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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. This is primarily not a "software" problem. Unless we simplify our tax codes in the US, tools like turbotax will stay. In fact, to be honest, turbotax was great when I used it last in 2009ish (I know they got acquired by Intuit and have gone downhill due to Intuit ) but the point is that it is overall an excellent software that really makes it easy to calculate and file things based on current tax codes. I would love to not have that dependency but that's not possible only when the tax codes are simplified.

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> This is primarily not a "software" problem.

This is true.

> Unless we simplify our tax codes in the US, tools like turbotax will stay.

The two are linked because a lot for he lobbying comes from the same place, so its unlikely that one would get changed without the other, but there's less essential link other than shared lobbying interest than you seem to think: even with the complexity of the system quite a lot of the information is already in the IRS’s hands.

It's still excellent. I just did my taxes in FreeTaxUSA this year for the first time and it's not nearly as good as TT last year. FTU is like manually filling in the IRS PDF's except as webforms, whereas TT imports PDF's and parses everything correctly, leaving you to do a quick scan. FTU is free because it's just a light GUI layer over the 1040 and various Schedule forms.

FTU does at least direct you to the correct forms for your situation, tell you what to do with deductions etc.

I've used FTU for the last 2 years and it's all I need, it has all the forms easily searchable and you just next next finish your taxes basically.

There isn't a need for anything else...

Simplifying the tax code will require removing special exemptions for certain interest groups. This is often rephrased as "raising the taxes on [group]" which gets a lot of pushback. For example, raising the taxes on teachers, native americans, certain small businesses, public servants, antarctica scientists, students at for-profits, etc. It's hard to fight against that message.

One proposal here is to eliminate the ordinary income tax, and keep only the AMT, which is much simpler. The political advantage is that nobody gets a tax increase, and nobody's taxes get harder. And the revenue loss is surprisingly small - estimated at $63 billion annually in 2010 (though perhaps higher now due to the lower SALT limits).

I am in camp-AMT-only and it seems like both parties could get on board.

TurboTax was sold to Intuit in 1993. Not sure why do you think it would get worse under Intuit, considering you liked it in 2009.

Oh my bad then. I guess I got confused because for some reason, I always they were acquired after I initially used them. You are correct though. So I guess the software has always been good.

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