government provided such a service many people would overpay their taxes.

This is tax payer's problem, not tax office's.

It's a webpage in the UK, takes about 10 minutes if you have all the data you need (how much interest etc you earned, how many charitable deductions) -- that's assuming you're self assessed. Most people don't need to fill in anything.

In Canada the CRA has a list of free tax software listed on its website.

For the last two years I literally filed my tax return with two mouse clicks. Click 1 Autofill Click 2 Efile.

At some point I expect the government to just send a notice "your taxes have been filed. If you have concerns contact us".

I could have been doing it for ten years but I was stuck in the past of only using electronic tax software. And I still made a paper copy for myself.

Ultimately the problem is that the tax code is altogether too complex. I filed by hand up until a couple of years ago when I had to start accounting for things like capital gains and dividends from stock sales, and at that point it became too difficult and I started paying for TurboTax. At the end of the day they solve a problem that is entirely manufactured by government.

The main area where the system seems to be gamed from a software standpoint is that the federal government provides software if your income is below a certain threshold. More than that and you’re on your own. _That_ has lobbying written all over it.

A flat income tax as the sole tax would eliminate tax filing complexity. It would also eliminate the inequality in the tax code (sales tax is a larger income tax on lower incomes, tax credits disproportionally benefit people in lower cost of living areas, etc.). A flat income tax is equal in that everyone pays the same rate, and fair in that the more money a person earns the more they pay.

Can someone from US explain how come there is still no open source alternative to TurboTax?

Probably because accountants aren't silly enough to work for free.

It takes work to keep up with changes to the tax laws in every state and at the federal level. I don’t know many open source accountants.

I'm a TurboTax user myself (b/c I almost always procrastinate to the last day/week), but my guess is because tax forms and rules change every year. Maybe the general situation for free filers is easy enough to code for, though? Though one of Turbotax's purported features is that it'll tell you how easy/complex your taxes can or should be, depending on your situation.

Also, one of TurboTax's features is e-filing. Maybe there are free e-file alternatives (as in free, with no upsell or strings-attached whatsoever), but it seems you have to be an "authorized IRS e-file provider" to do this, i.e. there's not a developer API: https://www.irs.gov/filing/e-file-options

Typically open source projects come from two places; a company needs software, or an individual thinks writing it would be fun or at least save them time. Preparing individual tax returns falls into neither category; companies have no interest in individual tax returns (they don't pay that kind of tax), and individuals only have to do it once a year so it's not time-efficient to write a program to do it.

There are...you can download any tax form for free and fill it in by hand or in a PDF program.

You will see articles regularly attacking TurboTax because SV has been wildly unsuccessful in producing a startup that can compete with TurboTax, so instead a lot of effort is spent attacking them in the media.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook all spend significantly more on lobbying to ensure market hegemony. Don't be surprised at the pattern, attack TurboTax in the media, then up pops a new startup that will disrupt the industry. Rinse and repeat.

Nice editorializing. TurboTax is actually maligned (as plainly stated in TFA) because of their lobbying efforts to keep tax filing difficult.

I can just imagine the YouTube advertising campaign...

> Do you hate doing you taxes? Try Simple, we made it easy! Just put in a few personal details and we'll take care of all the rest. We'll download your W2 information from your employer and send it to the IRS. With our Simple Guarantee, you can feel confident that your return will be correct.

Or maybe we could call it Tophat. That's a good tax software name.

I disagree with this simply because the idea that competition exists or could exist is not an excuse for the system to function the way it does.

There are new players in the space, like CreditKarma. Many competitors offer more features for free than Intuit as well. But that doesn’t mean we should have to rely on private companies (who are data hoarding) to file our taxes. That doesn’t mean that free fillable forms need to be unnecessarily more difficult to use than commercial solutions.

In reality, the IRS already has all the relevant forms reported to them. For most people the IRS could send a tax form already filed out to read, verify, and return. For business owners and other more complex situations, these are still the same people who are already hiring a tax accountant and are probably skipping TurboTax as it is.

In other words, commercial tax preparation software for most users is filling an artificial need that only exists because the government has been lobbied not to provide the (basic) service itself.

