Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp
github.com
github.com
The submission form is essentially a wizard that asks you questions related to your situation and your past year. Depending on your answers, it expands different parts of the form. Other parts, such as tax exempt donations are automatically filled out based on information that the recipients filled out for you.
I visited the UX department of the Norwegian equivalent to the IRS (Skatteetaten), and they had almost every device you could think of (eye-tracking being the most fun). No wonder they made good forms.
I understand that some people object politically to taxes, but as long as it's one of the certainties of life (death being the other), I cannot understand why filling out the submission seems so hard in most countries...
The bad reason: Lobbying by intuit and parties to prevent easy tax preparation. Their ROI on regulatory capture is very very good.
In reality, people are painfully aware of how annoying filing taxes is and hopeful that they will get some money back later. The system is so convoluted, most people pay someone else to take care of it for them. Not to mention, most people barely understand what's happening when they are filing their taxes.
That’s only a good reason if you’re opposed to the actual programs and/or outcomes. If you favor those programs and outcomes, making people “painfully aware” of their cost almost certainly undermines them. Which...
> The bad reason: Lobbying by intuit and parties to prevent easy tax preparation. Their ROI on regulatory capture is very very good.
Tax prep companies certainly don’t have this kind of power, and only one of the parties has that platform. That’s who’s invested in making taxation feel painful. Not just in terms of awareness but in policy too.
You'd be surprised.
Most of the people that philosophically opposed to easy taxes, are philosophically opposed to taxes in general and by extension most of the programs the taxes fund.
I am one of those people, doubly so for income based taxation which IMO is unethical. I prefer a Henry George Style single tax system for public finance but that is beyond the scope of this thread
Not at all. I support bigger government providing more services. I’d happily pay a lot more taxes. But I also support forcing people to grapple with the cost of government once a year. They should be making the informed decision to pay more or less taxes, not acquiescing to it merely because the government automatically takes their money and makes it so they never have to think about how much.
My brother in law, who is 20 and just starting to have to pay taxes, called my wife and I to complain. It’s an easy form for him to fill out, but he had to write a check because his employers didn’t withhold enough. I felt like it was an excellent learning experience.
But that's one-sided: people do not have the same requirement to "grapple" with the benefits of government once a year. That feeds right into known cognitive biases, where we underweight small but steady effects and overweight concentrated effects.
If you had a "yearly day of reckoning" with your partner where you re-hashed every argument, fight, or disagreement from the previous year without commensurate attention to the benefits, I daresay it would not be good for your relationship.
Moreover, this approach doesn't even seem to be effective at instruction. In particular, many people don't seem to understand the difference between marginal and average tax rates (link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724773/), which is a precondition for understanding the system as a whole.
Presumably you experience that every day. Moreover, politicians spend tons of time talking about those benefits.
That’s the kind of thing that becomes invisible when contrasted with a major personal economic event.
The current system feels more calibrated so that people have a negative association with the IRS, rather than being well-informed about how much they're paying.
Your argument seems to be that if you pay more taxes, then you get good programs and services.
In a similar vein, you should give your kid lots of lunch money to take to school, because he would have a more nutritious lunch. :)
One thing that confounds me is how do taxes tend to increase as a percentage (and will it only end because of mathematical limitations like the laffer curve?)
Having the filing process be complicated or tedious doesn't really do much to give people a more accurate perspective on the financial burden of taxation to them. If you could get your tax forms filled out automatically in 10 seconds but the result was "you have to send the IRS a check for $10,000", that would have a far greater awareness-building effect than having to spend 4-6 hours dealing with forms and paperwork only to conclude that "you don't owe any taxes" (because the money was already withheld as you earned it over the course of the year).
Of course, this change would also cause a lot of hardship because quite a lot of people would find it difficult, for various reasons, to save up money to pay taxes if they weren't having someone else do it for them automatically. And I'd expect that this hardship would probably lead more in the direction of political pressure to reinstitute W-2 deductions rather than pressure to reduce or eliminate income taxes.
Having worked on W-2 (salary with automatic deduction from each paycheck) for my whole life until last year, when I switched to 1099 (making quarterly estimated tax payments and sending the tax authorities a check), I really had the "wow, I never quite noticed how much I was paying in taxes before!" experience.
