TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing
slate.com
slate.com
The one that really aggravated me though was the one at the end: after you FILE your taxes, they present this damned progress-bar looking thing as if you are somehow “not done” yet, as if this totally optional product sale is a required step!! No, no, no, that is just misleading garbage, and it is so annoying to have to constantly hunt around the page for the magic text to get around these things. I mean, I couldn’t even reach the page that lets me download my forms as PDF until I skipped this upsell.
What’s more, the product itself is getting more expensive but worse. On desktop, the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?) with all kinds of things unnecessarily hidden. On page after page, there is more than enough space to show everything but instead it’s giant white space everywhere; they HIDE things behind disclosure arrows, and with no logic whatsoever; e.g. on one page it shows the 2020 numbers by default but hides all the 2021 numbers behind arrows!?
Guess what isn’t an insultingly-small, truncated experience on desktop? The ads, the upsells. THOSE are full-page, taking full advantage of screen space and even scrolling off the edges.
Really shows their priorities.
The product must get more expensive for Turbo Tax to deliver growth to its shareholders.
Perhaps it's time to hire an accountant?
At the end of the day the IRS cares about your net loss or gain, and what's short term vs long term gains.
So I typically sum up my various investments into those 2 buckets, by broker. if i ever get audited, i have the individual trades i can share if needed.
https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8949#en_US_2021_publink594...
These are the very same exceptions that tax software uses.
> The Ordinary box in box 2 isn’t checked
There is no "box 2" on the 1099-Bs I have. It is on the standardized IRS one, so the instruction from the IRS seems fine … but this is a great commentary on the state of the American tax system and how complicated it is.
(Variations on this theme cropped up multiple times during this year's prep, too…)
Exception 2 doesn't seem to list out what the conditions to qualify for it are, it only lists the procedure for the exception. I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to take it, for that reason.
> These are the very same exceptions that tax software uses.
TurboTax does not appear to take advantage of Exception 1. It would appear to have applied to my situation this year, and yet, TurboTax filled out a complete Form 8949, with each transaction, just like the parent comments hint at.
In practice, the condition for Exception 2 is "the 1099-B is already correct and you don't need to make further adjustments". Because if it isn't, you might as well fill out Form 8949.
It's definitely possible to have tax software summarize, although I suppose they might not do it by default.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/entering-importing/help/ho...
The tax code is just sufficiently complex enough that I don't feel safe making that assumption. You're probably right, but "probably" is too low a bar here.
> Brokerages tend to produced a condensed 1099-B to save space: it would be very cumbersome parsing hundreds of pages of a full-IRS-layout 1099-B.
… but like, isn't that the problem? If nobody uses the standardized form because it's too cumbersome … simplify the tax code.
Or standardize the data format and stop using PDF & human toil as a data transfer layer/format.
> It's definitely possible to have tax software summarize
Certainly it is possible. I was responding to the comment that it happens in practice, at least for the largest such software.
The problem is, the one tax code is made for the whole country to use. If there is one person who needs the full form to correctly report his tax situation, the tax code has to be that complicated. And the 99.99999% simple cases have to suffer. You have better idea?
I'll have to short-circuit it _again_, and this will be the last year I use TurboTax: if I'm going to have to manually work around these things, I may as well not pay for the privilege. Prior years made it trivial to import the data from the 10 different financial firms that provide 1099s.
Of course this is a bit of a sore point for me since my state used to have free online tax filing but H&R Block got their rep voted in and killed the program "to save taxpayer money", it cost the state about $40k per year to run and now instead we have one of the highest e-filing costs in the country.
Why would I pay for a worse interface? We don't have trivial taxes either, we have our own business and investment income. TurboTax was way worse about not letting us skip over stuff we don't have. It creates single question pages one after another instead of just sticking them in a list so you can skim through them all at once and select only the relevant ones.
And they always get me with the "Audit defense"... I am not sure how useful it will be if I ever get audited (I err on the side of caution when doing taxes), but still some small extra amount of money for extra peace of mind...
That's trivial; don't throw your ranch so easily. You only have to copy few fields from your 1099 form and the instructions are very clear - which fields to copy and paste where.
I tried freetaxusa but there were a few things that turbotax provided clearer guidance on. There was one particular issue where I was quite stumped with Freetaxusa, but Turbotax explained it.
I believe Turbotax also found one or two things that freetaxusa didn't point me towards. But it was all kind of a haze at this point so I might be misremembering.
I don't want TurboTax to be better, but for me it was better this year. I really hate their lobbying. I'll give try more options next year.
US is a country where IRS is legally obligated to make you screw up as much as possible.
I'm somewhat new to the Roth thing and this year it flagged an excess contribution issue, which feels like it would have turned in to a prolonged and painful ordeal if I hadn't gotten the heads up to correct it before filing.
I just wish it let me put my return in to I-Bonds.
Up through the 2020 tax year, it was possible to e-file state taxes for free using state fillable forms (like you can use free fillable forms for federal taxes). But intuit decided to no longer provide that service this year.
I've kept coming back until now out of habit and because they've got a lot of data on me they can prefill, but maybe I should look at FreeTaxUSA now.
Meanwhile, the traditional desktop software version of TurboTax remains quite good, and I have been using it year after year on Windows. They have several editions; here is the one I used this year:
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B09FW199HB/
It's much cheaper to buy it on Amazon than directly from TurboTax.
That's useless for tax software though, unless they are getting updated every tax year.
Not sure if this would have worked on a web version or not, but I was pretty happy to have this option available to me.
Last night while preparing my 2021 return I opened up the 2020 software with my old return to review what I had done in the prior year.
