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Comment by ed_elliott_asc | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?

In theory, yes.

But few people actually do because it is a painful experience. The IRS' documentation isn't actually bad, it is just that the tax system itself is incredibly (and needlessly) complicated.

For example, you'd need to hand-enter every stock trade (even automated re-investments) even though your broker likely already electronically sent this information to the IRS. Using a digital solution they can often log into your broker and auto-import everything.

For how under-budget the IRS is and how bad the tax system is, they do ok, but the whole thing needs a massive overhaul but there is money in politics keeping it bad in order to profit private companies (plus there's a certain demographic that "hating taxes" is a political position that needs to be kept up with, essentially self-reinforcing-itself).

Also, one might ask "why doesn't the IRS just send you a pre-filled copy of the forms, and you only correct them if they're wrong?".

The answer is "because Congress passed a law saying they can't".

Doing the next step of the root cause analysis leads to "Intuit lobbied Congress and the IRS hard enough that they passed a law, and the IRS conspired to change their procedures".

Except Intuit hasn't paid anywhere near enough in lobbying money to have that kind of effect. Grover Norquist is the last step in your root cause analysis.

what is to stop someone from just underreporting and blaming laziness or the process being too complicated. either the govt. audits it themselves or does nothing. the benefit of the doubt is on your side.

Late fee interest and penalties are on their side. It's statutory that you get it right, intent doesn't matter.

We used to have to hand enter everything anyway. The auto-import stuff is fairly new for all of the tax filing products. TurboTax also fucks up the auto import for my RSUs. Every single year there are a handful of people on the financial planning groups posting "wtf I got a letter from the government saying I owe $80,000" and it is uniformly because one of these services' autoimport system set all of the cost bases for RSUs to $0.

The end result is that I hand-enter anyway, even when paying $120 to Intuit for the privilege.

> For example, you'd need to hand-enter every stock trade (even automated re-investments) even though your broker likely already electronically sent this information to the IRS.

This is not true for most folks, who can use one of two exceptions that allow summarizing. Exception 1 allows you to simply report totals on Schedule D. Exception 2 has you file Form 8949 with summarized rows, as long as you attach a statement with the detailed transaction info (the brokerage 1099-B generally suffices).

https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8949#en_US_2021_publink100...

These are the very same exceptions that tax software uses.

If you made under $100,000 from salary and don't otherwise have any complications (like dependents), a form 1040EZ really is simple. There's no reason to use software for that. It's quite straightforward.

If you have deductions, stock sales, a nanny, a business, etc then you need the regular 1040 and various schedules, and those are all complex enough that you'd probably benefit from software. It's not absolutely required, but there are enough ways to do it wrong (like adding up the wrong lines) that the peace of mind alone is probably worth it to you.

FYI, the 1040EZ form no longer exists. It was eliminated in the name of simplifying the forms (don't ask me how that's supposed to work).

> the 1040EZ form no longer exists

That is wild. I remember using it for my first job, and yep, it took me all of a few hours to fill it out by hand and mail it in.

A few hours? HOURS? The 1040EZ was like 6 questions, it shouldn't have to take you more than 10 minutes.

You're right, I'm basically counting all the time it took me to find an envelope and stamps, get lunch, get a bus to the post office, drop it off, and head to a nearby coffee shop :)

Oops. Damn. Sorry for the bad advice. Thank you for the correction.

Doing them yourself is an option, but I prefer to be guided by software.

Credit Karma has an option to do taxes that is completely free, but I tried it once a few years ago and didn't care for it.

I use FreeTaxUSA which offers free federal and $7 state taxes. Cheaper than a meal at Taco Bell.

It is quite possible to do them yourself especially if your taxes are relatively simple - and in a lot of other countries you'll just be mailed a bill or credit depending on how much your withholding was along with a receipt to review if you think they messed up somehow. American and Canada are held hostage by tax software lobbyists though.

> Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?

Do them yourself. The IRS has guidance and resources for those who are interested [1].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...

