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Comment by phuff | Hacker News Reader

The US government provides this online for free. Only the edgiest of edge cases aren't supported. You can e-file your federal return with this regardless of how much money you make. You still have to do the calculations yourself. But you don't have to use paper.

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

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Right. But doing the calculation is pretty hard for most people. Add that to the risk associated to making mistakes and most people will probably prefer paying a bit and have a “””guarantee””” that there are no mistakes. (I don’t disagree he. Just pointing it out.)

Yes, and it's not just calculations. It's things like, "if section F line 27 is greater than the total in section B line 12, subtract the amount in section z line 127 from this total and multiply the result by the appropriate tax rate (see long form instructions for form 478B and fill out Worksheet 12C to calculate your appropriate tax rate).

This is not a verbatim quote, but solar to what you have to do now to calculate health care insurance subsidies.

I build a spread sheet for all the forms and worksheets that require calculations. FreeFillableForms does some of the calculations for you, and does not have any worksheets. Excel has formulas for everything I have encountered paying taxes, and I have a joint account with stock options and several rental property LLCs.

As a bonus, the spreadsheets are generally reusable, after checking to make sure there are no changes.

FreeFillableForms is great and has saved me a ton of time, but it does not do the calculations automatically for every field. You still have to manually lookup certain things from tables. It's freakin' frustrating, because there's no reason why it couldn't automate those as well.

Even more frustrating because it doesn't tell you that you haven't done the calculation or worse, you haven't transferred a field from one form to another.

I failed to copy my self-employment tax back to my 1040 for 2020, despite having calculated it correctly. No warnings, the form filing went smoothly, and 4 months later I got a notice from the IRS.

It's insanity.

I hear you. I keep hoping they will add more calculations in future versions, and they do, little by little.

My suspicion is that it is deliberately deprecated due to pressure from for-profit tax prep companies.

Except it's very useful to be able to import the many many forms for the various sources of income automatically. If you're just a w2 and a 1099-int then yes, obviously it's not hard to file taxes manually.

Those features are really only viable at the scale of large commercial tax software, not the efforts described in the submitted post.

PDFs aren't exactly used in a standardized way, so trying to make this work for even a fraction of the numerous tax form issuers requires a lot of work, and a lot of ongoing maintenance. You'll need to prioritize the actual tax forms, and annual updates to those first.

I used TurboTax online last year and was pretty happy with it's ability to import 1099 data from several companies I use like vanguard and Ameritrade. So the PDFs aren't standardized but many providers have apis to pull the data. In fact, they may be using something like Plaid that consolidates all the APIs into one.

Well, TurboTax happens to be the most widely used large commercial tax software, and the brokers you mentioned are also quite large and popular. Whatever integration has been done is almost certainly proprietary and not freely reusable.

Hypothetically, even if an API existed, building the integration in your own app also costs FTE hours that are likely drawn away to higher priority tasks.

Sure, but this just means open source tax software isn’t viable. TurboTax integrates with most financial services Americans use, to compete with them this functionality has to be matched somehow.

I use Free File Fillable Forms together with excel1040.com. First I fill in the numbers in Excel, then into Free File Fillable Forms, and check that they get the same answers. It works well for me.

It's 2021 and you see no problem with this?

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