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!
How does the project plan to keep up with that? Will it require volunteers?
Right now, we're focusing on tooling to make onboarding new tax forms simpler and require a lower threshold of project understanding to allow a larger, less technical group of people to contribute
If you have questions and the README and CONTRIBUTING documents do not specify a way to communicate, then open Issues on GitHub with your questions. Try to avoid asking questions unless you’ve read everything and cannot figure out how to proceed: remember that everyone working on the project is volunteering their limited time, just like you, and try to be respectful of their time and energy.
I am unaffiliated with this project, this is just the general procedure for contributing to open source projects.
IME everything else stays the same (e.g. the 8000s forms), but there are so many of them that it's a lot of work to just see which ones have changed and if you have to care about them. The forms also become less formulaic. E.g. If you file 6251, you need to keep your own records about Alternative basis, so you can't just fill them out based on w2s and 1099s.
Last year I used http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/
It did the job, mostly, but had some quirks and didn't quite get everything right with the rounding when I set it to use whole dollar amounts, so I had to correct a few totals that ended up being $1 off, which was annoying. Probably won't use that one again.
But the freefilefillableforms supported by IRS rounds all input and then does addition based on that. For now we just maintain all cents and do math with the precise numbers, then round at the end when the numbers need to go into the forms. We have some work in the pipeline now to make that user-configurable too.
I'd like to contribute, but don't feel like building someone's business for free.
It's interesting because having a group of disparate humans come together and say "yea, we hate the current thing, let's build something better and not commercialize it" doesn't typically happen. Kudos to you folks!
It's entirely possible for the rights holders to say "we're going private now" and pivot the project into a for-profit business.
In terms of future proofing against the project "going commercial" (i.e. changing the license going forward), it doesn't get much better than this, because pretty much all the copyright holders would need to agree on a license change.
Ideally, the bulk of the copyright does not reside with a small number of authors - the more authors, and the more evenly the copyright is spread among them, the better.
Sounds like yet another thing the e-filing lobby worked to ensure their monopoly...
Can any free app do all of this?
Better yet is there a free app that can log into my Turbotax account, fetch all the data and then generate the forms and file them?
Not only is it cheaper, more importantly, you’re not giving money that’s going towards maintaining the tax code that prevents the government from “competing” with TurboTax.
Obviously the Government already has what it needs to pretty much do all of your taxes, and they already must do this anyway. They could ask you like 5 short questions and your taxes would be done…they already have all your info.
Stop paying the lobbyists to continue lobbying against your interests. Start getting in the habit of calling or emailing your reps around tax time.