Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
>To receive the distribution of schema packages, you must have an active e-services account and be listed on an e-File application with the provider option of Software Developer. Your role on the e-File Application must be Principal, Responsible Official, or a Delegated User with MeF authorities. If you are a registered user in e-services and are listed on a State e-File application, you will receive this distribution.
I wish it were simpler. I get why the IRS wants to verify who is submitting tax data to them, though.
I do get why the irs wants to vet submitters in production but you can't even get the detailed info for development without going through the long verification process.
I wanted to do this since I have extensive experience in implementing SOAP clients and interfacing with ancient legacy systems so I am very interested in any public way to contribute
I don't know too much about the specific program but after skimming the pub you posted i may be able to provide some value. I'd be willing to help you out for free as I really like what you guys are doing. Feel free to email me at lrhoades at gsacontractpros.com if you're interested.
Please make this happen. We need open source code driving this kind of value proposition. Frankly the gov’t should be funding you to make this happen.
Are you blogging your progress and documenting the pitfalls and roadblocks along the way?
Facebook & Uber have received most of the heat over the past few years. Intuit has strangely avoided the same level of scrutiny.
It's possible that you could write your own modules to handle any mising forms, in fact I tweaked one calculation that wasn't handling some edge case properly. But that's more than most people would want to do, and would certainly be more work than just doing those forms manually with pen and calculator. But like any open-source project, it relies on individual efforts like that to build something that's useful to more people.
The UI itself is extremely minimalist and would not be regarded as "user friendly" by a user from the general public.
Edit: it also only attempts a few state returns. Mine is not one of them, but fortunately in my state the tax forms are pretty easy assuming the Federal return is done.
Also, personal accounting is an increasingly niche industry.
The one I've used has consistently saved me more money in taxes than he costs. That said, my tax situation is also nowhere near complicated enough that an accountant has ever asked the order of magnitude you were quoted, so YMMV of course.
1. W2s + bank interest for two people
2. Taxable capital gains of various kinds, including stock, options, and 1256 contracts
3. Self employment business (consulting) with multiple clients and deductions for various business expenses.
All of this took less than 2 hours and most of the data was digitally imported from various portals.
I'm guessing it would cost me at least an order of magnitude more and take similar time to do it through an accounting firm.
So i'm kind of split, on the one hand intuit is an evil company and i hope our tax system is changed/irs no longer uses them/etc. On the other hand I really don't want to spend extra 1k+ on taxes OR spend tens of hours it would take me to assemble the 50+ page return on my own.
After being completely ready to spend $40 or whatever it was for the "Basic Premium" offering of each, BOTH H&R and turbotax silently upgraded me to "Self-employed" (I am not) and said I was free to pay the ~$100 or delete my account and make a new one.
"TaxSlayer" finally let me file for like $30 or something.
https://www.propublica.org/series/the-turbotax-trap
“ProPublica has long detailed how Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and other companies have worked against making tax preparation easier and less costly. They have lobbied to ban the IRS from offering free, simple tax filing. And they have deceived customers who should qualify for the Free File product.”
money.
They made, and basically broke, an agreement with the IRS. But it's really not easy for a government agency to say, "No, you broke the roles, so our agreement is void". It would basically take a lawsuit, which would be ugly, expensive, and time-consuming.
It's not so much a matter of simply "caving", as that Intuit has gotten itself entrenched and it's difficult to dig them out. In theory it's not impossible, but it would require a ton of work, time, and will. Such things are very hard to come by, especially when you're the IRS and everybody already is predisposed to hate you.
It's not even a slippery slope to imply that acting in self-interest is always excusable: By the time you've gotten to that point, you're already at the bottom of any and every slippery slope. There are lines that we as a species have collectively are inexcusable to cross in self-interest, and without them life gets a lot worse for nearly everyone.
We're located in California.
We've paid politicians to look the other way while we drop it over forests, in fire zones. It's a lot easier than getting rid of it other ways.
We're enriching ourselves which is the American way, so there's definitely no problem with this, even though it may make fire season a major bitch for some people, luckily all our CEO's have homes in safer areas that won't be affected....
^ Are you saying you'd say to the above scenario: I have no problems with this.
If the answer to the above question is you would say that...
What's it like to be devoid of morality? Is there anything resembling a conscious at all?
TurboTax has a much worse interface, it took almost twice as long to complete the taxes despite having an identical return. TurboTax did find about $50 more return for us somehow despite having entered the same information into both sites, but that amount is less than the fee TurboTax would charge so we ended up submitting through FreeTaxUSA instead.
Next year I don't think I'm even going to bother with TurboTax.
The basic process is to: 1. Contact your employer and have them send you a W2 2. If your employer does not send you your W2 by the end of February, contact the IRS and they'll send you a Form 4852 3. If you still haven't received a W2 in time to file taxes, then you can file using the Form 4852 instead 4. If you receive the W2 after filing and the actual numbers differ from your estimates, then you have to file an amended return.
I’ve run into issues with the IRS over incorrect filings.
I am not a tax attorney or an accounting professional, but I strongly advise you to rethink your position.
Under no circumstances do you want to get audited by the IRS instead of complying with the Federal Tax Code.
Once the IRS begins its investigation, you will be obligated to pay the costs of complying with their requests, which costs may very well dwarf the costs of complying in the first place.
Dialog:
Do you have foreign bank accounts? Y/N
Next dialog:
Do you have foreign investments? Y/N
Next dialog:
...
And if you have to go back and double check/change something TurboTax makes you go through the whole damn wizard again.
TurboTax is supposedly able to import my W2 automatically (I work for a large corporation that use a large professional third party company to do W2s), but this has never worked. I always have to enter the information by hand.
I haven't found any other software that is practical to use in this way and has all the forms I need.
I tried H&R Block's free software one year, I think, because I was mad at Intuit, but it was useless because there were big gaping holes in the functionality.
