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Comment by dwighttk | Hacker News Reader

Dang it where will I go for actually free tax prep next year?

CreditKarma has worked well for me the past two years. I have W2 and 1099s and K1s and they never asked me to upgrade to handle additional forms. I think I used tax act before that and always had to pay something To unlock those “weird” forms.

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I've been a big fan of CreditKarma for a few years now, but they dropped the ball for me in a big way this year with some flagrantly incorrect behavior.

I used https://www.freetaxusa.com/ and it was fantastic. The interface is a little bit clunky, but the value is there. They charge $7 for "deluxe support" which was easily the best $7 I can remember spending.

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Edit: re-reading this comment I see how it reads very much like I'm making the whole thing up and shilling for Free Tax USA, so some more detail on the CK incorrect behavior I experienced -- CK kept listing my K-1 partnership income as income from rental properties, which in turn caused the interface to be broken if I tried to click into the rental properties section where it valiantly tried to show me the zero rental properties that contributed to the number from my partnership income. I contacted support, and they told me they didn't support K1 partnership income. I asked what it meant to not support K1 partnership income if they had K1 partnership forms to fill out. They said they'd get back to me by email. They emailed me a few days later (after the filing deadline) with a generic link to partnership income documentation. By then I had already filed with Free Tax USA.

Thanks, it's always good to hear about the alternative options. Yeah, HN instinctively goes after anything that sounds vaguely shill-y but don't worry, I trust that you haven't been here 7 years just to shill for freetaxusa :)

Huh. Handled my K1 fine the past two years. (Thanks I’ll check freetaxusa out if CK goes under)

I always say this when I can, Credit Karma’s support is terrible. I would never recommend them. Great if nothing goes wrong but you’ll regret it if you need them for something.

Good to know. I wonder how their audit defense works if regular customer service sucks.

I was pleased with FreeTaxUSA as well (have used them twice now.) I moved over from TaxAct when I felt their price increases had become unreasonable.

I too have been using Free Tax USA for the past few years and recommend it. I used TaxAct before it, but it just got way too pricey. TaxAct is good if you're eligible for Freefile though.

Fill out the forms yourself. Most people's tax situation doesn't change significantly from year to year. Just crib off the previous years return and alter the numbers where appropriate.

Mine tax situation is very shifty. Though my w2 job increasing to more than 50% of my income should settle things out a bunch, I’ve always had multiple 1099s and the k1 is quite different every year.

Really amazing we haven’t created an open source tax software yet.

Tax preparation & downloading forms to print is free. All these products charge customers for electronic filing.

And you can even electronically file with the IRS's Free Fillable Forms.

That's explicitly not an IRS product, though the IRS does a lot to obscure this fact.

CK Tax doesn't charge you for Fed or State eFile.

As far as I can tell credit karma makes money by referring people to credit cards and other financial instruments. Their emails are easy enough to ignore.

Tax law is complex and change frequently, it would have to track 50 states + federal tax law.

Not at all. Open source software usually falls under 2 categories:

1. Passion projects by passionate individuals

2. Released by companies to burnish the rep, improve recruiting, or reduce maintenance costs by sharing them

Laboriously writing tax rules for 50 states + federal the government can't possibly be any programmer's idea of fun. And the software has economic value so a company wouldn't write and open-source it, unless you can find a complement[1] to tax-prep that's even more profitable.

1. https://www.gwern.net/Complement

You forgot:

3) created by people to automate repetitive or expensive tasks for themselves.

I’d be interested in supporting the project because I do my taxes every year and it’s a laborious process.

No reason to capture 100% of the tax code. An 80/20 solution would be great.

Depends on what the 80% covers. Tax prep is something that you have to get right because of the legal consequences.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver/

although I never tried it myself

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