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Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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