Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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Excellent news, and congrats to Propublica for in no small part making it happen.

This wasn't just a shady operation -- Turbotax openly lied to customers about its free file program, it deliberately suppressed the program from search results, it lied to veterans. It was 100% acting in bad faith during negotiations with the IRS.

Sometimes topics like this end up becoming kind of ideological or partisan; but in this case I feel like Intuit is just very objectively in the wrong, and that the IRS agreement for the free file program very objectively just was not working. I myself contacted Turbotax about their free edition and got personally lied to about the differences between the programs.[0]

> In this call, I was told that the form availability between the Free File and Free edition were the same, and I wouldn't be eligible for either. To check this, I created a second account and added the same forms to the Free File program. I was never charged or told that I was ineligible. All of the forms were added successfully.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piuv7KH37D4

There's a good Planet Money episode that explains how surprisingly it is still a partisan issue. The Republican argument, at least from certain prominent people in the party, is that if paying taxes gets too easy the average American will be less likely to push their representatives to lower taxes or to oppose new taxes that get proposed.

> is that if paying taxes gets too easy the average American will be less likely to push their representatives to lower taxes or to oppose new taxes that get proposed.

This is problematic here (small EU country). People have no idea how much taxes they pay, and believe free (healthcare, schooling,...) is actually free, and that government can pay for anything. If average Joe (Janez here) would know how much taxes he pays for (eg.) health, and what kind of a shitty service he gets for that, he'd be protesting already,... but since it's 'free', it's ok, just so he doesn't have to pay for it (out of pocket directly).

I do get that angle of it, but that partisanship shouldn't extend so far as to excuse lying to people.

I guess what I meant by partisanship is, we could have a higher-level argument about whether or not the IRS should in theory have its own filing program, and that's the way that Turbotax wants to phrase this -- that it's just that Democrats want a government program. But Turbotax was blatantly involved in false advertising, lying to customers, rigging search results to get around their obligations.

Intuit is putting out videos that say, "Probublica just has an agenda", they want to make it a partisan issue. But it's like a gun company selling guns that randomly explode in your hands, and trying to say that it's an attack on the 2nd Amendment when they're forced to issue a safety recall.

When I describe the issue to people, I try not to let them have a partisan debate about taxes in general. When that debate starts to come up, I push back on the simpler issue, which is just that false advertising shouldn't be OK.

Which 'prominent people'? It sounds like an incredibly silly argument, one I had never heard of before.

Honestly, knowing how much taxes you pay is important (and as i said in a comment above, problematic, if people don't know).

But this can be solved by autofiling taxes, and then sending a yearly report: you earned X, paid Y taxes, out of those, Z goes to this, Q to that, W to that other thing, you've used these government services this year, that cost that much money, etc.

No doubt, the thing for most people, including anyone who hates paying taxes is the bottom line. I don't see any connection though between the bottom line paid and how forgiving people will be when they discover how easy it is to file. I suspect the word prominent is a misnomer at best, it just makes no sense to me.

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