FWIW TurboTax is eminently easy to pirate and crack to get state filing functionality. Network isolate the VM after you get the updates and state forms but before you start inputting data, and you can rest easy that no personal data is being exfiltrated. There's no need to support these regulatory capture parasites.
FWIW I'm a Linux user that runs most everything in VMs. Each year I create a new one for TurboTax, get the updates/stateforms, then disconnect and never reconnect it to the Internet. It's a little work, but can be done mindlessly while doing something else.
They would lose sales if it were. People are sensitive when it comes to their taxes. And I imagine a good number of accountants use Turbotax in the back. There could be legal issues with them uploading clients’ tax information to a third party’s servers.
However, fraudsters will use DIY software like TurboTax but then charge for it, evading all the provisions of tax law that pertain to paid preparers. This is not as severe a problem as it was say five years ago, since IRS has instituted a number of security features to weed out the fraudsters who efile.
The IRS and industry vendors (including Intuit) have, under the label "Security Summit", implemented things such as collecting metadata (tracking the network address from where returns are filed, how long the return was open in the software, etc), stronger password requirements with MFA required to submit returns electronically, limiting the number of refunds paid to the same address or financial account, and optionally collecting driver's license info to confirm identity.[0] It seems to have been relatively successful, as the frequent complaints of ID theft (returns filed under someone else's name) have declined significantly as a result.
[0]https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-announces-dirty-dozen-tax-s...
It's kind of like the difference between having an Oracle database server vs. having MS-Access on the desktop.
https://proconnect.intuit.com/lacerte/pricing-main/
Back in 1998:
State taxes are full of really confusingly-worded questions and things I've never heard of, with little explanation as to what means what. At least the federal section has proper explanations of things.
The problem is then: are they shielded from liability? If there's a mistake and people sue, they won't have Intuit's lawyer army.
But let's say we have the perfect program. Would people be OK with printing out and mailing their returns? Because you have to be an authorized provider to e-file.
Also it requires expertise outside of programming for which there is not much enthusiasm for open source.
The sheer number of changes that the Tax code makes every year would be hard enough to keep up with for an open source project, let alone making integrations with all of the brokerages to make this process less painful.
Except for medical bills, mortgage deduction, education expenses, retirement/HSA/etc. accounts and SALT (if that gets reinstated) and maybe a couple of others, probably. Although, frankly, I'm not sure what deductions other than charitable contributions don't get reported to the IRS and I'm similarly not sure what deductible expenses don't already have a paper trail I would care about retaining. But that's where "correcting the math" would include replacing the standard deductions with itemization would come in.
I think requiring a basis for investment income to be made in the acquired year to the IRS is both reasonable and trivial.
More people than you would think. I have several coworkers with kids that don't have a single computer in their house other than their phones. If the kids need to use a computer they take home their work laptop.
Yes. According to Pew, in 2021 there were 15% of adults in the US who said they only have smartphone data for Internet access and do not have what we know as home broadband. By age, that number skews towards younger adults, with the largest share being people aged 18-29, however even older adults hover in the low teens of percent.
Even if someone does have broadband at home, the number of "traditional" desktop and laptop computers have been dropping. Mobile phone and tablet devices (but, let's be honest, mostly mobile phones) have been replacing regular computers at a pretty high clip. And where a household does have a desktop or laptop, they may only have one, where almost everyone has a mobile phone device so it's probably convenient to just pull up the tax prep web site and get to it on the handheld.
Pew data: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
It's not that bad. I have this great app that's only $30
/s
My 6 year old was playing Minecraft on a tablet / console for a long time before moving to the computer. He's said several times about how much better he is at it on desktop. I've never even mentioned to him that one's technically better than the other.
Really irritated me that I couldn’t opt out permanently but had to click skip every single time.
And I’m tired of the progress bars pretending to be calculating in order to make me feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.
And yet I buy it begrudgingly every year because it is what I know, and it imports data fairly well from my online accounts.
Do the alternative brands import w2’s and previous year’s turbo tax files? Does it integrate with online brokers for pulling 1099’s?
I shouldn't need to download an app to a smartphone for something that I exclusively intend to use on a desktop. I went with FreeTaxUSA in the end.
I see where you're coming from here and mostly agree. However, I will say that as someone who already had the Cash App installed the process was pretty seamless. The only major item I would change is that it would be nice to have some way to import a CSV or XLS file (or even JSON) for the capital gains forms. They offer an online spreadsheet but you still have to fill out each cell individually. If you have a few dozen trades (or more) to report it gets rather tiresome and could even be a bit error-prone.
I suppose I could have scripted the data entry with keyboard macros (via xdotool[0]), but for something I only do once per year it probably wouldn't be worthwhile… and the interface could be different next year.
https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/wheres-my-check-cob...
Coming from a country where the government offers a decent and free tax software, I really hate being hostage to TurboTax and their dark patterns.
But honestly, the situation could be a lot worse if it were provided by the government, given the current tax code. To start with, we'd likely have the federal government + every state having different opinions on how to implement their version of the tax code, and spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars with consultants and developers (vide health.gov [1]) to implement their own flavors.
On the taxpayer side, you'd have to deal with at least two systems when doing your taxes, but potentially more if you lived in multiple states. In the best case scenario, some data would be portable between them (but likely not all, given the complexity and number of edge cases). In the worst, you'd have to enter the data manually in multiple systems, making it a nightmare to keep systems in sync. In this alternate universe, TurboTax doesn't look that bad anymore.
The only way to solve this cleanly would be through a full reform of the tax code, including a drastic standardization and simplification across federal + states. But it's unlikely to happen anytime soon, and, not surprisingly, Intuit will be always lobbying heavily against it.