> That doesn’t mean that free fillable forms need to be unnecessarily more difficult to use than commercial solutions.

They aren't. The IRS form is the exact for completed by TurboTax or any other accountant/service provider. The IRS only accepts their own forms.

>For most people the IRS could send a tax form already filed out to read, verify, and return.

Thats what is really being asked...the Government to do tax returns for you for free. Even if TurboTax and accountants weren't lobbying the Government not to do taxpayers tax returns for them for free, its a major jump to say the government/IRS would unilaterally begin doing this for taxpayers as a free service.

Well, the government was clearly interested in providing free online filing, back around 2002. But they were lobbied out of the idea by Intuit and a few other companies in the tax prep space.

Telling us that the end result of the form is the same is meaningless. You don’t fill out the form manually on TurboTax. It automatically imports W2 information, it asks layperson’s questions, and generates the final form.

If you do this yourself, it’s far more time consuming.

I don’t understand why you think it’s a major jump for the IRS to provide this service. Other countries already do this. Other federal agencies also provide complex web services like My Social Security and Healthcare.gov.

The IRS already has your W2 and 1099 data. The IRS already knows when you make a mistake, automatically, often live as you e-file. I have had e-files rejected instantly due to mistakes. They clearly already know how much I’m supposed to owe them.

Anyone want to start one?

The project is not easy. It requires carefully reading tax codes and implementing them, handling presumably thousands of explicit legal requirements plus whatever edge cases exist that may or may not be explicit in the law. Not to mention keeping up with annual changes. If you screw it up, whether or not you are legally liable, people are probably coming after you anyway. And the support nightmare...

That said, I think a programming-languages approach might be a good one to try to execute on this. Keeping the source code as close to the tax code as possible seems the only way to stay sane with respect to long-term maintenance.

It isn't the software that is complicated, it's the intricate knowledge of the tax laws at the Federal and state level that goes behind building it. If you can find a team of lawyers and tax accountants willing to work on it for free (and update it every year) then building something like TurboTax wouldn't be too difficult.

Open source software can be paid for. With a bit of funding, I bet an OSS-clone of TT could be produced and the organization can host and offer e-filing for a nominal fee.

I think the IRS will actually pay a service fee to small companies that file the free federal returns for individuals.

The exact conditions that would enable a simple FOSS tax software or portal is what TurboTax has been lobbying to make sure stays broken and can't easily exist.

Also, taxes in the US are really complicated, and while our governments know how much we owe, the burden of determination and filing is placed wholly on the citizen.

Should we be able to log in to our IRS profile page and track and manage our taxes ourselves throughout the year? Yes. Is this techically possible today? Also yes. Would this make TurboTax and some other bloodsucking middlemen less TurboRich?

Well, you can see why it's impossible.

There are dozens of alternatives. However, tax prep software needs to be certified for correctness, and that's expensive and onerous. This is made harder due to the many many different tax jurisdictions in the US.

There are "tax help" open source programs out there, but online filing (which is the main goal here) is impossible without a corporation working with the IRS to set up access, negotiate protocols, and such.

There's no open standard/API/infrastructure or protocol for online filing, so the only option for an open source program to help with that is "print out the whole thing and send it in" which is usually a lot more trouble (more expensive in time and money) than just paying Turbotax or similar services.

Turbotax and the rest of the tax prep industry have lobbied for years to prevent easy/free options for citizens to file taxes... it isn't just them preventing other companies from building products to do it, they're suppressing all competition and modernization, basically anything that would threaten the money they get from charging people to prep taxes.

At this point the entire system is set up with high barriers to entry, and open source solutions/free software don't typically work well in that kind of setting.

Essentially, no open source program has any chance of facilitating online filing in the US because of corruption in the US government.

Or incompetency.

I think our leaders spend way too much figuring out how to block the other party from moving forward than solving hard problems.

China’s a bully but my god, it gets shit done at an insane pace.

That being said, how do people file Taxes in China?

> There's no open standard/API/infrastructure or protocol for online filing, so the only option for an open source program to help with that is "print out the whole thing and send it in" which is usually a lot more trouble (more expensive in time and money) than just paying Turbotax or similar services.