Using the word "big" may be misleading. The point is, if anything isn't quite right, it's "gaping" because what's the fallback?
And as I said, I go directly to the forms, and the free option I tried was only interview-style. I could've predicted it wouldn't work, but I did give it a try to make sure.
I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but I don't think your experience relates to mine, because I was using the free version.
I imagine there is a very hazy line between the free version being designed for typical users without sophisticated taxes and "dark patterns" designed to frustrate someone into paying.
The pay version may be better, but I wouldn't have any motivation to try it, assuming that the wizard/interview is required.
Don’t you have to sign to say that you’re entitled to that return? How are you doing it if you don’t understand where it’s coming from?
Again IANAL, this is how I expect the law would work, not necessarily how it actually works.
Don't get me wrong, would love for the IRS to offer a standard free filing solution. But short of that, I want the thing that is most likely to get me the biggest legal return
I used https://www.taxslayer.com/ instead this past year, a bit more DIY but if you've done your taxes for years and they're generally the same year after year it's not that hard to read your docs and type them in the boxes. You pay for Support level, not tax form access with this service.
Relatively stripped down UI/UX and few "waiting" dialogs and I have to assume a good savings of clicks vs. TT. I have a relatively easy joint return with little audit risk and basically in the "generally the same year after year" boat as well.
Intuit is one of the members:
https://freefilealliance.org/free-file-alliance-members/
https://freefilealliance.org/about/
Its a little weird. One would hope they would just send you the bill.. I filed my taxes late with an extension. I could go to the IRS site and get all the documents they had filed by banks and my employeer, for me. They have that info...
As Robotbeat says, this is literally because Intuit lobbied to ban the IRS from being able to do it for you -- which is also literally what TFA is all about. YTF do people comment on stuff they obviously haven't even read?!?
It's free period. There is a threshold, but cost isn't what changes. Here's the entrypoint: https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
* <= 72k provides a wizard and includes state taxes.
* > 72k requires you fill out virtual versions of the paper forms (with some limited automation) and doesn't include state taxes, but it's still free.
According to Ted Cruz, 9 billion hours is spent on tax compliance each year.
Milton Friedman has a lot to say on the intentional complication of the tax code: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8
Tax rates should be low, deductions minimal, and compliance easy. The Laffer Curve demonstrates this value to government revenues. But the economic literacy of most people is so lacking that it always revolves into some kind of class-warfare debate.
Tangential, but related would be the UBI debate vs. welfare program.
Whatever side of the aisle you’re in when it comes to spending priorities, one thing that should be obvious is that simplification is a win for everyone except those with robust lobbying resources to fight for carve-outs.
We could spend more money with simpler, lower taxes that are applied evenly. Have a high standard deduction to protect the very poor and for every dollar over that, the government gets 10%. Simple. But the compliance industry would lose their minds. This “progressive” tax system we have is ridiculous because it isn’t progressive at all — those making money from capital gains pay less than wage-earners. Everyone should pay the same percentage regardless of the origin of funds.
No, it wouldn't. Like every tax proposal, it was winners-and-losers picking, not an elimination of it. People opposed it because they didn’t like the winners and losers Cruz picked.
No. The Laffer Curve says that if humans were rational - which they aren't - and if tax enforcement is 100% effective - which it isn't - then the expected revenue is zero at both 0% taxation and 100% taxation.
That's all it says. Every other point on the "curve" is arbitrary, and in practice Laffer uses this worthless conjecture about a hypothetical world that doesn't exist to justify cutting taxes on the rich, saying it will result in higher revenues. It doesn't of course, but as someone who benefits why should he care?
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/epis...
unfortunately turbotax is also one of the major players trying to prevent tax simplification… so they’ve got a great scheme going
anyway there are more and more free options every year so let’s hope that can start hurting them… I’ve used creditkarma for a couple simple years and it’s great
How do they launder the money Is that what the PACs do? Make sure Joe Politican can get the money, but isn't seen handed a bag of cash from a company?
Or is it simply that accepting campaign donations from corporations isn't seen as corruption by voters, so politicans can do it in the open?
The act, among other things, removed the requirement for the IRS to report on their development of return-free tax filing.
Direct PAC donations are allowed up to $5k. Super PACs are meant to be independent, can't work directly with politicians or campaigns... and therefore have to such limits. They're very often used for "indirect" lobbying.
It's a scam and everyone knows it. The people empowered by the scam are the only ones who can change it.
It's insane that election campaigns are such an important and expensive part of politics. Accepting millions of dollars, and for what? To keep your job for another few years. Where the biggest part of your job is getting more money for the next campaign to keep it for another few years.
Real campaign finance reform could do so much.
Not sure I agree with this statement. My experience with TurboTax is that the actual tax regulations are not that hard to read, and that TurboTax's translations do nothing to resolve the ambiguities of the tax code.
For example, the tax code might allow "deduction of reasonable expenses for blah blah blah" and the TurboTax "explanation" will be "You can deduct blah blah blah, but be sure the expenses are reasonable". Ok, what is "reasonable"? Oh, well, you know, reasonable.
It's like a high school student plagiarizing something they found on the internet by rearranging each sentence just enough that it isn't googleable.
Turbo tax is great if your income comes from one or more W-2 jobs (that pay cash) and a simple stock portfolio or investment properties. As soon as you start dealing with RSUs, stock options or (horror! ESPP), it starts becoming more trouble than its worth.
The ESPP thing is especially weird. Every office job I've ever had offered ESPP (so it's not some edge case). TurboTax will double tax your ESPP, unless you know the trick to enter your real cost basis[1]--and TT won't ever prompt you with "Hey, looks like you have some ESPP! Want a step-by-step guide to enter your cost actual basis so that you only pay as much tax as you actually owe?"
[1] https://thefinancebuff.com/adjust-cost-basis-for-espp-sale-i...