Now, if government were to embrace a public-private partnership like you suggested, we can make meaningful progress faster. Create a white-label version that is offered for free to 140M taxpayers, align incentives on simplifying the tax code, and get the 3P ecosystem to develop advanced versions for more sophisticated users, businesses, etc to create extra incentives to continue improving the sw.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/obamaca...
I know several folks that have their partner do it cause they just hate it.
So the "quite easy" is far from universal.
Only the Federal government could come up with a scheme where you have to prove you made X, then prove you owe Y and pay that.
FedGov doesn't know the basis of your stock (or crypto) transactions so even if it knows the proceeds, it doesn't know how much tax you owe.
Aren't brokerages required to file forms for every customer they serve? Let the regulated businesses deal with bureaucracy and accounting, they are expected to hire people for that job anyway.
They are, but there are corner cases where they might not have all the necessary information. For example, if you trade the same stocks or mutual funds through more than one broker then neither one will have enough information to determine the cost basis for each sale. It's also possible to move shares directly from one broker to another.
For crypto, in the US, none of the exchanges are currently required to track any of this to begin with (they aren't considered brokers) so it's up to the customer to keep track of the cost basis. Even if they did act as brokers the other issues still apply, plus the cost basis of your positions will be affected if you trade on your own without involving an exchange. For example, spending crypto on goods or services from an unhosted wallet can affect the cost basis of subsequent sell orders. The tax filings are probably simpler under the current system, since if exchanges were filing 1099-Bs you would need to submit adjustments to their cost basis reporting along with everything else.
Heck - how does Schwab know the basis of Disney stock that I bring in?
How does either one know when I acquired said assets?
When I sell you BTC, how do you report my gain?
When I buy pizza with BTC, how does the pizza place report my gain?
With bitcoin, a part of !!fun!! from holding non-security assets is all the accounting you have to do. Enjoy it, that's a part of a bargain. That said, other countries like Japan mandate regulated exchanged to keep track of their customers assets, assist with cost-basis computations, etc.
My point being, regulated institutions can make filing taxes easy for most of the people, with unsophisticated circumstances. Usually being an employee of a single business is considered "unsophisticated" enough to not deal with any forms, letting your employer do these things for you. There is no reason why other common life situations cannot be made as easy, like having deductions for mortgage, purchasing securities via regulated brokerages, etc.
If your situation is "sophisticated", then surely you gotta enjoy accounting and reporting then. But that should be necessary only for a fringe percentage of people.
Even if the government had absolutely no records of my income (which is false), there should be an option for me to just submit all my income records to them tabulated. I can attach a bank account number and routing number and have them deduct whatever money I owe in taxes from the account. End of story. Unless the IRS is claiming you owe a massive amount of money relative to your income, it is never worth contesting it. You're going to spend more money & time than you will ever recover.
Of course it's much easier for us because we have a much simpler tax system - virtually no exemptions - chances are if you have one job all year your employer got your tax right to the dollar.
I have to file in both countries, American taxes is like pulling teeth (the paper work side, I don't mind the actual paying of taxes, it's a civic duty after all)
Even if I were living in the US, getting money from someone under the threat of fines and incarceration is called extortion.
Do you need to adjust the value here? (Yes) (No)
... new page slowly loads ...
Do you need help calculating this value? (Yes) (No) (I don't want to change this value)
... new page slowly loads ...
What should the value be? (I'll enter it manually) (Help me calculate it) (I don't want to change it)
Like other than some basic wording changes, the third page already supports what the first two pages did. And depending how many stock trades are in your form you might have to repeat this loop a hundred times. It's really enraging.
I've tried for the first time FreeTaxUSA to prepare my mother's tax return. Guess what? It's even better than Turbotax in some aspects(the UI is similar, but doesn't waste your time with animations), and way cheaper. It only charges you to file state but, if you come from the Free File IRS website (and are under the income requirements), it doesn't even charge you that. There's one upsell for their tax consultants or whatever, but it's only done once.
It does not automatically import W2s though, but that saves you maybe 5 minutes per W2. Not sure about stock transactions import either, it seems they can't import from brokers. I will have to check next year. They do seem to have spreadsheet import, so maybe that's something we (as in, HN community) could fix until they have the feature.
The competition seems to have improved as well, although I don't have first hand knowledge (but watched some youtube reviews where they walk through the filing with every software).
It's time we ditch Intuit. If we can't have free IRS software, then we should at least bleed Intuit dry.
EDIT: it's particularly egregious that Intuit came up with the Free File program as a compromise so that IRS wouldn't have their own tax software, only to leave the program.
If anyone is looking to convert from turbo tax, you can import your previous return as pdf and that could cover a lot of details already that don't change year over year.
https://www.freetaxusa.com/help/display_faq.jsp?delete-accou...
It's also worth noting that the upsell is only $7.
It's astronomically easier than filing the same tax information in the US and takes far less time even though the tax code is less clearly written and user support is almost totally nonexistent.
The nonexistence of a national ID system makes digital identification unnecessarily difficult. The idea that an individual has to redeclare to the IRS what has already been declared to the IRS on W2s and 1099s is just stupid.
The US tax filing system is simply primitive.
The reason why it's so easy to file taxes in lots of European countries is because the tax system (for the general population) is a lot simpler. For example in Austria you pay the same amount of taxes no matter if you're single or married, capital gains are taxed at a flat rate and directly withheld by brokers, and "social benefits" are typically handled outside of the tax system instead of being folded into the tax system.
In the United States the tax code is a lot more complex. You pay different taxes if you're married compared to if you're single, capital gains tax rate depends on your other taxes so brokers can't automatically withhold taxes, and there are a lot of edge-cases for certain other situations that can't be easily automated. Like tax credits if you're affected by natural disasters, different tax handling for railroad worker pensions, and so on.
