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Comment by throwaway413 | Hacker News Reader

All of the people supercritical of Intuit in this thread make me wonder, do they think the government would truly be providing a service on par with TurboTax? When has the government ever done Internet right…looking at you, Healthcare.gov.

$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.

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In Canada (Alberta) but recently used their health link portal and was very impressed with almost all of it. I don't want the government competing with private organizations in what are clearaly market-driven domains, but income tax preparation against a few oligopolistic predators? Absolutely!

>> $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.

I was commenting on the generic complaint you hear about Intuit’s fees for tax preparation, not on this article’s content specifically.

The website from the article is pure crap, I’ll say that.

The government literally already computes the number they expect you to owe. It's how they send you a letter if your own calculations come up short (or long, in which case they will in fact contact you to issue you a refund). If the government simply sends you their calculations (which they are already computing anyway) and you disagree, you would still be able to file an amended return with a company like TurboTax.

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?

To be honest, I don’t know much at all about how taxes work in other countries, including those at or greater than the population scale of the US.

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.

Most Scandinavian countries compute taxes for you. If you approve of the government calculations, it's easy to finalize it.

> You trust the government to do that for you?

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.

Every other government in the world doesn't have corrupt leadership, corrupt and unfair tax codes. If taxes were straightforward, then why would anyone have to compute them manually except for edge-cases, which a government representative could assist with?

Do you understand that that's the reality we're saying we want to make happen?

Well, of course. This is the way it is in much of the world already.

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