That is the least burdensome part of the process, to me. In fact I used to do that from H&R Block Tax Cut back when there was an additional charge for e-file.

The biggest problem is tax laws change annually. You can't write the open source software once and be done with it. It needs to be updated every year.

From a previous HN discussion on US taxes: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used it, so cant comment on how well it works.

> Can someone from US explain how come there is still no open source alternative to TurboTax

Actually there is one (depending on your definition of 'alternate'): http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

I have used it for the last two years to do my Fed and State taxes.

I recently learned about this volunteer maintained spreadsheet for helping with your 1040.

https://sites.google.com/site/excel1040/

I've been using this for last couple years and it's a great piece of "software", I prefer it over TurboTax.

The dedication of the maintainer to this project is truly impressive.

I'm on linux but it works fine in the browser version of Excel.

This seems to make the hn front page every 60 days or so. Is there anything new here?

No, it's just still amusing to the rest of the world. We're like "This is 2019, not 1920".

Yet another data point: Hungary.

For most people the National Tax Bureau (NAV) prepares the filing based on the data they receive from employers, banks, etc. You can check the content on a web page, and approve, if you agree.

For those who have income that must be self-reported, there is the free Java app provided by NAV. I have used the latter for several years and it has been working reasonably well for me.

I'm likely in the minority here, but as a product TurboTax hasn't really bothered me that much. It makes filling my taxes pretty easy, and saves most of the info year of year so I don't have to re-enter it. Compared to the thousands of dollars in taxes I've paid, the $100 or so turbo tax gets doesn't seem too bad.

My issue is with all this is pretty simple - I pay too much in tax, and/or the quality of government those taxes are buying is subpar at best. I also strongly suspect leaving the government in charge of comping up with a solution to filing taxes electronically would continue the trend of disappointment.

If my choice is between paying a private company a couple bucks to make my interaction with the government easier, or going back to the old paper way of doing things until the government gets its shit together.....well I'm going to stick with the former, unless I'm missing something here?

This is just a convenient excuse for 3 layers of politicians with their own filing requirements, each one trying to get tax breaks for their favorite constituents. If we had a simple tax system there would be less power for politicians and less they can negotiate with. Blaming Turbo Tax is silly.

“ ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.”

Is propublica good/reliable news source? Always looking for good news sources

I like to look at things from Buddhist point if view. Calfile "buys" you the saved 50 bucks (3 hours of work for most people?) x the number if people use it, especially if you understand the implications and your intent is clear. Of course, a practical Buddhist never "spends" the earned opportunities, but reinvests them to get even more opportunities, until the impact is measured in trillions of years. But that's philosophy. On the practical side, if I were you, I'd do two things: (1) open source this on behalf of the gov - it's important to get the "official" status; (2) advertise this over official channels: send them a green letter from ca.gov/irs that say there is such a tool. The software doesn't need to be perfect: the website that manages toll fees in my state is in stone age, yet it's official and it's better to have this site than not.

ProPublica seems to be singularly focused on Intuit to the exclusion of all the other powerful interests who benefit from a complex and opaque tax code. They may be fighting efforts to make filing easier under the current rules, but they aren't really doing anything to keep those rules a clusterfuck.

Who else lobbies like Intuit? Who else spends millions of dollars on defeating measures intended to make paying taxes simpler and easier?

> Who else lobbies like Intuit?

Google spent $21 million in 2018. Facebook spent $12 million. Amazon spent $14 million. Microsoft spent $9 million.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/23/tech-companies-lobbying-...

Your point being? This discussion refers to an article about tax filing and Intuit’s efforts to retain tax code complexity and self-beneficial regulatory conditions.

Yes, companies like the ones you cited spend significant amounts of money to educate and persuade lawmakers. Academically I’d like to see what a world without lobbying looks like, but honestly, I’m not confident it would be significantly better for citizens (and may be significantly worse in some ways).

But that’s a tangential topic for a different discussion.

Numbers quoted in comment and link are total spent on lobbying, not on preventing easy tax filing.