They soak up a lot of the tech talent in San Diego, and every person I've met that works there on the TurboTax team has admitted to me that they feel ethically torn about what they do.
They had published spec'd out endpoints before the acquisition that just never happened. It's outright abuse, and harms their customers, but there's nothing we can do about it.
The very fact that Intuit has clearly invested money into making a beautiful interface for a tax program, a program that people use once a year, just goes to show how profitable the current arrangement is for them, and how determined they are to keep the average taxpayer from switching to any competing tax filing ecosystem.
It's really not. It's hard to keep track of where you are in your return and easy to get lost. You can't paste into any credential field for fetching information from your bank or other outside data source.
I get absurd cosmetic delays and animations, text that's tweaked to be so pale and thin that it disappears in some browsers, and tedious wizard-style workflow that you have to traverse half a dozen times when the vague language doesn't match the data on your forms. And don't get me started on confusing between "activities" (that's the official term, not Intuit's fault) because there's no way to see where you are in the process or show an overview until the end, and the final result is in a different format that I can't reconcile with what I filled in.
And it's shocking how bad some of the QBO integrations are, especially for newish technologies. Intuit even screwed up PayPal in a way that some accountants don't want to use it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT5zKWBXtQU), forcing a labor intensive manual process.
It is well designed to hold you by the hand if you just go down the happy-path of what a user who has all their documents in hand when the right question pops up on the screen.
It's poorly designed for people who want to go back, people who just want to input their forms, and people who value their time. There is no reason each question needs to take up its own screen, instead of being a list. There is no reason it needs to pretend to calculate for 15 seconds after every few questions.
Example: I know every year there is no way my itemized deductions will exceed the standard deduction. But there is no clear way to tell TurboTax to stop wasting my time on itemized deductions.
A sinister business model in every possible way.
I don't know why you think people don't think that. I imagine that most people who have been informed will think along similar lines. Those who don't think it are likely not yet informed.
Not surprisingly, most people think the complete opposite about the government.
So where Intuit is diabolically good, it’s at arbitraging those colloquial narratives and embedding itself in the middle as the savior. The good guy who is here to help.
They screw you, so they can later come and help you. As I said before, a sinister business model.
That’s still not true of most large companies like say Walmart or McDonalds which still invest a great deal in technology.
Is Google a tech company? Probably, but technically they sell advertisements, not software. You could say that they make money by operating ad-selling software. Walmart is a company that makes money by operating purchasing, distribution, and retailing software. An old west General Store owner could, if his records were lost, make a good guess as to what he should by from which big city distributors, when and how much of it to stock, and how much to sell it for, conversely, zero people have a comprehensive understanding of Walmart's product lines, they're just cogs in the software-powered machine that makes the corporation work.
Every large company today is dependent on software. I agree that it's a bit absurd to suggest that this means they're all tech companies.
Are they primarily dependant on off-the-shelf software? Possibly not a tech company. Is their software development team bigger than the whole of the rest of the company put together? Probably a tech company. Have the developers convinced everyone else to form squads and hold all the usual agile ceremonies? Don't @ me.
Nice.
Other "big tech" companies would not even exist.
Intuit most certainly is a tech company. They make web and desktop software. This semantic argument is a distraction.
https://jobs.intuit.com/search-jobs/
> If computers and internet were not a thing
Cool counterfactual. Not relevant in this discussion.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Isn't it literally a constitutional right? It's not a side-effect of anything - it's a right by itself.
I can't understand anyone suggesting that we should not be allowed to present our opinions to the government. What are you in favour of? Just voting once every four years or so and never saying anything else the rest of the time? Bizarre.
It's not the "saying anything else", it's the listening: Sure, anyone has the right to say anything they want. The difference is that the government doesn't listen to most people -- how could they? Where would they take the time to listen to everyone; when would they get anything else done? It's not as if there's any constitutional right to be heard -- but some people and organisations, they do somehow magically find the time to listen to.
Pretending that this is just "a super-basic part of democracy everywhere" in stead of highly correlated with how much money the ones who get heard have contributed to the campaigns of the ones doing the sympathetic listening is disingenuous in the extreme.
Intuit isn't a person, it didn't vote and it has no place telling the government what to do for the people. A company has no opinions, only a bottom line and in many lobbying cases a bunch a shareholders. A government isn't a company and doesn't need to have financial gain, it needs to support the collective people of the country it governs.
If the CEO of Intuit phones their representative and says they think some change to the tax code is bad that's lobbying and that's fine to me.
If the CEO of Intuit (or a representative of Intuit) just called the same phone line the rest of us get, sure there wouldn’t be a difference there. Even if the representatives were calling on Inuit from their side because they believed Intuit has relevant insights into the tax code, that would be fine. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s the way political donations buy access to representatives attention in ways that the non-rich don’t have access to that people take issue with.
A company is essentially a sociopath that does not have to follow a social contract, has no limited lifespan, doesn't need to eat, sleep, have shelter, and doesn't feel pain or joy. All it does is extract as much value as possible, at any cost, including joy, safely and general lives of others.
A government that panders to sociopathic wealth hoarders isn't a government, but just another company and the people in general are worse off for it.
And even then, does it matter? The point is that voters, which is what the government exists for, should be the ones to assess what they want, not the sociopathic wealth hoarder with the most wealth. If you want to define an ultra specific scope around that, you can do that.
Obviously a company as an abstract entity does not lobby. An individual human being lobbies. A voter.
Even an absolute monarch is going to have have various people/groups petitioning. For reasons both good and selfish.
That would be one way of looking at it yes.
Because it isn't that big of a deal.
> Their business is literally the idea of creating friction in federal and local tax systems so they can extort people in exchange of removing some of those synthetic frictions (emphasis on "some").
That's a hyperbolic characterization. It's not that big of deal.