With that complexity it is a lot harder to automate taxes, but it's also hard to retroactively reduce that complexity, as any changes will negatively financially impact some of the affected groups. Also I think that it might be easier in the US to handle those aspects as part of the tax system (instead of handling them independently), as the federal government has the authority to collect taxes, but direct payments (outside of the tax system) to individual groups might be harder? (But I'm not sure if that's true).
what do you think OP was talking about? they are keeping it complex on purpose.
To me this looks somewhat like the broken windows fallacy: In countries where the tax code is simple and allow for "automated" taxes nobody is going to advocate for a new law if it makes filing taxes a lot more complicated. But in countries where the tax code is already complex adding one more complex law doesn't make too much of a difference.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Part of the political resonance with the tax issue is the cost of doing taxes and the stress it causes. If the process was as simple as verifying a document, signing it and sending it back (or heaven forbid, docusigning it and clicking 'next') then the discussion changes to "what are my taxes doing?" and "is this worth it?"
I have a hard time seeing past malice, when some of the most high profile easy to target tax dodgers consistently pull it off with only good outcomes, or when the IRS is given more money to specifically target them yet doesn't.
The level of complexity in US tax code isn't outrageous, but there are a lot of exemptions. And most European countries have them as well.
The stonewalling of tax authorities sending me the bill, however, is pure malice.
I just use a passport for govt identification because it usually only requires the passport, where most other ID methods require two.
ofc it was never meant to act as a national ID (and thus never tried to be secure), but more and more things are hacked in to make it act as such since there's no better option. A bit ironic given the state of social security nowadays.
Yes TurboTax and the tax filling industry in general are pretty shady, and there should be free IRS/CRA tools for people to fill their returns directly. Unless you have a more complicated tax situation. But to me that does not have anything to do with doing away with tax fillings in general.
The US system is intentionally designed so that you don't know what the IRS does or does not know. If you leave something off of your taxes that the IRS knows about then maybe they'll audit you and give you a big fine. So the optimal strategy is to report everything and pay the taxes you owe.
In Spain's system, it seems to me that the optimal strategy would be to either go with what the tax agency says or to report more information, depending in which gives you a lower tax bill.
There's a lot you still have to report yourself, like cash payments or sales, crypto currency, dependents, charitable contributions, and so on.
It's not like the IRS magically knows everything. You're acting as if people only avoid tax fraud because the IRS has a general idea as to what you owe and they keep it secret from you. People are generally pretty decent. The people intentionally committing tax fraud are gonna try whether the IRS keeps your taxes secret from you or not.
Sounds a lot like 'it's best for the plebs not to know the law is so they don't know what to hide from the police'
You can thank the Christians in the Reagan years for calling damned near everything "The Mark of the Beast", including social security numbers, attempted creation of a national ID, and more.
So we ended up with a de-facto national ID, being a hodgepodge of state IDs, RealID, SSN, credit scores from multiple (horrific) credit vendors, legal records, and plenty more.
I seriously hope they fail, and also that they're never able to influence the powers that be / the whole process with Hacienda (they surely would like to make it more complex, more like filing a return in the US).
Does it also tell you of its own volition if the tax office owes you money instead on a return without you having to declare anything? For example, if the tax office knows where you work as an employee and where you live, and the tax code has provisions that stipulate that an employee gains a tax advantage of 0.xx€ per kilometre commuting distance between his home and his place of work, does it factor that in or doesn't it? Because that would actually be _nice_.
I’ve had payments pretty much instant (maybe next day) of repayments that are 4 figures, and ones that are just a few pennies.
Yes, if you pay too much in tax and their calculations reveal that, then, yes, you get money back on your bank account.
They don’t calculate commute deductibles for you, but mortgages, pension is something which is calculated for you based upon reports from the respective institutes.
I don't think it's related to national ID system though. The Social Security Number (or Tax Identification Number for non-citizen non-residents) does serve as a national ID for tax purposes. The IRS certainly already does have your W2's and does know who you are, that's not an issue.
The main issue is what the OP is about, that the US was considering creating such a system, but the tax prep software people lobbied against it.
I also wonder how much of an issue is the crazy complexity of the US tax code; it seems ridiculously complex to me, even for people without complicated or large income, I suspect it's a lot simpler in Spain. But this is just me guessing.
(1) In many of those cases, state/local filing requires very small additional paperwork plus same-year federal forms.
(2) In many of those cases, the same thing the IRS could do for federal forms could be done by state/local tax authorities for their own forms.
So, solving the federal case both solves most of the problem and provides a template for solving most of the rest of the problem.
States' tax laws are not just federal taxes on a different form. They're independent tax systems with different legislation and different judiciary. Maybe in some states the tax code is simple enough that it can be filled entirely from information on your federal taxes, but this is often not the case.
Like my taxes are relatively simple, so my state taxes are just a few calculations using my taxable income from the federal 1040, and then also I have to attach any federal schedules I filed. Having the completed 1040 and printable schedules would reduce the state filing down to a few minutes of work.
My tax situation is not complicated and my state filing is 11 pages, plus 8 pages of worksheets. Federal schedules are not accepted, my state has similar but slightly different counterparts.
I guess I wouldn't want Michigan to not implement an even easier system just because some other state requires more complicated calculations.
That's all that is being talked about with #1.
> I don't think it makes any sense to have what amounts to a nationalized TurboTax that interprets tax laws outside of their own jurisdiction.
No one is suggesting that.
> States' tax laws are not just federal taxes on a different form.
Typically, a component (often the main component, with the state firm being smaller to capture special situations that cause variations) of state tax filing is exactly federal tax documents (not on a different form.)