The Republican party? Seriously Grover Norquist wants taxes to be painful so you associate them with bad feelings. They made it illegal to compete with TurboTax by offering a free piece of software from the IRS. Look up California's FreeFile software. There is nothing Republicans have done that helps taxpayers unless they make over a higher than average amount of money. I'm not even trying to be political, this has just been an arm of their platform since the 1980s. I've included a link to a podcast which goes pretty deep on this topic.

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/07/18/tax-filing-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/house-bans-free-government-t...

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

The Republican Party itself is not a lobbying group, but a political party. To the extent that they want to make taxes worse, they are both internally motivated and also the subject of lobbying. To make my original question more pointed: Who else lobbies like Intuit? It is already well-established that the Republican Party's members broadly support these antisocial tax-frustrating positions; we are examining the people who put money into those positions, not the people who put people into those positions.

Norquist is a great example of a lobbyist worth examining. He's a real piece of shit. His group is Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). Their 2019 sheet shows $390k spread across 6 lobbyists who did not hide their representation; they had opinions on a variety of issues and bills, all related somehow to taxation. [0] Intuit's sheet shows spending of $1.28m in that same time period, spread across at least ten firms, including dozens of revolving-door politicos and industry insiders, all aimed at one single piece of legislation: The Taxpayer First Act of 2019, an attempt to modernize tax legislation and filing processes. [1] Surprisingly, ATR has officially said nothing about the Taxpayer First Act, despite Norquist's well-publicized position against such efforts.

To recap: Intuit spent 3x what Norquist's group spent, and focused that spend on one specific bill which would have eased tax filing. If Norquist is a piece of shit, what does that make Intuit?

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D00004709...

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientbills.php?id=D000026...

Republicans are not a lobbying group, but as a political party Americans have spent a heck of a lot of money on them, especially when you include PACs. Since you've limited it to specifically lobbying groups I don't know that the PACs qualify either. They definitely aren't as narrow either. It's certainly an interesting question.

That's hard to disentangle, because there are lots of individuals and large corporations that benefit from complex holes in the tax code that would go away if the code were made simpler. Intuit's efforts are just easier to ascribe to that purpose.

There's also the block of special interests that advance their agendas via the tax code. Things like the capital gains tax regime, Child Tax Credit, and mortgage interest deduction.

In this article on how Intuit is working to prevent free filing, ProPublica focuses on Intuit? Why is this surprising?

ProPublica seems really broad in the topics they cover: https://www.propublica.org/topics/

They also have multiple articles covering other types of tax reform and on closing tax loopholes if you search their database.

> In this article on how Intuit is working to prevent free filing, ProPublica focuses on Intuit? Why is this surprising?

My issue is that the article, and many posters here, make it sound like all the ills of the US tax system trace back to Intuit. Statements like (emphasis mine)

> Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy

and

> But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.

These statements ignore the vested interests that got all the complexity inserted into the tax code in the first place. Intuit didn't create the capital gains tax structure, the laundry list of special interest deductions available to itemizers, the complicated business income/loss rules, or any of the other elements that make preparing taxes a confusing game of hopscotch between various forms and schedules. They also would not be the loudest voice of opposition if any of those elements were to be removed to simplify taxes.

This is "whataboutism" at it's finest. This article is on Intuit. It's focused on Intuit's bad behaviour. ProPublica has other articles on the issues you are complaining about.

> This is "whataboutism" at it's finest.

That's not "whataboutism" at all, as I'm not defending Intuit's behavior.

> This article is on Intuit. It's focused on Intuit's bad behaviour. ProPublica has other articles on the issues you are complaining about.

I'm saying ProPublica should have referenced those articles, rather than making statements that imply everything is the tax preparation industry's fault.

So are aren't defending Intuit but, you are just saying that ProPublic must reference other material before focusing on Intuit? What about... This sounds like industry lobbying that will make it harder and more expensive for me to file my tax and increase the net worth of Sasan Goodarzi.

> So are aren't defending Intuit but, you are just saying that ProPublic must reference other material before focusing on Intuit?

No, I'm saying ProPublica shouldn't make the situation sound like it's all Intuit's fault.

> My issue is that the article, and many posters here, make it sound like all the ills of the US tax system trace back to Intuit.

Nobody except you is taking the article to imply that.