Lobbying is a fact of life in a democracy. There are always interest groups on every side of any issue that lobby for their selfish benefit, frequently to the detriment of the public (e.g. public sector union contracts). That tends to make most government programs less efficient and more expensive then they could be because politicians will balance needs of all kinds of interest groups. That will never change. Intuit has a right to lobby for their interests. Characterizing this as somehow nefarious, or even as an outlier is hyperbolic. Welcome to Democracy.
They aren't. Those programs don't require Intuit to claim.
Your argument makes it sound like you do not know what the issue in question actually is.
Why? My father is an immigrant, speaks with broken English and has no higher education ... and did his taxes for years with forms.
Which target group are you referring to?
the question starts to sound more interesting when you add the fact that the members of that union have "death or life" power over the public.
>This is what democracy looks like.
it is more like a "contract you can't refuse".
Do they even employ any sizable number of IC SWEs in the US, or are they all Leads/M2s that manage outsourced contracts?
> Do NOT use this online form if you're required to file a tax return. Use of this online form creates a simplified 2020 tax return. If you're required to file a tax return but file a simplified return instead, you won't be able to e-file your 2020 Form 1040 or 1040-SR tax return. This will delay the IRS processing your return and issuing any tax refund.
So... what?
Do not use this site if I'm required to do the thing that this site does? If I use this I won't be able to e-file Form xyz? No information what those are, or why it would matter?
But if you are required to file one, you are likely to need a real one, and the dummy one will conflict with it. But it sounds like if you file a real one, you don't need this form, and this form is only for people who wouldn't otherwise file.
But the gist of the article - that the website is implausibly bad - seems correct.
It's hard for me to believe they are the source of the problem, particularly with such a shabby fourth estate.
I thought the citizens are the federal electorate?
Political note: calls for nationalisation, in American politics, is a gift to the other side. It lets one paint the opposition as extremists without grounding in U.S. Constitutional law or the economic history of countries that regularly expropriate property.
I get the impulse. But literally any other phrasing—massive fines, criminal prosecution, open-licensing requirements, et cetera—is more productive for any aim other than blowing steam.
Perhaps you should rephrase this as "calls for nationalization run counter to my own free-market ideology" rather than a) assuming you know what everybody else thinks, and b) suggesting that conventional wisdom should dictate the bounds of acceptable discourse.
Not to mention, plenty of countries — the US included — have successfully nationalized companies and entire industries.
Its so crazy to me that some Americans label abstract ideas as evil. Communism == evil. Socialism == evil. Many welfare programs == evil. Immigrant labor == evil. High minimum wage == evil. Some languages, religions, cultures == evil. Stop subverting the English language because you're too lazy to check a thesaurus. None of those things are evil.
They are, rather, making a statement about strategy and messaging in American politics; a point which has borne out in countless political contests over the past decade alone. There is a reason why Republicans try to say "socialis(t/ism)" as often as possible. It works.
One example off the top of my head is Florida during the most recent presidential election. The Republicans beat the drums of socialism broadly and especially targeted at Cuban-Americans who immediately think of Castro. Voters who might otherwise skew towards Biden went Trump.
Again, that's one example, but the point is about _messaging_ and how the electorate in America broadly (not 100%, everywhere, etc.) responds to "socialism". (Nationalization being, of course, clearly tied to socialism.)
Why should it be off the table? Does the average person even give a shit about the public/private status of Intuit? I get conservatives will complain but they will (and do) literally call ANY improvement to the IRS Communism. Is the hope that if you play language games they’ll see the light?
Intuit aren't alone in this scheme. There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?
Yes, that solution is obvious, and has been for quite a while. The problem is that Intuit et al, through their lobbying, are blocking it. So the problem that needs solving now is how to block that lobbying.
> There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?
Most countries' politics are a lot more sane than the USA's, so such people aren't able to exert quite the same perverse amount of power through "lobbying" -- i.e. bribery, thinly disguised as "campaign contributions" -- as in the USA. (Oh sure, most countries have at least some of that shit, in various forms. But few, on the whole, as bad as the USA.)
Whatever bad things you see with ATT and Comcast are actually a direct result of city granted monopolies which will likely be ended by Musk's Starlink sooner or later.
"city-granted monopolies", are you kidding? The monopolies exist because of non-competition arrangements between companies. A city can't have anything but a monopoly when only one company willing to run cable because they've made everybody else agree to keep off their turf.
And starlink won't save anybody. For one thing, satellite internet already exists, you can buy it from providers like Viasat, DirecTV, and Hughesnet: it's expensive and the latency is outrageous because of the speed-of-light distance to satellites.
I get that you're just reciting the propaganda talking points that you've heard from news organizations and media properties (which are all now owned by telecom monopolies thanks to all the cash they have to spare from the extremely profitable telecom business, funny how that works), but a person can hope.
Starlink latency is materially improved from traditional satellite internet providers. 20ms vs 500ms. Conflating them borders on equivocation.
This happens regardless of how extreme or radical the proposal is, so why start from a position of compromise? This is what happens when one party cries "wolf" for 40 years.
Populism changes the equation. Populism blurs the left/right split.
Populists of all political persuasions can get behind nationalizing Intuit.
[0]https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...
Exxon would be another nice target.
Corporations are legal fictions. If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component.
Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are proven. They are precedented and they work.
If you wantonly break the law, you should not be a going concern. But "nationalization" and "corporate death penalty" are political hot potatoes. (I'm entirely sidestepping the argument as to whether that's reasonable.) If you want these companies shut down, or fearful of being shut down, credibly threatening to break them up, fine them into bankruptcy or suspend their licenses (e.g. for Intuit, their tax preparation license) is more effective.
> Corporations are legal fictions.
Then they shouldn't have the same rights as real people. If they're just fictions, then it stands to reason that at least when they behave so egregiously that their fictional life has to be ended, their worth and value also turns out to be fictional.
> If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component.