Getting the state to prefill their own forms is a separate policy decision, but it's generally smaller impact in time/effort per filer as well as smaller impact in # impacted.
"we don't even have income tax" to "copy over a few lines, multiply by this fixed number, and we have 5 other possible deductions" to "we have our own forms for everything, and you need to file a separate local tax return"
And heaven forbid you have any part year returns with a couple of states like the latter.
My point is that the whole system is inherently a mess and even if federal returns were automated, many people would still be spending considerable amounts of time preparing taxes.
And even then, the only difficulty I had was doing CA nonresident taxes, because it turns out that there's a weird collision with CA and a few other states for nonresident taxes, the other one being the state I lived in at the time. And CA's instructions doesn't tell you about needing the other form unless you read the instructions for that form in particular.
The US government has zero power to change any of this.
The US system is just terribly implemented and there's no excuse for it.
See my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31075655
The large tax companies are engaging in regulatory capture and ought to be sidelined in favor of a healthy society.
Edit: my relative says that it's already on the TODO list, but it takes a while with all of the other things they have to do.
Edit: sanitized personal information because I'm stupid.
I LOVE the company and the product though, please pass along kudos. what a breadth of fresh air after years of using Turbo Tax. I now tell EVERYONE I know to use them.
Your +1 and kudos have been passed along.
However, I worry that the reason they haven't done it is because of lack of time. They spend a lot of time on finding and stopping fraud. If they didn't need to do that, I'm sure it would get done faster.
Tangentially, there are all sorts of good reasons for an investor to want a CSV available locally anyway. Analysis of one's misadventures, for a start.
Consider that this requires cutting a separate deal with each individual brokerage. Even TurboTax omits some big ones e.g. Vanguard. Not on TT's list -- I checked just today.
https://finovate.com/square-takes-on-taxes-as-justice-oks-in...
All this for like $13.50 federal and state filed online. Can't get cheaper than this.
I love how they ask you again if you enter something that's "not common" in case you misunderstood what something is for.
And here is this subthread, recommending "FreeTaxUSA" … for $13.50+state.
It might be cheaper, better quality, or better quality/price … perhaps. But is this not exactly the same thing? (Perhaps with less advertising, e.g., not running a commercial to millions of people repeating "free" a gajillion times.)
13.50 is for state filing.
P.S. Use FREETAXUSA 10 for 10% off, and go through TopCashback for cashback
They support the federal version, and did leave them a message, so we'll see next year.
If you google "FreeTaxUSA" and log-in that way, it'll change your free-file account to a paid account and there is no way to change it back. To free-file with them, you need to always log in using the special IRS link.
I thought this was pretty annoying, especially as there's no way for customer service to change it back. Their recommendation was to make a new account and re-enter all my tax info.
Or, unless you're saying I should believe the marketing, but again, we're in a thread about the marketing from companies in that industry being false…
This IRS link issue is something I've noticed with TurboTax and TaxSlayer in the past. They hide their free file (even the Federal File) from users unless they use the IRS link.
At least the paid accounts are cheaper than H&R block's gotcha upsells!
My concern is that my tax situation, while not extreme, is not exactly simple. How well does something like FreeTaxUSA deal with small businesses (K1), part-time employment (1099?), stock awards and ESPP, and so on? If I can do my taxes in a day and be confident that I don't severely screw anything up, I'll totally go with that next year.
A few non-IRA investments become very annoying to file after a couple years.
The current tax system is absolute garbage.
I found it MUCH more usable than TurboTax * and TaxAct. TurboTax was going to charge me >$300, and TaxAct was also > $150.
FreeTaxUSA was only $16.
* TurboTax can auto import your 1099s from most institutions. I did have to manually import 6 different forms into FreeTaxUSA - but I think the process was still faster.
Ended up using FreeTaxUSA and was pleasantly surprised. Was way easier to enter all my info in than TurboTax, and pulled up the same refund amount. I don't see why I would want to use TurboTax when the free alternative is free and easier to use.
The problem isn't people trying to influence the government to do the wrong thing. The problem is the government can so easily be convinced to do the wrong thing.
Current CEO has net worth of >$100 million. In fairness, the poorest board member of intuit has half a dozen positions earning $150,000 to $350,000 and _may_ not have accumulated true financial independence. But other board members have over $200 Million.
Those people make the following decision Every. Single. Year: “let’s try to get the government to make taxes far harder and riskier for hundreds of millions of Americans so that I can be even more rich than I already am.”
It would be more excusable if they merely hadn’t lobbied for Americans at all, someone else did, and they reacted quickly to additionally reap the benefits of the same policy.
But when you are already well past having all the money your family could ever need, and choose to try to get the government to fuck over hundreds of millions of people, then the blame lands on you just as much as the politician.
Of course, that is still a drop in the bucket compared to how many people suffer because of their lobbying, but it isn’t about simply one person being greedy for themselves.
Survival instinct.
Fascinating way to reframe this as a natural survival instinct of...checks notes... a corporate entity. An entity that exists at the government's pleasure, and whose charter can be revoked by said government.
Let's reframe your own logic:
> The real villains of this story are the politicians who TurtboTax/Intuit have successfully lobbied.
The politicians did nothing illegal by accepting the lobbying on behalf of TurboTax, after all. Under what rule or law would you punish them? Surely you can not fault politicians for earning money to continue to survive in politics, no?
You can go in circles with this kind of thinking.
Instead, we should look at outcomes. What do we want to happen with taxes? Ideally the government sends you pre-filled paperwork. Who is opposing this outcome? Intuit. Hence they are villians.
First off, I never said anything about a legal punishment. Secondly, politicians are ostensibly supposed to act for the good of their constituents. Corporations are motivated to act for the good of their shareholders. In this situation TurboTax/Intuit is operating as it is expected/supposed to act while the politicians are not.