[1] Note that the Norwegian tax system is progressive, so median wage earners don't pay as much as that.
I listened to a couple of episodes of Planet Money a while back that others might find relevant. They address how some state / local governments raise money in regions where opposition to taxes is high.
The Liberty City (https://www.npr.org/2019/10/18/771371881/episode-945-the-lib...)
Fine and Punishment (https://www.npr.org/2021/02/12/967260423/planet-money-fine-a...)
Essentially, the subjects of each episode use the justice system to raise funds from speeding tickets, court / prison fees, etc.
They do allow installments the following year, so you can replicate the monthly deductions, but it’s plainly apparent how much you’re paying since you need to pay it separately each month.
This is true in the US as well, but the tax authority (IRS) gives you nothing but blank forms to fill out yourself.
It is more like a test, where you get nothing if you answer correctly and penalty if you make a mistake.
Note: IRS does provide a way to download what they know as a pdf (what banks reported, for example), so one can get some help with the "test"
That’s what happened to me when TurboTax applied too many credits.
That’s when I learned that the IRS had everything they needed to just send me a bill.
That said there are ways they could build around it but it’s the IRS so that’ll never happen.
The IRS does not have the resources to manually verify all of everyone's income, so instead they use a process of flags which trigger audits of varying depth. Flags include things such as certain reported amounts/types of values. Shallow audits review some submitted records, and the deepest ones are detailed, extensively scrutinizing all aspects of all records by a forensic accountant in an attempt to identify some criminal behavior.
But I have no idea how much of this is true as I think about it. It's just some things I've intuited/reasoned out over time.
Seriously though, I would love (hate) to read what sort of ethical backflips they had to do to make IRS reform a bad thing. I'm presuming they tried to make logical arguments.
The following year it was going to be rolled out to everyone. The state had invested millions in it. The legislative session before it was to go live Intuit successfully lobbied both the governor and legislature to kill it.
Why would they need to make logical arguments? Money (lobbying) is far better at influencing politicians.
However, the politicians that are getting lobbied sometimes try to make logical arguments, and they typically say that making the process harder encourages popular support for lower taxes.
The US needs serious reform on what it allows corporate entities to do. Your common citizen couldn't get away with a fraction of the arguable theft to the general population most these companies get away with. It's not technically "theft" though since the theives define the rules and what constitutes theft to not include their actions.
Alas, I don't know how we accomplish such reform. It increasingly seems to be yet another lost battle and perhaps lost war. Aside from consumers essentially checking out as many segments of systems and allowing them to crumble under their own weight and then rebuild them after under stricter policy, I'm not sure what can be done. Legisilation doesn't seem to reflect the needs of the many and continues to cater to the wants of a few.
I suspect Intuit and the like argue that any sort of electronic system of improvement is some direct competition to the private market and is unethical. They probably also argue that the free market version of something like TurboTax offers a more cost effective solution to the general tax payer than what it would cost the government to simply fix parts of a broken process to simplify things. In the short term these arguments could be viable but I'm pretty sure within a few years time, a tax system that didn't involve so many people spending hours of their time navigating through these commercial packages while also paying them plus many still needing an accountant to speak to could possibly be cheaper than a simplified tax system.
Obviously simplifying the tax system can have socioeconomic effects. Many deductions exist to try and fix those issues or help push policy onto citizens and some of the complexity is unavoidable as even those dedications are loopholes around existing legislation. It seems to me though we can still allow for these sort of dedications to let people who need tax relief get it and not what we currently have where the people getting tax relief are the ones with mountains of capital to hire professionals to find and exploit tax loopholes while so many who need the tax relief likely overpay comparatively as a relative portion of their total assets.
Of course, if you actually incurred more expenses (and kept track), you can claim that, but I have my doubts about most people doing it.
Did it today. It takes 5 minutes. You need the normal HMRC account though.
Is it just a double-edged sword that we have to thank for making us (one of) the economic powerhouse(s) of the world? At the same time, it feels like it to blame on why we can't have anything nice when compared to European countries. Am I out of line/uneducated on this matter? I very well could be.
I hate just chalking the root of problems up to some massive unbeatable evil force (like lobbying).
My guess would be the will to collect taxes is stronger than the lobbying to make it more difficult. In Europe there is far less opposition to taxation as well.