Exactly. And since the whole point of a limited-liability stock company is that a single entrepreneur shan't be liable with all he owns, but each shareholder only with the value of his investment, then it is precisely that investment that will turn out to have no value: After creditors are paid off, any remaining value goes to the state, which is the entity that hitherto, through the contract and other laws it maintains, has upheld the fiction that this kitty of money is a separate thing capable of exerting a legal will and intent; for this particular kitty, that fiction has now come to an end.
As for "wiping out" shareholders (not creditors, as per the above)... Yes and no, and above all: So what? As mentioned, their investment is exactly what they are willing to risk; that's the whole idea. Three points on this:
1) They could just as well lose it all if the company goes bankrupt some other way, so pretending that this is some new and unique possible outcome is disingenuous.
2) If they're "wiped out" because they've put all their life savings into any one company, the poor bastards should have looked up "diversifying". Again, not unique to this.
3) Wow, great -- finally some incentive for shareholder activism, to try and rein in old / appoint better new boards and CXOs and curb some of the evil shit corporations do, eh?
> Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are proven. They are precedented and they work.
Bullpucky. Two corporations, out of the myriad that had deserved it, that's ridiculously ineffective.
> If you wantonly break the law, you should not be a going concern.
Exactly. Then the fiction should end.
> But "nationalization" and "corporate death penalty" are political hot potatoes. (I'm entirely sidestepping the argument as to whether that's reasonable.)
Maybe they're such hot potatoes precisely because people, like you here now, keep sidestepping the argument.
> If you want these companies shut down, or fearful of being shut down, credibly threatening to break them up, fine them into bankruptcy or suspend their licenses (e.g. for Intuit, their tax preparation license) is more effective.
Sure, that too... But it seems imbalanced to limit yourself to only that, as long as you still have the death penalty for real people.
(And, hey, if you're fine with "fin[ing] them into bankruptcy" -- what happened, all of a sudden, to those poor shareholders and creditors; is wiping them out suddenly OK now?)
Corporate death penalties reinvent the wheel for zero benefit. It gets, at best, to the same place as fines or revocation. It adds the needless step of creating an unprecedented and politically-charged term with major constitutional flaws in respect of the taking of private property. If I’m a lobbyist trying to gut antitrust and the threat of those stronger measures I just mentioned, corporate death penalties are an almost all-too-perfect red herring. It severs the left from the centre-left so cleanly that I’m about 10% sure it came out of the right.
If you like the idea of ending companies for bad things, skip fabricated steps and push for specific crimes being punishable with fines equal to a substantial fraction of enterprise value and/or license revocations. You would have to do that anyway with any corporate death penalty rules. Go straight for the kill.
Unless, of course, the aim is rabble rousing. In that case, fight for corporate death penalties. It’s effective at turning out certain voting blocks.
> [corporations] shouldn't have the same rights as real people
Corporations don’t have the same rights as natural persons.
They have many of them, but those are mostly severable through legislation. Incorporation does have broad support. Taking the evil lobbyist from the previous example, if she sees a list of ten corporate reforms she doesn’t like, adding ending corporate personhood to the list guarantees opposition from small business to multinationals, NGOs and unions to trade associations.
This is an extremist view and basically advocating theft. I do not think IRS has competence to build and run a complex software system.
> Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country
That is debatable.
> There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen
They have not inserted themselves anywhere. You are free to use CPA or do all the paperwork yourself and save yourself $70 bucks.
Another thing that is jarring is the regard that Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit is held in the valley. He was apparently a mentor and coach to many founders Jobs? Page/Brin? and others. But the disconnect with his sterling image as a coach and leader and the general dark patterns/crappiness of Intuit products is something that is interesting.
So, yes, having a society-critical service provided by a for-profit market actor, that then uses that money to pay for speech that results in a worse situation for everyone is a market failure.
You can’t say “the IRS makes this too complicated in order to funnel money into Intuit’s pocket so I am going to pay my taxes elsewhere.”
And it's a perfect example of why accepting broad government power provides an avenue for this sort of corruption to exist, especially in areas that people don't care enough about to spend time influencing government policy.
In a free market, it requires very little effort for you to make your opinion felt - you give your money to the people you think have the best product. Done. Those people see that they are making money - the people with lesser products see they are losing money. This requires very little effort on your part other than forming an opinion on what product you want to use.
In the government, what can you do if you think the IRS is doing a shitty job? Write a letter to your Congressmen? Vote for another Congressman in 2 years (what if you agree with their position on the IRS, but disagree on something more important, e.g. guns?) Run for office yourself?
The result is that relatively little attention is paid to public policy around tax preparation. There are no single-issue voters around IRS Free-file policy. There is too much else going on in national politics that is inarguably more important. And because no one really cares about this other than the tax preparation industry, the tax preparation industry is left largely unchallenged in pushing government to enact regulations that favor them.
In my country (Netherlands), the IRS itself provides the software. Once a year, you download and run it. Everything is prefilled: income from work, bank accounts, mortgages.
So if you're a boring, financially stable person, the entire process is literally next -> next -> next -> submit.
Filling out tax forms is not a value-add economic activity, so I have no idea why you'd insist on free market, nor do I understand the classic American anti-government stance.
If we have solved this a decade ago, why can't you?
Large organizations are less efficient than small organizations. This is true even in private enterprise. Large bloated, centralized government bureaucracies are the most inefficient of all.
Part of the "classic American anti-government stance" comes from the realization that American society is too large and too diverse to be effectively governed by a centralized bureaucracy. This is why you hear people complaining about "state's rights".
However, for people who explicitly wish to control society and don't care about efficiency, centralized power is great. It means they only have to win one argument to impose their will on 330M people, not 50 separate arguments. This is why so much attention is paid to the federal government in the US, as opposed to state or local government.
But do hear me out once more. The dutch tax system is anything but simple. It has an extremely complex rule set.