You're right. I think I'm mostly aggravated by the HN lens I'm viewing this through, which seems to be focusing on the tax prep industry while ignoring the forces that made the tax code a mess in the first place. That is evident from the people saying the IRS could just pre-fill the existing forms (which itself is an oversimplification of the situation).

No one else really has the same lobbying might as intuit. Even HR Block is smaller (and targets a different market)

The GP's point (I think) is that many companies have much greater lobbying might than Intuit (Amazon, Google, Cocacola, Unilever, ...). Those companies may not care so much about how taxes are filed the way Intuit does, but they do care about keeping complicated tax codes in place that include all their favorite loopholes. So they lobby for that, without much regard for the details of the filing procedure.

I'd argue that the corporate income tax being complex and the individual income tax being complex have little to do with each other

They've done various stories on the IRS and tax policy:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-political-dark-money-...

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-ameri...

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

The reporting on Intuit has been going on for years, but the recent onslaught is likely because their recent initial report on Turbotax obfuscating Google search results led to federal and state investigations, and possibly attracted whistleblowers who passed along the inside documents that make up this newer report (i.e. the snowball effect)

Disclosure: I used to work at ProPublica years ago. My tenure overlapped the authors', but I never worked on these stories.

> They may be fighting efforts to make filing easier under the current rules, but they aren't really doing anything to keep those rules a clusterfuck.

ProPublica is trusting the reader to understand that responsibility for the current state of US tax laws lies with the US government.

Then ProPublica should not be making statements in the article that explicitly tie Intuit lobbying to fighting efforts to improve the current tax code. See another of my replies for examples.

Are you saying that Intuit isn't lobbying to keep the current tax code, and tax filing, complex? Do you have information that refutes this article?

The article doesn't present any evidence that Intuit is lobbying to keep the tax code complex, just tax filing. The code complexity, as I have already stated multiple times, stems from a myriad of special interests.

This topic hits people in the wallet and makes them stupid as a result - I think they're being sincere, not malicious.

I didn't say they were being malicious, just myopic.

Most of the other people gaming the system are doing it to benefit themselves personally. Intuit is gaming the system so it can continue its rent-seeking behavior against the American tax payer at large. There is an element of direct unjust enrichment against the tax payer at large which is absent from other forms of tax code manipulation.

I agree. The article just doesn't seem to acknowledge that these other manipulations exist, or reference any of their other work on the subject. It's written as a standalone piece, and when taken as such seems to blame all the ills of the US tax code on the tax preparation industry.

Payday loans and financial derivative products both exist at opposite ends of 'creative finance' that can come back to bite you.

Payday loans, like what Intuit is doing, seeks to directly profit off of those who have the least. While they're both bad when they go wrong, it would muddy the waters to say 'but also there are other areas that are just as bad or worse depending on how you look at it.'

I'd go further to say what Intuit is doing is worse than the payday loan industry because it does it through regulatory capture instead of just desperation for capital.

Turbotax is my cheapest option to doing taxes.

My tax lawyer would cost me probably $40,000 to do the same thing just for the hours and their obsession with analyzing parallel legal theories and case law. I use my tax lawyer to construct the whole business model before any tax filings actually have to occur. Yes I could also consider a different lawyer and cpa for actually filing the tax return. They would also be more expensive than Turbotax and I would be paying two lawyer then.

Reading comprehension gives the biggest advantage with taxes. It is worth it for me.

The IRS is more of an ally than an adversary when you are using them to basically approve exactly how you wont pay them taxes, in advance.

Barrier of entry is pretty high to unlock that level, I dont mind, its what I always aspired to do.

There are other tax programs that are generally cheaper than turbotax.

yes, at this point I just don't want additional organizations having my data

credit karma having more comprehensive financial data on me? no thanks! just stick with the credit line approvals from self-reported income

Easiest way to do taxes is to do them by hand. There are copious amounts of guides from the irs explaining in detail how to fill in each box.

yes, for me the interrelated nature of some of the calculations on different forms is what I prefer a computer to do.

100 pages that I had to print twice and couldn't e-file, fun! but by hand? not fun

I did read the comprehensive instructions for some forms.

Paying taxes is so frustrating.

Gov : “Please pay us the taxes I owe”

Tax Payer : “Ok. How much do I owe?”

