100% this is to squash Credit Karma’s free tax product.
This whole for-profit tax software market needs to be killed.
This whole for-profit tax software market needs to be killed.
Think of it as announcing a $7B X Price for anyone building this again.
And if you make a mistake in your software and the user gets audited, you can bet you’ll be sued by the user eventually.
On the plus side, it’s a lot harder to buy someone with morals than a VC backed startup.
You of course also have to build out distribution channels to acquire users which is also very costly.
EDIT: Changed "keep the tax code complex" to "keep tax filing complex", since someone asked for (and I couldn't provide) evidence of keeping the tax code itself complex.
The purpose of their lobby is to prevent the IRS or state tax authorities from building their own versions and just letting tax payers use them.
I cannot.
It's slightly different I guess. But since a lot of the paperwork you have to feed into turbotax is already known to the IRS, it's possible the IRS having their own product would have really simplified things. Then again, gov websites are pretty hit and miss.
Literally no one is proposing that the tax system be changed so that you get a bill that you have to pay, every proposal is that the government should send you forms prepared with the information they have, and you can file different forms if have additional information.
You gotta complain about it being unfair for people in cash businesses to get that information or something, the lack of incentive alignment is not even close to a real problem with the idea.
"Each year, Americans pay billions of dollars to Intuit, the corporate owner of TurboTax, to help them navigate the byzantine nightmare of filing a tax return. And each year, Intuit reinvests a small sliver of that revenue into political contributions and lobbying efforts to keep taxes pointlessly complicated."
Anyway, I edited my comment to read "keep tax filing complex", which is much better documented in the articles, though I don't think it would change opinions or arguments, but in the spirit of being as exact as possible.
Most people take the standard deduction. For most people, the complexity of filing is relatively low.
The W2 and 1099 forms that people get contain just about 95% of the information needed to file their taxes.
The current process involves getting those forms, which the IRS gets anyway, and re-entering the information into a privately run tax website. If you do this on IRS free fillable forms, you’ll have to do a significant amount of extra effort (for example, TurboTax can automatically pull in your W2 with partial information while the IRS system requires that you enter in every value manually).
Just entering the W2 is a lot of the effort for people on the IRS Free Fillable Form system.
Let’s continue in the workflow. You’ve got your wage information entered. The main questions to answer are:
- What’s your filing status
- Did you do things that could be deductions (tuition costs, mortgage payments, etc)
- Are you poor enough or have special circumstances to get tax credits?
For a huge percentage of people, the IRS wouldn’t even have to ask your address to get this done. They could simply verify your filing status and ask the same kinds of questions that TurboTax does to determine which forms get filled out. They would even have to ask for fewer pieces of information because, unlike TurboTax, they already have your W2 and 1099 forms and many others like bank interest and retirement/HSA distributions on file. Again, most of the effort in TurboTax is just entering in the data from the forms and answering a question or two.
Taxes are only truly complex for a very small percentage of Americans who have built up enough wealth to have complex tax situations. For everyone else, they’re using free tax services, but are unnecessarily providing data to third party private companies and being upsold on unneeded add-ons constantly. Half of the time it takes to run through TurboTax is just declining all the unrelenting offers to pay them money.
Essentially, the problem here is that the IRS could literally copy the best tax software and just use that for everyone. Instead their offering (free fillable forms) is artificially terrible and functions as literal digital representations of paper forms instead of abstracting away the complexity.
Even for paper filling, the IRS could even have an advantage over TurboTax. Here’s how the workflow would work:
- The IRS receives wage and other tax forms from employers and financial institutions as they already do now.
- The IRS then prints out a customized form (automatically generated) that asks questions related to those forms they received. This would essentially be like TurboTax on paper.
- The form is mailed to each taxpayer.
- The taxpayer answers the questions and returns it with either payment/refund information or the IRS uses those answers to send you a bill.
- Taxpayers with additional deductions above the standard deduction could either be provided with a follow-up or be asked/opt to file some additional forms.
None of this is difficult to implement, especially compared to the alternative of dozens of tax filing firms implementing all of this separately.
The IRS is severely and chronically underfunded (a situation that gets worse every year) and can't even perform its basic tax collection functions at this point. Even if it were allocated the budget to make a TurboTax competitor (the complexity of which I think you severely underestimate) I am extremely skeptical that the resulting product would actually be as good as TurboTax. The net result could easily be us all paying (in the form of taxes) for software that no one uses anyway.