And because it is so complex, leaving the understanding of it to citizens has led to an enormous burden of processing and correcting faulty entries, staffing massive support desks, and so on.
So they solved complexity, centrally. The rules are just as complex as before, but the process and UI make it a breeze for a good 75%.
With this I mean to say that complexity is in fact another reason to solve things centrally. Why would you want to spread complexity around?
The US federal government is 20x larger than that of the Netherlands. The US is also more economically, socially, and ethnically diverse than the Netherlands. Larger systems are harder to manage.
Then stop doing that, and talk about the situation at hand, using the evidence in front of you.
Even if "free market good, government bad" were a good rule of thumb (which it isn't), it clearly isn't working in this situation, so it's irrelevant.
Holy fuck, can't you Yanks just fucking stop pulling this idiotic non-argument out of your arses every time a comparison with any other country is made?!?
Sure, your pool of people to be taxed is X times bigger than some other country... But your pool of people who could be tax administrators IS ALSO exactly X times bigger than theirs! Holy fucking fuck, how stupid does one have to be not to see that?!?
In actual fact, of course, you wouldn't need anywhere near that many: This is all done by software nowadays, not bespectacled men with green eyeshades, quill pens, and big ledgers. Sure, being so much bigger, you might have more weird edge cases and exceptions... But although your population is twenty times bigger than the Netherlands', your number of kinds of edge cases and exceptions will be far lower than that. And you only need exception code for each kind of edge case. So your larger population will actually allow you to use fewer resources, proportionally, to build an equivalent system; not more.
...which is why I'm against having an entire corporation like Intuit inserted between me and the government I'm trying to pay taxes to. Your opinion that administrators are suddenly fine when they're a corporation is absurd.
Fact is, there's literally no reason we can't or shouldn't be doing this. My tax returns are super boring, and the IRS already knows what they are. Just send me a damn form that says "this is what we think you owe, if we're correct sign and return it".
The only way your argument has any merit is if we start talking about going back to no income tax. Which is an argument worth having, but your current argument is simply absurd.
Coming from a small European country, I'm familiar with a failure mode that does not exist in the federal government of the US (but can be seen in smaller states). Sometimes the government performs badly, because it would need expertise that is not available in the market. Everyone who is good at a specific thing already has a job and is not interested in getting a new one.
I believe the root issue here is that efficiency is not a fundamental value in the US in the same way it is in many European countries (I'm thinking Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and the Nordic countries). Meanwhile, decentralization is a fundamental value. Americans on the average do not want the government to be efficient, because it would require a level of centralization they would be uncomfortable with. For example, with centralized reporting, it would be reasonable to expect that 80-90% of people do not have to file taxes in any particular year, because the government already knows every relevant piece of information about them.
Another issue is that the US is already far more centralized than the EU. The federal government is a major actor, with an almost 20x bigger share of the GDP than the EU. There is an uneasy balance of power between the federal government and the states, with neither party clearly superior to the other. Nobody has an indisputable authority to change things, which I guess is another reason why American bureaucracy is so inefficient.
This is the sort of thing you get when you start from the conclusion, "Free market good, government bad", ignore the article, and just slavishly repeat the tired free market hypothesis.
The power is in the hands of the free market here, not in the hands of the IRS. You're blaming the IRS when clearly Intuit and Equifax are to blame. Don't comment on articles you didn't read.
Maybe in intent, but certainly not in implementation. Fine if you want to give money to the poor / people with no income, but enacting that through our tax system (designed to collect tax dollars) seems like a particularly poor proscription to achieve the ends. Here's another take (that I'm sure will be unpopular)...
'In 2021, progressives cloaked an expansion to our entitlement programs through a tax cut to get the bill through Congress. This has been hard to implement, and company's like Inuit aren't helping as much as they could.'
1. imports your previous turbotax years
2. charges $10 less than turbotax
3. offers a free version gated by income
4. squirrels away some percentage of profits each year to a big "F U" fund, half of which goes to lobbying for permanent income tax simplification, half of which goes to directly paying out the shareholders in the company on dissolution.
The "professional" they connected me with turned out too not actually be a CPA, and was an IRS "Enrolled Agent" instead, and did all of my taxes wrong. I don't mean "the math was a little off", I mean "used all of the wrong forms" because he was was unaware of the criteria to be considered a Resident Alien for tax purposes.
Further, when I tried to contact this individual again (through Turbo Tax), Turbo Tax had shut down the program and was blackhole-ing all of the email without notice.
It cost me thousands of dollars after-the-fact to get fixed.
As of last year (in my case) finally the tax authority had all the information slips you need to file already in their database.
The freely usable tax software (Studio Tax) was able to download and autofill them to generate a valid (as far as the government knows) tax return that could then be e-filed.
The only thing that changed was that the donation-based model of Studio Tax wasn't enough, so now you have to pay CAD $15 per installation (not per return) in order to actually file - but you can still try it out and see what your refund will be before you pay.
It would still be better if the government had all this on a website, but $15 per household is not the end of the world and won't ever fund consumer hostile political lobbying.
The Tax authority should also have a very good guess of all possible deductions/credits, so that can be filled automatically too.
I was a bit sad that they were bought out by Wealthsimple, but Wealthsimple has been a largely ethical and transparent company with all the services they provide, be it their investing platform during the GME debacle or their SimpleTax buyout. Hopefully it stays that way.
"Issue : Business Rule FPYMT-051-01 - If IRS Payment Record is present and Form 4868 Line 8 checkbox or Line 9 checkbox is checked, then 'RequestedPaymentDt' in the IRS Payment Record must be on or before the extended due date but not more than 5 days prior to the received date."
When you search this error in the IRS error search tool linked in the email I got from the IRS, nothing comes up.
I carefully combed through my form until I saw the error - my "Date to make withdrawal" for my payment was a date in the past. Absolutely no mention of the "RequestedPaymentDt" mentioned in the error was present on the form. Googling was not helpful but perhaps I didn't Google the right thing.