Gov : “We can’t tell you that. Hire an accountant if you need help”

Tax Payer : “fu*k fine. (Files hinder and makes one mistake)

Gov : “You owe us money!! You didn’t pay enough. You owe us interest on what’s due as well!”

Tax Payer : “I thought you didn’t know how much I owe! Just tell me!!!!”

Fin

Until garbage like this stops, you don't get to call our economic system a free market. This is plutocracy, plain and simple. It's not a free market when large incumbents can bribe the government into forcing their product to be needed.

In New Zealand, the involvement that I had with my tax department this year since they have switched to an automated system was checking my bank balance one day to find that I had received a tax refund.

Ok, I have a really dumb question...

Why does everyone say you can't file taxes for free? The IRS has a site for it here: https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...

I get that Intuit is fighting tooth and nail to keep their business, but "hiding" a page from google - seriously, is that to be considered evil now?

Seriously, I'm missing something in this conversation.

You CAN, if...

1) you are under a certain income threshold

2) you go seek out that particular page (vs searching free file in google and clicking on intuit)

Or you go directly to intuit and qualify as a “free filer” which you only qualify for if you have a dead simple return - w2 and no deductions or extra forms.

The problem isn’t that you can’t file free. The problem is that intuit is doing what it can to bury it while promoting its conveniently named “free” edition that bumps you up into a paid edition faster than you can say “what?”.

Free fillable forms are available to everyone, and referenced repeatedly in the Form 1040 instructions.

This is correct. The problem is the lobbying has stopped making forms easier or non-existent. They are complex because of private corporate influence, not the constituents of the I.R.S..

What does that have to do with the ability to e-file for free? I didn't say it was a good option, just that it existed. There's plenty to complain about without making things up ("You CAN, if... [...] 1) you are under a certain income threshold").

> The problem is the lobbying has stopped making forms easier or non-existent. They are complex because of private corporate influence, not the constituents of the I.R.S..

Where did I contradict this?

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything you wrote was incorrect. I was agreeing with you and this my opinion on the top level comment. Sorry for the confusion.

Isn’t tax filing complicated because of the tax system? If your income is low enough it is free. Below $66000. You just have to say no to add ons. State filing can be free if you shop around.

Free File: Do Your Federal Taxes for Free https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...

I am all for free filing software for the people!

What TurboTax offers that a free version may not is the ability for a CPA to sign off on one's taxes. That is worth paying for in my opinion. B/C they carry the liability if I were to be audited.

I think the IRS needs to simplify the filing process so that a CPA is not needed.

Sadly, this issue is more complex than intuits lobbying power.

Not a direct counter-point to this piece, but:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-commissioned-report-respond...

It's a high-level view of the 2 sides arguing about the Free File program.

I'm not in the US, but I'm not seeing the reason for all the anger.

Yes, they are hiding the free option, similarly to how Google for example was hiding the free option for the Gsuite - you had to dig for it in the menu.

Plus there are multiple alternatives.

What's wrong with a company using little tricks and dark patterns to nudge more people into paying for their service?

Google "free tax filing" and these organizations all promise free tax filing on the first page: IRS, eFile, FreeTaxUSA, TurboTax, H&R Block, TaxAct, and others. Intuit's not the top organic or paid slot. Are all of these equally misleading or is Intuit just called out for being the market leader?

Who is going to build this "free" tax filing system? I hope not the IRS [0]

0: https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/irs-predic...

"On 17 April 2018, the final day for U.S. citizens to file 2017 tax returns, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) suffered a major system failure related to the hardware supporting its 58-year old, 20-million-line Cobol-based Individual Master File system [PDF], which is still being used today to process the vast majority of individual tax returns. As a result of the failure, the IRS extended by a day the filing due date."

Maybe that's because a decades-old system hit capacity, and has nothing to do with the system design?

"While it’s true that the IRS has experienced budget reductions over the past several years, those cuts hardly explain a failure of an 18-month-old piece of computer hardware. More important, those claims conveniently ignore that the IRS has spent untold billions since the late 1960s on numerous attempts to modernize its IT systems, all centered on trying to replace the ancient IMF system, with minimum success."