I do think the FPTP system in the US and UK concentrates power. And that makes them better able to exploit foreign countries (Arms deals, coups etc). But that seems less about lobbying it's more that the concentration of power makes lobbying more profitable.
Among other reasons, America has a uniquely loose political fundraising / election spending system. If all else fails, a company like H&R Block can directly take out election ads -- with business funds -- to campaign against candidates who would support simplified filing measures. This would be somewhere between illegal and heavily curtailed in other countries.
The net effect is to give greater policy weight to issues that give concentrated benefits to (or avoid concentrated costs on) small, well-funded groups at the expense of diffuse costs (or foregone benefits) to the general public.
In the 2020 election, pretty much every ballot measure to increase taxes failed, including in blue states like Illinois and Colorado.
Other countries have lobbying too. What they don’t have is a huge population that hates taxes with a passion.
Our origin story is literally a tax revolt.
“No taxation without representation” — they weren't looking to get a couple of new members elected to Parliament. Definitely focused on the no taxation part.
- Tax prep companies like Intuit have a vested interest in keeping tax prep difficult.
- Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform) believes that making filing taxes easier will make people more okay with paying taxes, and as a result, many conservative policymakers won't bite. (It's slightly more complicated than this, but I believe this assessment to be accurate.)
Here's a Planet Money podcast: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...
And a ProPublica series on Intuit: https://www.propublica.org/series/the-turbotax-trap
It's tinfoil hat, but my only conclusion is the actual reasons for the policy are so incredibly unpopular that they invent these realities to obscure them.
I love paying my taxes and support higher taxes with more government services. But I agree with Norquist that it’s a useful exercise for people to go through once a year and write down how much they make and what part of that the government is taking. I don’t like the idea of socializing people to accept higher taxes by deducting them automatically and making it so they never have to think about how much they’re paying.
Take investments. The current way I get 1099-INT and 1099-DIV forms from a variety of sources. I've got to go to each source and find and download the form.
They are all laid out differently, so there is some confusion when I'm trying to find the right number to use for my filing.
I get so caught up in the mechanics of finding the 1099s, and ensuring that I've got them all, and finding the right data and copying it to or adding it to the right line on the right form that I don't really notice the numbers themselves.
If the IRS sent me something that said "Here are all the 1099s we have received from your banks and brokers. We received forms from <list of banks and brokers>", and had a nice table of the 1099-INTs and 1099-DIVs and any other similar forms, each telling me where it was from, the amount of interest or dividends or whatever, how much of that was taxable, and if it was ordinary income, short term capital gains, or long term capital gains, with totals at the bottom, I'd be much more likely to actually notice the numbers.
Even if I still had to copy the numbers to my IRS filings, it would be a vast improvement, both to making less work for me and to Norquist's supposed goal of making me more aware of how much I make and how much of that goes to taxes.
That’s what they are claiming, but there are many ways (probably a lot better), of drawing attention to taxes, aside from forcing you to go through a bad process.
Additionally, if they were truthful about what they are saying, they should be trying to draw attention to government budgets and make them transparent, i.e. how much the government spends and collects.
Government spending is out of control, and clearly people being forced to file their taxes through a crappy system hasn’t fixed that. Why would anyone ever think that keeping things as they are will do it?
Drawing attention to budgets should not only be about the way the money is spent, but also about the way the money is collected.
In any case, the point still stands. There are many ways to make people be aware of their taxes, and probably one of the worst is making it hard for people to file their tax return.
It’s been tried in America. The idea that we’ll have Scandinavian-style benefits without raising taxes on “middle class people” (defined to include people making as much money as five median households) is the centerpiece of the platform of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has tremendous media visibility. Everyone acts like someone else will pay the $30 trillion price tag for Medicare for All, etc.
And most people focus primarily on the balance or refund due and their marginal tax bracket, not on the total tax liability or the effective total tax rate. Lots of confused or inaccurate conclusions get drawn.
Were it that simple, I would agree. This approach is problematic in the US because:
- the tax code is too complex for the average citizen to approach on their own,
- powerful interests such as Intuit have a vested interest in keeping things difficult for their own gain, and
- reporting your income incorrectly (when the IRS already knows what to expect!) can expose one potential criminal penalties.
> I don’t like the idea of socializing people to accept higher taxes by deducting them automatically and making it so they never have to think about how much they’re paying.
