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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

A free program for doing US taxes that has the polish and SEO of TurboTax.

The ultimate successful exit sees the entire sector of “tax service middleman” drying up once you have cut off the revenue of TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation lobby, so they can no longer keep lobbying the government to have this complicated process instead of just automatically doing your taxes and sending you a bill like every other civilized country. Your company vanishes along with the rest of this sector.

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Seriously the IRS should just mail you filled in forms, they have all the data, you can mail back amendments. Or online. There's absolutely not a single reason any third party needs to be involved in this.

Canada's been experimenting with this lately [1].

Frankly, as a rule of thumb, if something is potentially big and impactful, and isn't well suited to being funded by a VC, it should just be a government service.

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

I might get downvoted or something for this, but have you seen the most recent episode of Patroit Act with Hassan Minhaj?

His last episode was all about why tax prep companies mislead customers and the Patriot Act team set up a site that points to free tax filing services. Characteristically, with a vulgar name: https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/

Think it's only a matter of time before one of the new age banks or investment management startups do this as a customer acquisition hook.

Nice intuition because it already exists in the UK for freelancers. Combined banking, accounting, auto tax return: https://getcoconut.com

I used https://www.taxhawk.com/ this past year. It is free for Federal, but does charge for state taxes and has "deluxe" paid versions. The free version worked well for me.

You may have a point on SEO. While SEO means nothing to me as a user, the fact that people think free apps don't exist certainly shows a marketing problem.

It's an awesome idea. I wonder if it could be crowdfundable. There are more than enough people out there that hate the system.

I have always wanted to create a non-profit to do this :)

The analogy I used to use is a Robinhood for Taxes, but really now that Robinhood is increasingly seen as a manipulative tool, maybe I don't really want to associate with that brand anymore? (although I'm still a user though)

Dennis Moore. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2nrqgb :)

The reason this is not the case is irs is prohibited from doing this. You can thank big lobbyists from Tax prep providers (intuit). I hate this. Talk to your congresspeople about this.

I’m also a turbo tax customer. :(

Well, you should go live in Canada and try https://simpletax.ca

The UX simplicity and documentation is just amazing.

Isn’t CreditKarma trying a free alternative to TurboTax et al?

Turbotax purchased CreditKarma

Maybe a good VC play. Build a good alternative to Turbotax et al., force them to acquire you, sleep in bed of money.

Yup, should obviously be blocked on antitrust grounds but I doubt the current DoJ will do so.

actually, wouldn't it be better if this was open source effort?

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