Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year

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46 pointsselbyk11 comments

I will be boycotting TurboTax this year. Their latest ad campaign[1] is particularly egregious. It claims that (with TurboTax's help) "people can be good at anything... even taxes". Given the amount of lobbying that Intuit does to make taxes more complicated, this message is disingenuous at best.

[1] https://www.campaignlive.com/article/turbotax-returns-new-ca...

So the dichotomy between the advertising and the actual actions is what caused you to boycott in this particular year? Whereas before you didn't care?

I've actually been avoiding TurboTax for about 3 years now. Mostly due to dissatisfaction with their lobbying policy.

I have been very satisfied with CreditKarma's free tax filing. It has _actually_ been free for me, while TT has felt like a bait-and-switch ("felt like" because it is).

Yes, I realize that even though I am not paying for the product, I'm giving them the benefit of my personal data. But at least I am not aware of CK lobbying congress to keep an unnecessarily complex tax system.

For most of my life, I just worked my own taxes and filed on paper. Used TT recently as my taxes were quite complex for a few years.

It seems now that filing on paper is no longer a practical thing to do, time- and complexity-wise. What's the closest thing available these days? (for federal and all states, obviously)

I don't really want to go with somebody I've never heard of, but H&R Block seems to be providing their free option to anyone with income under $69K. They have an option to import your previous year's Turbotax file.

Does that include state tax filing?

It appears to, however I haven't completed the process yet.

Does anyone know of any open source software that can help with filing/calculating taxes? Would be very useful to people who don’t want to be stuck with proprietary software

The normal approach is to keep copies in a format that isn't dependent on specific tax software, and the IRS only has a few years to audit you or ask for more money. I was undergoing a ten year background check once where I had to certify no government debts, and found a small underpayment (W-2 that the IRS had but I never received) and they wouldn't take my money.

I think worrying about open source in this context is optimizing entirely the wrong thing. If you keep things simple, then at worst, you'd have to copy your printout onto the forms for an amended return by hand, and that wouldn't be too onerous.

There's open tax solver, which helps with computing the numbers that go on the 1040. It doesn't do any of the handholding turbo tax does, but it's handy for doing tax simulations.

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