> The corporations are ignoring something that is outside their responsibility.
Intuit is actively lobbying about tax preparation, ergo it is their responsibility, ergo they can be judged for their actions on it. In general you are correct, in the specifics here, you are incorrect.
Corporations may not be obliged to better society, but it is entirely reasonable for me to look upon them unfavorably when their management intentionally and knowingly takes actions that make life worse for most people.
It is very strange that you believe that an entity can engage with a government but then be absolved of all responsibility for the outcome of that engagement.
It doesn't matter that a certain choice is better for the corporation. It's still immoral for the corporation to harm people.
>Making the world worse so you can benefit is evil. It's evil when individuals do it, and it's evil when corporations do it.
You are simultaneously arguing against nuance in one comment and then for it in the next.
There is no need for the glib "checks notes" snark on a forum like this. I feel like it undermines the argument and makes the post come across as adversarial rather than constructive.
It's both.
If you tried to change the government to fix lobbying, every company would lobby against it. It wouldn't pass.
Also I don't really want to hear about how American citizens need to fix their government when they have no time for civic engagement. Independent polls show the US Govt has misaligned priorities to what the people want, and they often have a rock bottom approval rating.
Let's start by making voting days holidays, guarantee a livable minimum wage, guarantee time off like the rest of the sane world, let that marinade for a while, then let's criticize people for their lack of engagement.
Trending outrage seems to be the only way to move the needle at the moment so trying to undermine this article is also undermining progress.
I am pointing out the root of the problem is not TurboTax/Intuit but instead the government. Your comment is effectively the doing the same thing to my comment that I did to this article so I don't understand your criticism that I was "undermining progress". It isn't like "making voting days holidays, guarantee a livable minimum wage, guarantee time off like the rest of the sane world" is a much easier to accomplish political goal than "fix lobbying".
Fully agree with you that saying "This rent seeking entity with a will of its own and deep pockets to spend on lobbying, is solely a byproduct of a broken system and not also fundamentally culpable at this point for the continuation of that system". Governments and corporations are made of people who make a choice. If a company choses to profit off a bad thing the government wants to do, we can decry the industry as well.
At some point there was a complex tax code, and TurboTax et. al. didn't exist yet and were not to blame for it. At this point, they do exist and they must share in the blame.
My point was that this is something we all do. I have never met a single person who was always on the side of the greater good for every single political issue. I don't think voting or lobbying for your own interests is inherently immoral. If it is, basically all of democracy and capitalism is immoral.
No need to add grey space here.
To solve the problem, you can either liquidate all immoral people, or harden government against the desires of immoral people. Eliminating Intuit would just result in a new company picking up where they left off. Blaming and condemning Intuit is a no-op and a waste of time.
That's primarily because it would be unconstitutional to "fix" lobbying, at least they way detractors of the practice would likely consider adequate. It's right there in the First Amendment next to freedom of speech:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
But one thing it shows is that the American democratic process is supremely broken, because we don't seem to be able to punish our bad politicians who are accepting bribes. All you have to do is look at the average age and tenure of the senate compared to approval ratings and it tells it's own story.
My last point is that money is not speech, corporations are not people, and one person equals one vote. If you etched all that in legal framework you would totally still have lobbying, but I'd like to think it would help.
Most lobbying is boring stuff like proposed amendment drafting, outreach to Congressional and agency staff, highly targeted issue & message test polling, ...
are you saying you think people in power care about the people they rule over?
"Let's start by making voting days holidays"
if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow you to do it. they literally shot JFK, the elected president, almost 60 years ago. the idea that everything is not completely fucked at this point, is so incredibly naiive.
Are “they” in the room with you right now?
They don't have to disallow it, just make it difficult and inconvenient. The loud part is "election security". The quiet part is "voter suppression".
Like, why the hell do so many states only allow a SINGLE day to vote? I can understand not trusting the mail-in voting that Oregon and some other states do, but certainly we can all agree that letting the polls be open for multiple days with long hours would be a good thing, right?
> "Let's start by making voting days holidays"
I hate that there has been such a push for this. It's not going to increase turnout. It will not increase turnout from people that work emergency services, and will lower turnout for people that work customer-facing jobs like retail and restaurants. Just ask your cashier how easy it is for them to get Labor Day, Memorial Day, or Independence Day off of work. They will laugh in your face.
If you're W2, and you have kids or 1099s the gov already knows about, there should be no need to file at all. State and local governments should tap into the federal feed, and there should also be no filing there. Any discrepancy that results in a bill or refund gets automatically sent out.
The amount of time wasted to do taxes, even a simple 1040EZ, is staggering. The fact that people with relatively simple tax situations are persuaded to use expensive filing services (H&R) or crappy software is criminal.
And when you go to an H&R Block office, you're talking with someone who doesn't really know taxes at all. They are just filling out forms like you might do yourself.
When my ex-wife and I had separated but were still legally married, she went to an H&R Block office and the tax preparer told her that she could file single. (No, you can't. It's married filing jointly or married filing separately.)
She also said our adult daughter didn't need to file at all because her income was below the filing threshold. (Yes, she did need to file because at the time she was on an ACA/Obamacare health plan.)
It's bad when I know more about taxes than the "expert" at H&R Block.
It's true that some employees would be hurt if Intuit went out of business, but paying someone doesn't magically make their behavior acceptable. You can't pay someone to harass people on the street and then say "sorry, I can't stop or my harasser will lose their income, the real villains here are the police for letting me do this."
Disagree. Nation-states, companies are entities with minds of their own.
That said, we could make income tax more visible without requiring tax professionals. (e.g., end withholding and send me a monthly tax bill; show the money go into my bank account and then back out, whether automatically or forcing me to write a check.)