You can absolutely do your own taxes, either on paper and mail the forms or (possibly) via the Free File Fillable forms mentioned on the page you linked (as long as you don't hit a corner case). The Free File Fillable forms page [0] says "Make sure we fully support the forms you need" and links to another page with a lengthy list of limitations [1].

So yeah, we're in a place where the IRS says taxpayers "should file electronically with direct deposit if at all possible" [2] but also informs taxpayers that not everyone can use the IRS's forms to file electronically.

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

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

2: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-begins-2022-tax-season-urge...

Among unsupported forms, the validation step in Free Fillable Forms also has a number or bugs that prevents filing due to phantom arithmetic errors. It's beyond frustrating filling out everything on FFF, then needing to copy everything onto a third party service just to pay for the privilege of having my data harvested by a shady company and electronically filed exactly as it would have otherwise. The current situation is unworkable.

If your tax situation doesn't change much from year to year, you can have a CPA or even TurboTax do this years, and next year fill out the new forms based on the new numbers.

I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org, an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes.

Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!

Yes, I used to file taxes with paper forms from the IRS years ago and this is free. There isn't even an income limit to do it this way as far as I know. But of course it's more of a hassle than doing it online as you have to buy stamps, go to the post office, etc.

Just pirate TurboTax. Torrent it, set up a fresh windows VM with Internet access via VPN, install/update turbotax, crack it to get the state version, make sure it's got live versions of all the forms you need, disconnect Internet access (never to be reconnected), copy previous year's data files to VM, do taxes, print out and file by mail, copy data files off to long term storage, save VM image in case you need to revisit any time soon.

Sure, it's a bit tedious. But short of a privacy-preserving libre solution or just doing them manually with fillable PDFs, you'd have to do most of that isolation prepwork anyway. So fuck 'em.

P.S. The directions for modifying .NET assemblies to crack TurboTax are simple and easily followed by anyone with basic programming skill. So if you're fine trusting Intuit you could obtain the installation files from them directly, crack it yourself, and even have e-filing capability from what I understand.

Or just use CashApp Tax. Your procedure makes it sound like Turbo Tax is the only game in town. Turbo Tax isn’t worth any of the effort you mentioned.

TurboTax is one of the few pieces of tax software meant for offline use, thus letting you keep your personal information from entering the permanent records of surveillance valley.

Just quickly looking at CashApp Tax, it appears it is an Android app that likely will want network access to function. If that meets your requirements, good for you. But it doesn't meet mine. I'd also rather use the same software year to year so that information is carried forward, rather than being subject to whichever way the startup winds blow.

CashApp Tax is Credit Karma Tax that was bought by Square. Everything transferred from previous years and Square/Block Inc is publicly traded corporation with a ~$85 billion market cap so I’m not sure what you mean by “whichever way the startup winds blow.”

Furthermore — it’s your tax records. As soon as the government receives them they enter the permanent records of surveillance valley.

"Cash.app" had no name recognition for me and frankly the name sounds gimmicky. I hassumed it was some fly by night thing, but okay, thanks for informing me it has a longer history and large company behind it. Still, being free, it either presently has a revenue strategy (ie commercial surveillance), or it will inevitably pivot to one down the line.

> As soon as the government receives them they enter the permanent records of surveillance valley.

Uh no, US tax records are not public data, nor available for the surveillance industry to buy AFAIK. It's unavoidable that the government gets them, but the fewer parties that get mine the better.

You can go marry an Air Force officer. Military installations offer free professional preparation services to anyone stationed at the installation.

For most folks, CashApp Tax works fine. Its 100% Free. I have used it since it came out (originally Credit Karma Tax).

I own an LLC, traded stocks and crypto and CashApp handled it all flawlessly.

Just be a little careful with the state returns on CashApp. It has a bug on handling mortgage interest deductions if your mortgage is over $750000 and the state allows deduction up to $1000000. Double check by filing with other tax software and verify the refund amount is the same. I used freetaxusa.com to get this right.

No, Turbotax wants you to pay a taxes to Intuit to pay taxes to the IRS.

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