I think this is an implementation detail; there are solutions to removing unnecessary pain from tax filing that combat regulatory capture while keeping people involved with the process of taxation. Advocacy for lower taxes and tax reform are not mutually exclusive.
Why is it constructed in that way? There's a reason, it doesn't come from nowhere. What is the reason?
Pretty basic stuff here
Yet investment in the IRS is highly likely to result in recapturing the huge amount of legal taxes they miss, if they were only able to. Clearly the status quo is insufficient to actually collect the taxes currently on the books.
Of course tax law in the US is also politically designed to make policy that results in favored industries and organizations and to make this as obfuscated as possible, resulting in crazy complexity, which of course also benefits the tax prep industry.
The IRS knows everything about your taxes. The filing process is about allowing the citizen to make deductions and providing flexibility by default.
I actually prefer it this way. Note that I’m not saying that the actual filing process is good - that has ways to improve. But, I’d rather take action on my part than government assuming on my behalf. I want to file taxes.
I feel like I might be the only person that likes filing taxes. It’s sort of a Zen mode for me. I love it.
Why you would prefer to have to re-enter data that your government already has and that they will match against your own data I don't really understand...
Complacency, complexity, corruption, and conservatism.
First, there's a strong status quo bias. The system works as-is, and the tax code is also set up in a way that's relatively simple for the median worker, so there's not a huge benefit to a change. Additionally, the IRS may not have enough data because data collection itself is decentralized. For example, married Americans typically file joint taxes, but the IRS has no way of telling who a taxpayer's spouse is until filing time.
Second, a lot of the complexity of US tax law happens on the deduction side, rather than the income side. The US has last-dollar deductions from taxes, so deductions are worth proportionally more for higher-income filers, but the IRS won't necessarily know about charitable deductions or mortgage interest or home office expenses.
Third is the aforementioned corruption -- tax-preparation firms consistently lobby against any sort of automatic return. Their arguments are relatively thin: they claim that automatic returns would have people not claiming tax credits they're eligible for and that developing automatic returns would be a waste of government money. In the meantime, they've collectively agreed to a "free file" program for moderate-income Americans -- only the program is barely advertised and full of "pushes" to paid tax offerings.
Lastly is the ideology of fiscal conservatism in the United States. Anti-tax politicians (usually Republicans) argue that automatic filing would make it easier for future governments to raise taxes, since people would not have to calculate themselves how much they're paying in federal tax. This is often coupled with farfetched offers to greatly simplify the tax code by (e.g.) replacing it with a flat income tax that collects much less revenue.
I kind of understand this, but kind of don't. I live in one of the countries where tax forms are pre-filled and you only make corrections for whatever wasn't already known to the tax authority. I don't really need to actively file everything (only deductions etc. that weren't pre-filled), or in the simplest cases anything, but I still definitely know the number under the line.
I'd understand it better if automatic filing meant that the total is somehow less clear to you, but it doesn't.
Holy crap, so if a h4x0r breaks into that website they can see the income and assets of every citizen of your country? That's nuts.
The IRS sucks, but believe it or not they're smart about keeping data secure. The massive mainframe into which all that employer-related data gets loaded is not web-connected.
In fact, not even IRS employees can access the data in there via the web. The only connectivity is through (fairly) dumb terminals with a chip-card slot. The chip-card signs each query before it's sent to the mainframe. Yank out the card and the terminal will cease to respond to your commands. The chip-card is also their employee badge.
This is why it's not as bad as you think.
"As part of Finland’s celebrated transparency, any member of the public can call up the local tax office to enquire about a total stranger’s annual income and tax contributions." - https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/in_finland_all_it_takes_i...
Also tax and income data for everyone earning over 100 000€ a year will be posted publicly online (with an option to opt-out).
Unless you have a very special circumstance (e.g. you're a Lloyds of London name) you can file online through the HMRC website which does all of the calculations for you and is mostly just a case of entering a few figures from your P60 and P11D for the vast majority of people.
In Spain it's the same, except unfortunately they don't notify you when it's time (although the whole country has a month to do it so you can't really miss it). Also their login system is a bit more complicated than a password, they have a special 2FA system you need to setup in person.
There are no calculations to do, you just enter your incomes and deductions by type and it calculates your taxes for you.
