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Comment by bobro | Hacker News Reader

I tried the fillable forms in previous years. They certainly aren’t easy and don’t make you confident you are filing an accurate form. Paying $50-100 to save a few hours and a lot of worrying is well worth it to me, even if along the way I bemoan the complexity and inaccessibility of the current tax system.

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I'm not going to claim they are easy, but they are accurate (they have a Do The Math calculation button). Even if you mess up, the IRS will typically send you a response noting where their calculations diverged from yours and offer to automatically adjust. (Which denotes the absurdity of this exercise for most taxpayers because the IRS already has all the information it needs to complete your taxes).

Yah you have to be confident of the values you’re plugging in. Do the math is for the simple in-form formulae. Some of the raw data you put in comes from worksheets etc you fill out on your own. You may benefit from a gist I’ve kept around with some tax urls for free tools out there https://gist.github.com/jxramos/08ea6af443dae5a251f0a5b21ee5...

Accuracy here is probably about classification? Like “am I really putting this in the right box?”

Wonder what the minimum information you could put in, and how accurate it'd have to be, to get that response. It'd be cool if you could lifehack your way into getting the IRS to do your taxes just by sending something obviously wrong that they'd autocorrect into the final product! Then we'd be roughly on parity with more sane countries that just send you a tax bill.

Ah, the classic game of “Does this mistake get me free tax preparation or jail time”

Well, one way to answer the minimum is, one has to report every 0.49 dollars of income, even if the bank who paid did not report it to IRS.

Agree, most countries (including India) simply opens their portals, you sign in, check all numbers, report anything missing like income or deduction, and press the final Enter.

IRS is very understanding, but I wouldn't suggest this. I have gotten plenty of letters from the IRS and they are always stressful.

The IRS has always responded in a really positive way, so it is really worth talking to them (well, unless you think you may be in real legal trouble... I guess "don't talk to the cops" applies here too...) if you're in the situation where you think "oh, yeah I messed up" or "oh, yeah they messed up" it's probably best to just reply... but yeah if you think it is serious talk to a tax attorney... (not an accountant, which isn't a tax attorney).

The "they messed up" for me was a crypto thing, where I actually took a small net loss, and didn't file (because you don't need to, for capital losses, from my understanding, though I guess you should) and they thought I took some insane gain b/c of the $ value of the trades.

I just mailed them the trades, said "I didn't submit the form for this b/c I didn't think I needed to for a loss" and they said "yay, thanks, see ya" a bit later. Positive experience.

They actually don't have all the information they need in every case, as not everything is reported to the IRS. But yeah, they already have the majority of information, particularly the most impactful information, and for the majority of people, all of the information that they need.

Anyhow, I'd imagine in any case it is still useful as a way to validate information.

Yup. I suppose they can use the cell phone tracking to figure how many miles you’ve put on your personal vehicle and use AI to figure out how many were business use miles. /s

In reality only if you take standard deductions and only get paid with a W-2 can they actually figure it out. But I agree that overall the process is messed up.

So the reality is that they could automatically calculate taxes for >>50% of households?

Except they don’t know who they can and can’t do this for, so the entire exercise is a bit useless.

Not for the >>50% of people who they know. The IRS just mails you their projection and you can amend it if necessary. It clearly is less work for the citizenry.

Even if you screw it up the IRS will just charge you interest “penalties” or give you your money back if you overpay (both have happened to me). I’ve straight up forgotten forms and paid maybe a few extra dollars in interest, I wouldn’t even call it a penalty.

People are generally way more afraid of the IRS than they should be. People that hate the IRS for being unreasonable are very likely aggressively reporting deductions or whatever, not just making typos on their freefillableforms.com return.

I’m guessing the vast majority of people that hate the IRS don’t have any reason based on personal experience. They are people that believe things like “The IRS is hiring 87,000 new armed enforcement agents”.

Or people like my stepdad’s cousin who took ten years to get the money back that they paid (because of a mistake on the IRS’s part due to having the same name but different SSN as a tax dodger) so they didn’t get their assets/house seized.

This was before the kinder, gentler IRS but still.

> took ten years to get the money back that they paid

How much did they pay?

IDK, a bunch?

I just know they had the money and didn’t want the IRS to harass them while it got straightened out so paid it.

I lived in Australia for a time and the taxes were a breeze. Enter a few identifiers like tax id number, it fetches the data from the government, confirm the data, done in 15 minutes. I couldn't believe it.

Taxes and health care in America are just so broken.

I think this is relatively new. 10 or so years ago you still had to download a desktop app that looked like it was written in 1995 and go through each page.

Ha that's the app I'm talking about, it was about a decade ago. It was still mind bogglingly simple compared to US taxes.

The desktop app I’m thinking of was called “e-Tax”. More recently you could complete your return through the MyGov website with all data pre-populated. Perhaps there was a transition period where they were still using e-Tax but also could pre-populate the data. But before that, you still had to fill it all in from paper forms.

It’s a while since I’ve had to complete an Australian tax return.

No offense intended, but my taxes must be a lot simpler than yours because I do the Free File forms in about 30 minutes every year.

1099s, K1s, SEPs, list goes on

add in retirement trusts owned by self directed IRAs invested in leveraged real estate and id love to see a 30 min tax return

i pay $1k and spend a few hours setting data up to give to the accountant

oh let’s not even consider the mess crypto or poker winnings are

> id love to see a 30 min tax return

That looks like one or two W2s, maybe a 1099, deductions, no state taxes, capital gains... and that's about it.

I spend longer, probably 4 hours for federal and an hour for state (itemized deductions, SE income on a passthru LLC, W2 income).

I hire an accountant if there's something new I don't know how to do and then just follow the same process on my own for subsequent years.

US taxes are stupid.

Moreover, just a few years ago I was in a position where none of the free services I tried would allow me to report a specific form of taxable income I received (a stipend paid by a university in the form of a reimbursement that wasn't reported as W-2). I literally spent 12+ hours on my otherwise very basic taxes just trying to navigate the interfaces for the "free" services.

I ended up switching to the fillable forms after that; lo and behold it turns out it's a tiny adjustment to one line on the 1040 and is clearly explained in the instructions. If your taxes don't change much from year to year it's trivial to work out the form each year. Like you it's always taken me about 30 minutes after gathering the various forms together.

I’m so glad someone else pointed this particular case out! When I was a first year university student but still claimed as a dependent on my parents taxes, the accountant who prepared the returns wasn’t even aware that it needed to be reported, so they had to redo it. Later when I was doing taxes for myself via TaxAct, there was no way (that I could see) to accurately report that income. It also stumbled on HSA contribution limits. Both issues were easily resolved with the free fillable forms (which come with detailed, if overwhelming, instructions)

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