Facebook & Uber have received most of the heat over the past few years. Intuit has strangely avoided the same level of scrutiny.
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...
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.
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.
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...