Your stock goes from 500 shares at $20 to 500 shares at $2000, no tax on that $999,000 gain until you sell.
Your house goes from $12,000 to $3,500,000, absent something like Prop 13 in California, your tax bill goes way up even though you have derived no income from the gain in value. This can be a hardship for people whose incomes have not kept pace with the house value.
In previous years, TurboTax's free option was pretty great. This year, my only real option was TaxSlayer, since the others required a US mobile number. It worked, but it was very primitive compared to TurboTax. I could've e-filed IRS forms directly, except I also needed to file state taxes, which directed me to use private software.
A very stupid system of filing a bunch of paperwork through private companies just so I can pay/receive $0.
Or to put it into computer terms, IRS doesn't interpret "no return" as meaning you owe zero taxes but rather as a null (i.e. a person that didn't file a return).
Filing taxes could be free & simple. H&R Block & Intuit lobby against it (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856968 - March 2022 (114 comments)
FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846071 - March 2022 (555 comments)
Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409523 - Feb 2022 (122 comments)
Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against It (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185484 - Feb 2022 (18 comments)
Killing TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330584 - March 2021 (662 comments)
Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138446 - Feb 2021 (219 comments)
TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102695 - Feb 2021 (306 comments)
TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26060414 - Feb 2021 (199 comments)
FTC Is Investigating Intuit over TurboTax Practices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24409093 - Sept 2020 (194 comments)
IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923220 - Dec 2019 (448 comments)
IRS Tried to Hide Emails That Show Tax Industry Influence over Free File Program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393758 - Oct 2019 (188 comments)
TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411 - Oct 2019 (447 comments)
TurboTax to charge more lower-income customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461169 - July 2019 (81 comments)
Congress Scraps Provision to Restrict IRS from Competing with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119916 - June 2019 (18 comments)
TurboTax Uses a “Military Discount” to Trick Troops into Paying to File Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19994118 - May 2019 (42 comments)
Listen to TurboTax Lie to Get Out of Refunding Overcharged Customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870242 - May 2019 (44 comments)
TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19810981 - May 2019 (143 comments)
TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126 - April 2019 (262 comments)
TurboTax Uses Dark Patterns to Trick You into Paying to File Your Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718284 - April 2019 (274 comments)
Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725 - April 2019 (696 comments)
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673 - March 2019 (253 comments)
H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against Free and Simple Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18956883 - Jan 2019 (190 comments)
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751383 - Aug 2018 (424 comments)
Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16844458 - April 2018 (23 comments)
H&R Block and Intuit Lobbying Against Simpler Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16841449 - April 2018 (232 comments)
H&R Block and Intuit Are Lobbying Against Making Tax Filling Free and Easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922482 - March 2017 (234 comments)
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150 - March 2017 (439 comments)
TurboTax Takes Aim at Smaller Rival in Fight for Filers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11150694 - Feb 2016 (87 comments)
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381437 - April 2015 (150 comments)
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380232 - April 2015 (124 comments)
Filing taxes: It shouldn't be so hard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488084 - April 2013 (56 comments)
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203 - March 2013 (330 comments)
No reason that most people shouldn't have the government do their taxes for them.
If the IRS is in charge of doing people’s taxes, there is a non-zero chance that the IRS will not be completely trustworthy.
The real conversation should be about moving to a consumption tax and eliminating the political power that comes from income taxes. The current system is intentionally complex — designed to give politicians power to favor and disfavor behaviors and industries.
But I agree, the current system is intentionally complex and should be simplified.
Just make it so that it's only already 'prepared', you still have to sign them off or correct them if there's something wrong.
For taxes to be fair, people who have more means should pay more, as it's less of a burden on them than people of lesser means. If you think of someone who's not too well off, their entire paycheck is going to food and rent, and not savings. For wealthy people, some part of their paycheck is spent on consumption of things, but a larger part of it goes to savings and investments.
There's a reason why rich people go to tax havens that have no income tax and only sales tax.
This case is a good example of the difficulty—the only word that (sort of) appears in all these titles is "tax", but searching on that alone would cast too wide a net.
My sense is that we'd be better off writing software to allow the community to collaborate on a list of related URLs. That's the plan anyhow.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver/
It seems to work and will produce PDF of the forms with data filled in for one. I appreciated it. It will also handle some of the states. It took a while, but I did find how to check out via subversion:
svn checkout 'https://svn.code.sf.net/p/opentaxsolver/SrcCodeRepo'
I use subversion so rarely, I always seem to have to figure out that the package name is "subversion" and not "svn" to install on my OS. Then I need to find a tutorial to know how to check it out. Then I just needed to build open tax resolver (no binaries are available for my OS). I have gotten way too used to git and github. :)
The majority of the civilized world spends almost 0 time doing personal taxes. Intuit steals our time and money.
what happened to the original forces that created this mess. I am not convinced that if it wasn't for intuit we would have a simple tax system.
> The majority of the civilized world spends almost 0 time doing personal taxes.
this isn't actually true.
There are at least 50 countries with less complex taxes than the united states
What does that have to do with original 'almost 0 time' claim?
Also complexity of american tax code didn't come because of turbotax/intuit. Do you really think we have stuff like credits for home improvements, credits for student loan payments ect are in tax code because of intuit?
There are politicians right now trying to cram in more and more tax code because those incentives are incredible popular with American public. All this is not because of intuit.
I didn't say that Intuit caused complex taxes, I said they actively lobby to keep them complicated.