I think "IRS makes a better TurboTax" is basically a fantasy, and Intuit is a convenient villain to blame for that fantasy not coming true. They appear to be taking steps to discourage it, but I highly doubt they, or they plus all other lobbyists combined, are a but-for cause of the fact that filing taxes is difficult.
[0]https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/bills?c...
In Belgium, most people's taxes are a postcard that says "here's what we think you owe, do nothing if you agree". Before that it was about the work of a single 1099-EZ. (Belgium is not unique in this.)
This is mostly due to the size of the country (compared to, say, Switzerland) and doesn't have anything to do with for-profit tax software.
Anyway: both Switzerland (your example) and Belgium (my example) have multi-layered governments. Belgium's one is particularly complex, with "communities" which are language unions and "regions" that largely overlap but not quite, as well as province-level and city-level taxes. Each of these has their own institutions and most incur taxes. The multi-layered government is far more complex than the US, but this does not result in comparable complexity to my US filing. (I'd also argue it's far more sensitive: secession has been a possible outcome in my lifetime in a way that it really has not been in the US.)
Meanwhile: the IRS has simply agreed not to provide free tax filing software. Why is that good for taxpayers?
I do know that there are weird and frustrating intertwinings of US Federal and State tax codes and I wish I didn't have to deal with that. Kill the SALT deduction!
1. Er, not sure why I brought another small European country into the discussion. I meant to replicate your example but brainfarted.
Mind you that this does not even anything at city level.
Imagine if Illinois was mostly part of the Midwest Region (a governmental entity that transcends states but is not federal and also has a tax authority), but not including Chicago. That'd be close. Also the largest party in its government wants the Midwest to secede from the Union.
At least these are collected by a single entity, the NYS tax folks!
Consider, for example, the deductibility of state and local taxes. This is a source of significant tax code complexity, but various constituencies have howled quite loudly about even reducing the amount of the deduction. I am doubtful that it can be eliminated completely.
If your income is entirely W2 (any stocks sales if any are in tax advantaged accounts) and you take the standard deduction, generally your taxes can be automated easily. That covers most people. Honestly, the only thing that even makes my taxes complicated are investments (made worse by CA diverging from the federal government in matters like HSAs) -- even then, until recently, most of that could be automated from 1099b filings.
Turbotax if anything makes taxes more complex than they have to. There are so many things in their "step by step" for deductions that are completely irrelevant if you are taking the standard deduction. It would be a huge improvement for them to simply pose a question:
"Is there any chance the sum of the stuff below is going to exceed $14k? YES -- itemize. No -- skip"
I suspect they don't do this though to keep convincing users of the need for complex, pricey software.
So I do agree, TT could be much better by explaining the deductions (standard vs itemized) up front and asking if you think you want to answer all the detailed questions.
Mortgage interest was always the big one, so all new homeowners would have to itemize. But mortgage interest goes down over time, so you have to keep doing it every year just to see when it's not enough to qualify.
You can also deduct your home office, as a percentage of the surface of your home and share of the utilities. That's one that might apply to a lot of tech people.
Another big one is charitable donations. Some people give up to $1000 (and more), which could put you over the standard limit.
I think the deductions are really what make US tax complicated for the regular person (businesses are another can of worms). It's like saying: you could pay less tax if you can find of all the ways that the tax code has said you can deduct from your income.
But the IRS gets to bear the brunt of any complexity in the tax code, and they've already suggested free filing. They also clearly already know what to expect in significant detail anyway, since they adjusted my return last year.
This was part of my point with Belgium elsewhere in the tread: Belgium has tremendously intricate (and sensitive) governmental structure, but that hasn't prevented them from making tax filing a postcard for virtually everyone. The actual tax code is a lot more complex than the postcard (though still far less complex than the US' tax code), but the tax authority does the math, suggests a number, and if you have some reason to dispute it you go file a "proper" return. So: yes, maybe we can make the tax code simpler, but that should not preclude us from making _filing_ simpler regardless of how complex the tax code is.
1. eliminate all deductions in favor of the standard deduction
2. once 1 is done you can actually eliminate the standard deduction as well and make it a part of the tax tables with a 0% rate up to various income levels.
3. eliminate the AMT and the NIIT
4. move all FICA taxes to the employee side (which is where the incidence actually is anyways) and thus eliminate the self-employment tax.
5. roll back all the crap about S corps that got introduced in the 2017 tax bill
6. standardize all 50 state tax forms (the rates can be different but the structure should be the same)
Corporate income tax is regressive, because AmaGooBookSoft is much better at not paying taxes than a mom and pop grocery store. But I think you've lost most of the constituents that think that's a good thing after saying you're gonna slash corporate taxes to literally zero.