Why didn't the freefillableforms website catch this error, it can't be hard to validate the form to make sure the withdrawal date is not in the past? Why is the IRS description of the error nearly undecipherable (now that I know the error it makes sense - before I did I didn't know what it was talking about)? Why does the error not show up on the IRS search tool? I know when file my taxes I will definitely use a paid piece of software because the free stuff has shown itself to be useless (probably deliberately so).
I just finished reading the Snowden article about conspiracy practice, and this is a stark example of it. A group of people acting against the democratic interest, subverting the legal and political system to their interests, and leaving the public feeling powerless.
I can understand the massive profit interest in blocking simplifications to the tax system: if people have an easier time filing their taxes, they might not need to pay Turbotax for the privilege. But what's the profit interest in blocking the IRS from sending poor-people-who-dont-file-taxes-anyway free money?
State Legislators are really cheap. Donate <$500 and you’ll be able to get in-person meetings.
Unfortunately CalFile seems to be intentionally gimped e.g. only usable if you're under a certain income threshold and technically you're not supposed to use it if you have capital gains or loses (but since cap gains are treated as regular income in CA it works fine if you still use it)
Every year, I go ahead and self-prepare my taxes, and then type all the data into Turbotax to see if they find something I missed, and every year they do, and it's in my favor (and always worth more than the Turbotax fee). OTOH, I've seen suggestions that Intuit themselves have had a hand in making the tax preparation process so complex that humans can't possibly get it right without them.
E-filing the federal tax form is free, and state tax form is only like $14 I think, really cheap, and the website does a good job taking you through it step by step in an easy to understand way.
You can also double check the numbers if you want by going through another service like Turbo Tax but stopping before the payment step.
I used them this year after getting screwed by Intuit again last year and swore it would be the last time. Their UI isn’t quite as shiny but still very straightforward and easy to use for someone like me who knows almost nothing about taxes besides ‘I need to do them’.
I’ll use them again next year too, was very happy with the service.
Still ridiculous I have to file them at all, but that's another thing to get into.
Right?
Doctrow always baffles me. By the end of any article, I can't remember what we're talking about.
Where's the call to action? Doctrow had me at "Intuit sucks". Just tell me where to shoot.
They create detailed financial records which are useful beyond filing taxes.
I don’t know if Intuit is helpful in this regards.
There is a level of pragmatism that calls for better communication of programs and help with tax filings ... but ... as a citizen, you do have a responsibility to file tax returns. Why is it always hard to make the argument from both sides, namely: we should make tax filing as easy as possible AND the citizen has a responsibility to file their taxes regardless. It seems we, as a society, have a hard time with the latter part.
So much easier.
Having to fill out self-assessment -- or at least complaining about doing so -- is a bit of a humble-brag as it's an indication that the person complaining earns enough (or has sufficiently complicated tax arrangements) to need to.
No, this is not a general responsibility of citizenship.
It could read that and say "by the way Intuit has a history of poor performance"
it doesn't really say they sabotaged it. when I read that headline, I think that their flagship software is miscalculating it. But thats not what this article is about at all.
The article is about how a tax credit has always failed to address the needs of those eligible for the tax credit, and Intuit has only made a small dent in that in a contract that hoped it would make a bigger dent.
People can still have gotten that tax credit for free before, can get it for free after, can use Intuit's poorly crafted free system, or not. They can also use Intuit's paid systems the whole time. The article then points out that Intuit always crafts circumstances to make their paid system the desired path.
The Child Tax Credit is fine, its the people you are worried about.
Who is stopping the IRS from making a competing easy to use tax filing website? Are people suggesting Intuit is stopping a good product team from operating within the IRS?
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
So I ask again, will the IRS make a painless tool? If the answer is yes, but Intuit is lobbying them not to, then I understand your point.
If it’s just about free vs non-free, I could care less. Filing taxes or filling out anything for the government is usually an awful experience and I’m willing to pay to not have to deal with it.
Yes, IRS would have made a painless tool, but for that lobbying.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...
Exactly this, yes. It's well documented all over the place, but here are a couple of examples:
https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2013/04/02/it...
In any case, thanks to the folks in this thread suggesting alternatives. I was going to switch to Credit Karma last year, but literally the day after I created an account I woke up to the news that Intuit had bought them.
Edit: I see down-thread someone says they had to spin out the tax-filing portion of the business?
[1] https://squareup.com/us/en/press/credit-karma-tax
[2] https://www.pymnts.com/news/partnerships-acquisitions/2020/c...
And the great irony is that said accountant is likely using an Intuit product anyway. So it’s not like they don’t have the ability to make good products for the consumer market, they choose not to.
Yes. The IRS signed an agreement with a coalition of companies called the Free File Alliance (including Intuit) stipulating that if the latter would provide free filing, the IRS wouldn't create a competing product. [1] Intuit then delisted the TurboTax Free File page from search engines [2] so taxpayers would only be able to find the version that directs users to pay. Only 3% of taxpayers took advantage of Free File products — remember, these are products made by tax prep companies like Intuit — even though over 70% are eligible. [3]
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/free-file-online-tax-prep...
How about reading TFA before commenting on it? This is literally exactly what it's about.
Both systems output the same result, so I used CK.
Back in the stone age, we filed taxes with paper and pen.
For most people, it really isn't that hard to use paper/pen/envelope/stamp method.
I did this method of filing for decades. Take the time to learn the basics and you will never have to worry about random ass programs.
My tax returns were never "simple" but filling out the forms was not hard - it never took me more than an hour or two.
It is in the interests of Intuit to make the tax forms seem so so scary.
In reality, most spots get a 0 entered. Very simple math is involved.
Before you made this comment, did you actually try looking at the 1040 form?