Intuit spends millions on lobbying every year (against simplification efforts, as well as efforts for the government to create its own free digital tax filing system) and has recently pulled out of a federal free tax filing program, and are being sued by the FTC for their use of "free" in their marketing and performing bait and switch.
they do? I know they lobby against free website. But i don't see why they nee to lobby for complicated tax code since all the tax exemptions and complexity is widely popular with american public. I cant imagine a politican running on removing home improvement exemptions to simplify tax code.
Are you engaging in this conversation to seek more information, or in an attempt to defend Intuit? most of these answers are a simple google away.
yes i am trying to find how they `lobbied against tax code simplification.` . All the links are pointing to how they lobbied against govt run tax filing system. eg: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Same source, different article mentions Intuit's opposition to return-free filing:
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
> 2. lobbied against tax code simplification.
1 and 2 are different. yes?
You are right i can tons of examples and articles for 1 but i am looking for 2 specifically.
tax code simplification isn't the same a tax filing simplification.
edit: Yes i am not saying its not simple. 'Tax code' means something specific, its not a generic standin for anything that has to do with taxes. Tax code has nothing do with tax filing itself. I am not sure how to explain this better.
Going to end it the conversation here and log off for the day, nothing personal, it's just a waste of my time to connect the dots in such a painstakingly specific way.
.. I take it you have managed to post this without reading nearly every other comment?
You're being facetious, right?
They have dark patterns every step of the way to try to get you to pay more and to share your tax information. Their "free" is oftentimes not free. And on top of all this, there are countless articles about them lobbying to maintain the status quo of complicated taxes.
Bro. Read the room.
The entire comment section answers the question of "why all of the hate".
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/intuit-will-no-longer-partic...
and
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/irss-free-fil...
1. login
2. enter my AGI from my federal return
3. enter my estimated taxes
4. done
Postscript: 36 hours later, refund in my bank account
I have no W2 income, am fully self-employed with no 1099's either. I had no capital gains/losses to report this year, but I have the feeling it would have been very easy to deal with that it had it been necessary.
Have the government give a $100 tax credit to all tax-paying citizens to pay for tax software. You keep competition and private industry and companies get paid for producing their products.
Even if you don't technically qualify for Free File, the fees are much lower there than what you would pay on Turbo Tax. For example on 1040Now filing a federal tax return when ineligible for Free File only is about $20. Intuit can crash and burn.
It's 2022, and I can't submit my government mandated math homework electronically as a private citizen. That should piss an incredible number of people off, but nobody ever seems to think about it.
Every year around this time I'm reminded how lucky I am to have at least a somewhat sane and pain-free taxation system here in AU. Me filing a tax return involves bringing a folder of receipts, a page of notes, and handing them over to my accountant who charges me about $120 (tax deductible) the end result of which is I normally get a small refund from the ATO a couple of weeks later.
myTax is written by the Australian Taxation Office and is fairly simple and effective. It adopts a really simple design where you begin by ticking some boxes about your income sources and deductions, and then you only see the options relevant to you.
Tax returns competed via this method are back in less than a month. Probably half the people I know do their own tax returns for free.
I had an account on TurboTax as well...tried to file an extension. Well, at least their system is up and running and responsive. They tried to sell me "Premium" in the middle of it. No, I don't want premium because I won't be able to finish my taxes in 2 hours. Just file my damn extension. Thanks!
I filed my taxes on January 30, and still can't print out my tax return. They tell me that the tax return is not "finalized" (or something like that), along with the "helpful" comment that usually forms are ready by end of January... it's April now, FFS!!
[*] Biggest gripe being their effort to undermine auto-filing.
> …There’s been proposals in Congress on and off for years, from people like Elizabeth Warren, to appropriate money to the for the IRS to do what it was thinking about doing back in the George W. Bush administration 20 years ago, which is to join many other developed wealthy countries in having an online filing process that’s free and offered by the government to all of us as citizens.
Just lie and select "I need to fill out the FAFSA"
Maybe they should have been more specific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays%27_Rebellion
https://www.thebalance.com/tax-preparation-fees-deduction-31...
And I find it concerning that many people seem to feel that this is a make or break feature (as this is always brought up in this discussion). It really isn’t that hard to sit down and focus for a half hour to actually look at your tax documents and type in a few numbers.
P.S. if anyone knows another tax-filer with Robinhood auto-import, feel free to mention.
Intuit obviously doesn't want free filing. They'ee engaging in rent-seeking behaviour and free-filing would obviously hurt their business. Politicans are bought ("lobbied") for a pittance.
But the dirty little secret here is the complexity of the tax code. It's truly ridiculous. Everyone fights simplication of the tax code because every simplification will remove somebody's special exemption, write-off, accelerated depreciation schedule, tax credits and so on. Intuit loves this. The tax industry (not just Intuit) loves this: the more complex it is, the more money they make.
Worse, there's almost an institutional resistance to ANY simplification based pretty much on the slippery slope argument: well if they come for Acme Co's tax credits for not growing corn this week they might come for mine next week.
There's also an awful lot of dishonesty built into the system. Payroll and social security taxes are classified as "employer taxes" (in part at least). There are no employer taxes.
Simple example: Social Security is 6.2% on the employer and employee (up to a cap). So if you have a nominal income of $100,000, the employer is really paying you $106,200 and sending $12,400 to the Federal government.
Can't we just call this what it is?
And don't get me started on the bullshit that is the standard deducation.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see a consitutional amendment for universal basic income of $X per US citizen tax resident, a tax free income on the first $Y of personal income and just a flat rate tax beyond that. Congress gets to play with the values of X and Y.
I'm not holding my breath.
> Can't we just call this what it is?
You seem to be under the impression that in the absence of the employer side of the FICA tax, you would be compensated the full $6,200. This however is not the case. It is almost certainly true that you would in fact see very little if that portion went away tomorrow due to how tax incidence works and how your salary is determined.