I assume you didn't read the whole source

There is a branch of government in charge of large software projects: https://www.usds.gov

This looks very promising! I read more into this agency and it looks like they are looking to put a price tag on some of their services [0] From the article: "The hope is that by putting a price tag on some of USDS services, that will encourage agencies to develop their own native digital service teams, as the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have already done. That in turn will free up capacity so that more agencies can tap USDS personnel for their own needs."

0: https://fcw.com/articles/2019/06/17/weichert-usds-funding-ma...

Update: Services offered to other government branches, not to end-users.

Is there not an option that has all of the advantages of electronic filing, EXCEPT actually submitting the return? i.e. you print everything out at the end and mail it? Because I mean, that would make it immune to all lobbying but still be a huge improvement over filling it out by hand.

In norway, filing taxes is optional. Citisens are highly encouraged too log in to a website called AltInn (wich means literally everything in) and check the data, and do adjustments. Income, bank loans and investments are usually registered correctly.

Just use credit karma.

I guess this is why some wish to vote for Elizabeth Warren. This kind of crap goes on all the time. FWIW I think TurboTax is pretty useful and because it saves time worth paying for in many cases. However someone with very simple taxes, like working a job with no itemized deductions they should be able to file an online 1040EZ or = for free and in a few minutes. It's very simple. This is probably why the whole money-in-politics thing is so powerful as well.

I refuse to use TurboTax for my (albeit simple) tax filings. I used FreeTaxUSA last year and it was pretty solid.

Missing option: repeal the 16th amendment and get rid of the income tax. It's intrusive and complicated.

The income tax, designed to prevent the accumulation of wealth, needs to be replaced with a wealth tax[0]. This would simplify filing for the 99% of Americans who are not the 1%.

0: http://www.cosmicweenie.com/wealth_tax.pdf (don't let the domain name fool you...)

We are living in a conflicted world full of quid pro quos powered by lobbying congress.

Is it that time of the week again?

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you...

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-military-discoun...

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-funded-review-confirm...

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...

https://www.propublica.org/article/intuit-turbotax-h-r-block...

https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-...

https://www.propublica.org/article/listen-to-turbotax-lie-to...

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-tax-law-threatened-...

https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-scraps-provision...

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-get-turbotax-refun...

https://www.propublica.org/article/intuit-ceo-in-internal-vi...

https://www.propublica.org/article/here-are-your-stories-of-...

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-intuit-h-r...

https://www.propublica.org/article/elizabeth-warren-and-othe...

https://www.propublica.org/article/senior-irs-leaders-launch...

https://www.propublica.org/article/bill-to-limit-irs-ability...

And that's just ones from this year. I'm not saying TurboTax isn't a scummy company, but this is just getting ridiculous.

The crux of this article is a PowerPoint slide from 12 years ago? Really?

If you hover your mouse cursor over the underlined words in the article (these are called 'hyperlinks' or, more informally, 'links') and then hit the left mouse button, your World Wide Web browser will display other documents which ProPublica used for their reporting.

> The crux of this article is a PowerPoint slide from 12 years ago? Really?

The article definitely focuses on more than a single Powerpoint slide. In fact, in the same sentence you cite, there's a reference to a 2014 slide.

Hello

Anyone else read that as TurboGrafx?

When I lived in New Zealand, you didn't have to file at all. You could create an account on a website with your tax ID and see all the reports employers sent in. You could requests corrections if things were wrong and have any return transferred to a normal bank account.

In Australia, they had a desktop application you could download, provided by the government. It wasn't pretty, but it was straight forward and took less than an hour to go through the whole thing.

I once met an Aussie at a security meetup who worked at immigration and I told him how surprised I was that I got my visa in like two days. He was like, "oh I worked on that piece. Yea that use to take two weeks; but we were able to fix a lot of that process." I wouldn't be surprised if Australia taxes were all web based and even faster today.

Surely that's only for employees though, not for companies? This is how it works in several countries, including the UK - your employer tells the tax service about your salary and pension payments, and you only need to fill a tax return if you have "something else" to tell them about, such as another source of income.

How about a change.org petition and starting a github project to counter the lobbying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com