* print out the pdfs * fill out * mail
Takes less time and effort than installing magic software and trying to figure out "wizards"
Regardless of which political party is responsible, the Federal government has a lot of benefits programs that have a lot of roadblocks to actually take advantage of. That isn't an accident. You could look at it as the GOP tending to send up roadblocks (e.g. they famously forced the IRS to strike a deal with Intuit) OR you can look at it as a class divide where the GOP are just the "baddies" everyone can scream about without actually needing to hold the government accountable.
The readers on Hacker News are also less likely to follow up the issue with their representatives.
So why don't the authors find a way to directly target the most affected people and get them to complain to their representatives?
PS. Why do some people tend to blame corporations for the corrupt behaviour of their congressmen and senators? If lawmakers are corrupt they should be the ones who should be targeted.
Companies are simply doing what they can do within the law to gain an advantage. They deal in "legality" not "morality".
$90 bucks a year to ensure your taxes are right, with a streamlined interface that almost anyone can follow, that returns you back significant value in time and tax return…
Intuit legally cannot sell your information like other companies can, because they are in the business of taxes.
People here LOVE to tell founders, “oh, you should be charging for your product! Otherwise it isn’t sustainable!”
I’m sorry, would you rather TT be free and them be slanging your data like Facebook and Amazon? Or alternatively, the government just in charge of replacing it with a congruent service? I didn’t think so.
Why do you think it is—specifically—that a multitude of other governments can manage to accomplish this feat, but the United States government shouldn't be able to?
It’s a good point, I will learn more about it.
Regarding the first point. You trust the government to do that for you? Genuinely asking. I have no stance formed on that yet.
If they disagree with me, they send me a bill for the difference anyway. The only way that's changing is if I provide them with additional information they didn't already have. If after that we still disagree, "whether or not I trust them" is philosophically moot: there's a resolution process for disagreements.
And if you don't trust them to get the number right, nothing stops you from filing your own return with the information you believe is correct.
>> $90 bucks a year to ensure your taxes are right
Did you read the article? This is about how Intuit defeated an effort to provide credits to very poor people who might not even file a return by saying "we'll take care of this for you" then creating an obivously sub-par product. This market doesn't have $90 for this specific service, or likely a computer beyond their phone.
The website from the article is pure crap, I’ll say that.
President Donald Trump's 2018 budget blueprint is out, and it wisely cuts IRS funding by $239 million.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-to-shrink-defic...
The number of IRS revenue agents — the auditors qualified to examine complex returns — has plummeted 43 percent over the past decade, according to a report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Audit rates of those filing these complex returns have also sharply declined.
For example, the number of millionaires who were audited in fiscal 2020 was about a quarter of the number from fiscal 2012. Accordingly, these IRS audits turned up unreported tax bills of $1.2 billion last year, about a quarter of the $4.8 billion found in fiscal 2012.IRS spends 11 billion, 300 million is barely a speed bump, is the money being spent correctly?
IRS has been used as a tool of intimidation and oppression to target political enemies of the ruling oligarchy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/irs-scandal-fast-fac...
They have deep corruption, the tax code needs reform, and justice deferred is justice denied.
Gas lighting and blaming the victims of political intimidation is not acceptable.
Is there any evidence that drawing attention to bad actors actually garners political support to fix this? Look at the comments here, almost everyone is talking about the problems with Intuit and not how to fix this systemically.
What we need is grassroots political change. This specific issue regarding tax prep is a symptom of larger systemic problems caused by two main issues. First-past-the-post voting means that people generally only have two viable choices when voting. Anyone who is a single issue voter and their single issue is the tax prep industry is extremely rare and frankly in my opinion crazy. This means that no one has any incentive to change the status quo. The second problem is how US's free speech laws (or perhaps more accurately the current interpretation of these laws) basically create a near free-for-all in terms of campaign financing. Since there is almost no strong motivation for change, the only people involved in the discussion about tax prep are the people who are already invested in the industry. They obvious have a huge incentive to lobby against the death of their industry. So you have an issue in which we have little public motivation for change versus an entire industry that would be willing to dedicate all their profit to fighting change. It isn't surprising we see the results we see.
>A multi-billion dollar company has been lobbying the IRS so it can steal money from the most vulnerable taxpayers" is far more compelling than "poor people pay more taxes than they have to".
I am not making the second argument. I am generalizing the first argument to "multi-billion dollar companies have been lobbying the government to steal money from everyone, let's adjust our system to stop that".
I'd argue that someone drawing attention to specific bad actors is implicitly saying "stop these people from doing this" which is far more actionable than your generic "What we need is wide-spread, bipartisan support for change". What am I supposed to do with that?
Exactly, but people focus on the "these people" rather than the "doing this". Why stop this single actor when we can stop anyone from "doing this".
It feels like if one does that, then you come back and say "but who is doing [bad thing]? where is the evidence?". You can't just leave the people causing the problem out, as if it were some how rude to name the people pissing in the pool.
It is the equivalent of a blameless postmortem. We are in a constant cycle of firing interns for pushing costly bugs into production without ever wondering why we are allowing interns to push to production without supervision. We just fire the intern and think the problem is fixed. We have learned that isn't a good way to run a company, but we haven't learned that isn't a good way to run a society.
Probably not faster than I’d fire whoever let an intern repeatedly push broken code to production, without taking responsibility for fixing the deployment process problem they were responsible for, were I at the level where my responsibility wasn't merely to fix the deployment process problem but to address the problem that allowed the deployment process to persist, and presuming that there wasn't a systemic reason rather than simple nonfeasance behind permitting that problem to go unfixed.
Especially as establishing the “intentional” part of the hypothetical would probably take longer than establishing a serious and inexcusable failure even in the absence of any intent in the person responsible for allowing the push to be possible in the first place.
That's, I think, the upthread posters point. If you have an intern posting broken code to production repeatedly (intentionally or not), you have another problem that is a deeper and broader impact problem, whether individual or systemic or both, than the intern.