In both cases, you can also use a mobile app for all of that. And you can choose to do it on paper, by physical mail.
Disclaimer: I was told this by people who were exchange students there at least two years ago. Things may have changed and/or be different (i.e. harder) for foreigners.
That was true until maybe 10 years ago? Today you can easily open an account online and never show up to a physical agency. If the bank you chose even has one.
But due to the way France works, with the different administrations forbidden from sharing information between each other and no central citizens repository, processes work on the customer themselves passing documents back and forth between the different administrations or companies, which makes it more difficult as a newcomer. Say, the bank will ask for a proof of identity and a proof of address, you have the proof of identity but the proof of address must come from an ISP or utilities company, which in turn requires a bank account. So you have to first find an ISP that will accept payment from your foreign account, etc.
It's different for example in Belgium, where once you're a resident all your information is there in a repository of the federal government and tied to your national number, so you don't need anything more than your identity card to sign up for a bank account. It's much easier but on the other hand, I don't really like having all my information in a single place like this, I just find it a bit unsettling that the police can look up your car's plate and call you on your cellphone to tell you that your car is badly parked.
Actually more and more people use online-only banks now, without any physical office. I couldn't visit my banks even if I wanted to.
Probably exchange students don't know the market and go to the nearest branch, so it might not be the most technologically advanced option.
And it has been like that for a while (I remember opening a PEL online and configuring a monthly transfer to fill it when I started working 10 years ago). Maybe all the banks are/were not at the same level, but with mine, BNP, it was possible.
Also, now, I also have bank accounts in a more "international" bank (HSBC), and to be honest, even if the website as the same functionalities, HSBC website is a lot more clunkier, mixing the old and the new than BNP's one which is reasonably good looking and easy to use.
Top left is the form section. The orangeish part is the prefilled value and the white box next to it is for corrections. Top right is a breakdown of your finances, bottom left is a breakdown of the tax calculation and bottom right just contains some payment slips.
Not sure how many people actually bother with returning the paper form these days as you can do it online as well.
VAT is handled by shops for you.
Council tax (local tax based on property value) you are sent a bill based on the value of your property. There are various exemptions and deductions for exceptional cases, but otherwise you just pay the amount.
Income taxes are deducted by your employer from your paycheck under a system called PAYE (pay as you earn). It works basically perfectly if you have one job, and can even cope with multiple jobs, variable income, etc.
If you have an issue with incorrect income tax, there is a friendly call centre who are generally knowledgeable and can fix things with minimal effort on your part; and they also handle some common exceptions (e.g. dividend income under £10,000) over the phone rather than via a form.
The 25% off for single occupancy is very common rather than being an exceptional case, but yes applying for it is very easy via an online form (if you are organised and apply as soon as it becomes relevant) or a visit or phone call to the local council office.
Also applies to multiple occupancy if all or all but one of the occupants are full time students.
Note that if you earn over £100K, and/or sell more than £45K in shares/options in a year (so probably a lot of people on here from the UK/London-area who work for a BigCo?) then you must fill in a tax return even if all of your income is otherwise PAYE. In this case it takes just mere minutes but I guess they like to check everything really is simple.
> We have provided a pre-filled 1040 based on your W-2s, Form 1099s, 1098s etc. We have made the following assumptions while preparing: > your marriage filing status remains unchanged since last year, > your dependents remain unchanged since last year, > you have no income beyond that reported to us, > you do not qualify for any deductions/ credits beyond those indicated in forms we have received. > > If all of the above assumptions are correct, you may sign the enclosed form and return it. Otherwise, you may use the provided pre-filled numbers and worksheets as a starting point, and make the necessary changes.
In the above scenario, one can very clearly see the amount of tax one paid, and the amount of income, as both are clearly indicated on the "postcard"-sized main 1040 form (which is a good joke as basically everybody will have one or more additional forms they need to attach to it.)
The fact that schools do not teach makes it crazy too. I imagine it has something to do with the fact that if you make it easy, mistakes cannot be made therefore you cannot exploit the few bucks here and there out of a large number of people who are not tuned to the tax filling process.
I'm in the US, and I was a high school math teacher for 20 years. I tried teaching everyone how to do taxes, and people hated it because if you make people do fake taxes it's incredibly boring. Then I developed a "financial literacy" unit where students could choose a focus, such as analyzing investments, analyzing credit card policies, analyzing loans, or doing taxes.