I'd love to see land tax too, but I appreciate that the Constitution doesn't make that easy. But damnit, if we somehow outlawed liquor, we can outlaw inefficient tax strategies.
And yes, Georgist taxes on the value of unimproved land would have so many benefits.
Can we get a carbon tax & dividend while we're at it? Dare to dream!
1. This simplifies things like crazy, but could have all sorts of spill-over effects. (most notably reduction in charitable giving)
3. AMT, yes. NIIT is only another tax bracket though?
6. This would help dramatically, but I'm not sure how to execute it. CA nonconformity to all sorts of federal tax rules is a huge pain point (HSA being the worse one for the regular person), but it seems CA could care less about the complexity that hits its citizens.
3. Not really because of the weird way it calculates the interactions between capital and labor income.
6. Indeed. I never said the enacting the plan would be easy!
I'm skeptical that much progress can really be made on the latter (for-profit filing) without significant work on the former (code complexity). Perhaps I am wrong though.
Maybe I'll go read about the Belgian tax code. Sounds like some light reading for a Sunday afternoon. ;-)
As far as I know they can correct isolated pieces of information (e.g. wrong numbers from a W-2) but do not have the ability to prepare a return from scratch.
Edit: I mean, they can obviously put all the pieces of information they know about you onto one return and do the calculations. But there will be many pieces they don't know, and I think you are unlikely to get an accurate return without them (or based on guessing). But if the IRS says otherwise I would like to know.
You're of course correct that they do not have every document to prepare a return from scratch: but they do have the vast majority of them (in the cartesian product set of (Person x Document)), and certainly a similar to what other industrial nations who have reduced taxes to a postcard notice have--so the assertion also seems credible to me.
Regarding your second point: the IRS has a lot of documents but it is dwarfed by the total amount of information needed to prepare a return. Even just to determine who your dependents are is a complex flowchart[1] for which there are no official documents in existence that can provide the answers. These kinds of things come up all the time when doing ordinary people's taxes, not just in esoteric situations. (I know because I used to volunteer to do it.)
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
[1] https://apps.irs.gov/app/vita/content/globalmedia/dependency...
Unfortunately there just isn't much of a constituency in the US for eliminating tax code complexity.
(Imagine the code was so complicated that they didn’t know, and they relied on your honesty. How well would that work?)
In all the countries I’ve lived, the government simply tells you that number. You can dispute it if you think it wrong.
In the US, you have to tell them that number, and you had better have added it up right because they can trivially check. Oh, and you pay for this privilege?
This is not true. Just as an example, I have various business expenses that I incurred while consulting last year. The government has no way of knowing in advance what those expenses are.
I regularly adjust the number, claiming various expenses etc.
I have been audited twice, which was actually a lot less scary than it sounds.
This is normal, easy and doesn’t cost and doesn’t even need complicated software. I have filled in forms, but I believe you can also do it online in the country I’m talking about now.
Most people’s tax is not that complicated, especially with the increased standard deduction and most people not itemizing anymore.
Make sure you update your privacy settings: https://www.privasectech.com/changes-to-simpletax/
I think the reason good free tax filing exists in Canada, but not in the US, is partly because US tax code is too complicated, and partly because there there are dozens of them: federal, 50 states, and a couple of territories, each with their own tax rules.
In Canada, you have one federal and 13 provincial and territorial tax codes; and you only have to file taxes to two agencies: CRA/ARC and Revenu Québec. It is orders of magnitude easier to make a tax software for Canada, thus giving it away for free is possible. For many years, SimpleTax/ImpôtSimple was a three-person operation. Their team has grown to 12 people now [0]. I imagine if they want to extend their services to US, they need to increase their headcount by a factor of ten or more. And at that point, not charging for use would no longer be an option.
That said this experiment may come to an early end with this acquisition ;-).
I'm sure there will continue to be plenty of free ways to file my taxes - I usually owe a little bit every year so I'm not very keen on paying even more to file - but the sites I used before Credit Karma were all just more complicated and took longer to file.
One thing that's usually hard to find is the form to enter my mortgage credit certificate. Since it's not the most common thing (a program for first-time homebuyers / buyers in targeted areas administered on a state level) I've usually had to go through some wizard and answer the questions just right (e.g. lie and say I bought a house within the past year) to get it to offer me that form, rather than just picking it from a long list of options.
100% to get credit karma's valuable user data.
Intuit also has free tax product ( fed and state ). Their for-profit tax product is for more complex tax preparation ( home sales, stock sales, etc ) or people with higher income.