About half the class chose taxes each year; making things like this optional significantly increases engagement, because many people end up recognizing they really would like to understand how to do their own taxes. It was also eye-opening for many who were surprised what impact things like "tax brackets" would have on their income. It cut through so much propaganda that's shouted about taxes in the US.
Takes about 20 minutes to do it each year if you have all of your figures to hand... (if you are disorganised and have not been keeping track of any capital gains losses/gains etc throughout the year then it will take longer as you'll need to work those figures out first)
My wife is dual-national US-UK, and she does her UK one herself without much fuss as well, but seems like she has to employ an accountant in the US to do her US return due to complexity and convolutedness.
is wrong. TurboTax has a product they will sell you when you search for "turbotax free edition". They will allow you to fill it out for free. They will hold your hand (for free) while you do it. What they won't do is file the return you filled out, until you give them money. For that, you need to go find the actual free tax return (start at https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/) and do it all over again, if you fell for the ads TurboTax bought.
EDIT: The above is correct if you made over $72k in 2020. If you made under $72k but still have questions about your investment options and house sales, please don't give me financial advice.
It isn't immediately obvious who is running the site. whois info lists a Canadian privacy company. The site doesn't have an about page. Github has contributor info, which may help. Tax returns need to be private and accurate. If it's hard to verify that the authors are even in the US, it's had to know if this is a scam.
I think the project is still young, and the above is likely something addressable. Partnering with some accountants may be a way to fund further development/maintenance through referrals. Good luck!
1: https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/become-an-authorized-e-... 2: https://www.irs.gov/filing/e-file-options
The site runs client side only, with no external API calls, so assuming you trust the code in the repo is the code being served to you then no data can leave your computer. If you're curious you could probably verify by clicking around on the site and checking the network calls made to ensure there's no external API calls
It'd be appealing to try to factor out the underlying translation of the tax code and IRS form layout into some very simple DSL that could be used by multiple kinds of software.
The only similar thing I could find was https://www.npmjs.com/package/taxee-tax-statistics but that package has some security vulnerabilities and does not seem to be actively maintained.
Here is the compiler: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03002266v3/document
https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang
They’ve also open sourced an official calculator, along with web APIs: https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france
OpenTaxSolver (http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/):
OpenTaxSolver (OTS) is a free, safe + secure program for calculating Tax Form entries for Federal and State personal income taxes. It automatically fills-out and prints your forms.
I've used OTS for the last three or four years now to do my taxes, it does work for the task.
It was disimproved by hauling it into a web app, which breaks with all the usual connections you built with the paper equivalent and is the most UX unfriendly monstrosity one could create. From this year on you HAVE TO USE IT. I deeply disrespect this regression, which forces many people into paying a tax office for their private tax submission.
I wish for a swedish/norwegian system, where the state courts you for YOUR money. I don't know a single person in Germany which states: "I love doing my tax submissions!"
EDIT: Typos plus last paragraph
The web app is absolutely awful to use and offers easily the worst user experience I've ever seen. I gave up and decided to seek help by a Lohnsteuerhilfeverein, which is really comfortable but still way cheaper than a tax office. The only annoyance is, that they'll just help you with your tax submission if you're employed or on state benefits. They can't help you if you're self-employed or a freelancer which is somewhat annoying
For example:
this.totalDeductions = this.computed(() => {
return this.isItemizing() ? this.itemizedDeductionsAdjusted() : this.standardDeduction();
}).form("f1040-131"); // 131 is reference to a field on the tax form
this.afterDeductions = this.computed(() => {
return this.adjustedGrossIncome() - this.totalDeductions();
}).form("f1040-133")
Noticed this comment.
https://github.com/thegrims/UsTaxes/blob/master/src/irsForms...
I wrote some python a few years ago for this purpose
But many do because you have a tiny chance to win a lottery. Yes, they do it even for one coffee (0.70 euro...).
I do not understand why there is still no system to easily transfer that fiscal number. For example with a qrcode or RFID. You pay electronically with card, often only by just touching your card, phone or even watch, but then have to give a memorized 9 digit number which the deskperson has to type correctly.
You can. The VAT number is used to enter you in a lottery where you get a small chance to win some of the taxes you paid back, but that is optional. The goal of the system is to increase compliance with tax laws, by having consumers ask businesses for receipts and pressure them into paying VAT.
But it would not be feasible to use this for most of the people. Tax is often vastly complex and it ignores all those parts. I don't have any capital gain, any properties or any uncommon income such as from rent but even for me this would not work because I get 1099-INT forms from bank (for 1.25$) and there is only W2 option under income.
I am also a nonresident so I need to use 1040NR another block there but I am not even talking about that.
I like that it's all browser-based, but the problem is that I, the user, have no way of actually guaranteeing it's not POSTing somewhere else. It's the same problem with browser JS crypto. So I would suggest that in addition to a note explaining how no personal data leaves their browser, also link to a guide on how to download and run it on a local computer. (Is it possible to export a single .html or .js file that a user can open with their browser? And a SHA512 checksum to verify the file?)
At any rate, I'm grateful, and I will consider using this. I may just have to find a way to doublecheck the work done.
The title in the HTML is still "React App"
There is very little information about this. Why should I trust this? I see the option to print, is that my only option?
The readme and website appear to be kinda thin on details. Cool nonetheless.
I also enjoy filing taxes. It’s one of those things that allow you to reflect on your work, how you did, optimize the deductions, and get a reward at the end. It’s fun.
- A Texan
For most people, it's a case of quickly doublechecking all your income/property numbers and then spending some time on items you might be able to deduct.
All you want would still be possible under a system where the govt pre-fills forms. It’s just the 99.9% of Americans who DON’T find it to be fun would get a leg up.
[Having proper unit tests as specs is a much cooler answer.]
It doesn't fill tax forms, but it's a set of simulations and a framework to write more models and generate UIs automatically.
If milestones and a growth path can be clearly planned and communicated, I think many people would happily chip in to help fund a project like this.
Something like this page would be nice: https://k9mail.app/2021/02/14/K-9-Mail-is-looking-for-fundin...
Looks like you are using typescript React here. Any driver for that choice?
The reason I chose React is I wanted the site to be client side only, fitting with SPA, to avoid having a database of social security numbers that could be breached.
Typescript is being used to help make sure the right types are being used when the form is submitted. Income should be in number format & names should be in string etc. I've also just found it pleasant to use
I actually do not understand why this is not automatic. If you have a special case you would need to act, otherwise it accepts by default.
I read a few times about the lobby of tax software companies in the US, it is really weird that they can get away with such practices.
I have a technology that will be really useful for disrupting tax filing in USA.
Basic pitch is here: https://github.com/breck7/copypastetaxes
I'd be interesting in talking about some type of collaboration if you're interested in chatting! Email is in profile.
Expat workers seem so niche and there may be different requirements depending in their specific situation.
Part of the problem is a pervasive sense that if your are an expat, you are somehow guilty of something or not patriotic enough or some other undefined sin. All of US law seems to expect that you are US resident, yet we apply it globally.
My taxes are much more complicated because of this and I think a separate niche tool would be better.
In theory I'd love a tool that could save me wasting my life on this every year. However, would I trust it? Not from a malicious standpoint but it seems there's been lots of changes over the last few years and I'd need to know the tool had been properly updated. To do that I'd have to go and read all the updates/instructions each year (just like I do now) and then also check the tool was correct. I'm not convinced a (free?) non-accountant DIY method helps when the monetary cost of it being outdated/bugged could be significant.
I guess you could argue that this is no different from any other open-source software and it's my choice to either personally audit it or assume someone else already has - including all the schedules I use. I'm struggling to understand why I have more of a concern with this compared to, for example, my web browser. Perhaps I am just especially (and irrationally??) fearful of the IRS and the consequence of getting taxes wrong.
True to form, it still has the title "React app." I personally have shipped things to production without changing the CRA boilerplate title :).
It's something that needs to exit!
exist something that needs to exist.
Not sure why I can't edit the original comment.
@dang if you happen to see this, I wonder if you may want to fix the typo and delete my followup comments?
I'm wondering if this can be improved. Especially for cryptocurrency processing. The cryptocurrency tax solutions are woefully inadequate. I was surprised considering how much marketing and polish they have.
I remember.
And like, if you're even halfway competent you know how to run the program without Internet access.