Intuit pouring money into lobbying amid push for free government-run tax filing | Hacker News Reader

Intuit pouring money into lobbying amid push for free government-run tax filing

opensecrets.org

378 pointsdanso178 comments

In the meta, this article reminds me of what I perceive as a surreal disconnect between the amount of influence lobbyists have in government(s) vs the objectively small amount of money that actually is changing hands.

If Intuit spends (just) $3.5M to significantly impact decisions that are worth Billions to them and potentially hundreds to every taxpayer (!), I think I'm frustrated that corrupt politicians aren't doing more to leverage their corruption.

This kind of illegal influence should cost... at least $100M? Selling everyone out for fractions of a penny on the dollar is frankly just kind of embarrassing.

Crime harder, elected reps, if you're going to get out of bed.

Politicians are very cheap, but the $3.5M is what was spent legally and openly. Most of the iceberg is hidden underwater. For example, this:

> In 2022, several members of Congress called for investigations into the company’s practice of hiring “revolving door” lobbyists who previously held government positions

is also bribery.

The fact that it's legal is also part of the problem

Exactly this. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not corrupt.

Not that I think this change should happen but it's amusing to consider a seeming lack of ambition from people in such positions.

Many engineers reading this make a larger salary than these lawmakers.

Maybe if the people deciding our laws made enough to not be woo’d by practically a $300 gift card we’d at least make corruption more expensive.

Not taken into account that if they're not a millionaire when they enter congress, they tend to be by the time they leave.

Because it's not insider trading if you're a congressman. It's total crap.

Yeah, though the actual pay isn't always enough to easily afford a home in your home state and a place in DC for those who aren't already rich.

That's a fair point - DC property is so expensive, there's a sort of Democratic senator "frat house":

https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/politics/real-alpha-house/ind...

Why should lawmakers get rich at all? It's a public service and honor to hold that power -- an above average wage should be plenty reward (not to mention the millions of discretional fund most high profile offices come with).

Maybe should be an honor, but it certainly isn't treated as such by near anyone.

And it's not about why should they get rich. It's about aligning incentives. Relying on good will does not work long term.

Neither does normalizing corruption.

I don't want you to be left with the sense that I'm arguing for corruption. This thread is social commentary on how pathetic it is that elected reps can be bought for so little.

Sometimes, humor is hard on the internet.

High wage didn't stop pharma from getting to doctors

I think Bill Burr has a joke about how congress members are all making ~150k but somehow are multi-millionaires.

>This kind of illegal influence should cost... at least $100M?

A you not on the complete wrong way to equality and same rights for everyone? ;)

There's a particular Calvin and Hobbes strip that always comes to mind with articles like this: "I don't know which is worse... that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low."

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/04/08

I found it fascinating to see how far a modest individual contribution gets you in the political process. Less than $1000 gets you an unprompted one on one personal call with the Governor at some length, ~$100 would allow similar access to state-level legislators or local political executives, and senators are only modestly more expensive to garner attention from, certainly a maxed $3,300 personal contribution would absolutely get you direct redress of your grievances, should you desire.

At that price we should all purchase access to legislators, it's a screaming bargain.

Most Americans see lobbyists as dishonest or unethical [0]. With that in mind, I think most Americans would not want to buy a legislator. After all, at some level, the legislator is supposed to represent them anyway...

Even if Americans did, since there's a fixed supply of representatives, as demand goes up, so will the price :)

0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/103123/lobbyists-debut-bottom-h...

Think about 99% uptime vs 99.99999% uptime cost for a service or next day customer support vs 24/7 phone support. If you think it should just a little bit more then, yeah, buying legislators would sound cheap.

That's surprisingly affordable even for average Joe SWEs in the valley. I can see it being useful for when paperwork gets jammed in the USCIS pipeline for instance.

Yes, I was kind of stunned, I made an in-my-opinion modest contribution to a couple people when some equity vested, as a mild form of basic political engagement, and they were prompt and solicitous in reaching out to establish positive relationships.

If I ever have a dispute with some bureaucracy, I will definitely do that again as perhaps a 2nd or 3rd step - it's about similar in terms of cost to retaining legal counsel, and I have to imagine a letter from a congressperson would open a lot of doors.

This disconnect is called the "Tullock Paradox" in Economics, after Gordon Tullock who first asked it in "The Purchase of Politicians" (1972) [couldn't find an online link].

You'll find a more recent discussion in "Why is There so Little Money in U.S. Politics?" (2003). [1]

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300332116497...

Much more recent:

TOO MUCH DARK MONEY IN ALMONDS (2019)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

Sometimes I think it's like dark matter, it's just out of the public eye in, I dunno, art sales or cushy jobs for family members that funnel money to one another.

Interesting points, but I'm wondering if you're possibly missing the point here. It's not only that Intuit uses their "right" to lobby the government and politicians allow Intuit to exercise this "right" to make money themselves; it's also that politicians ideologically agree with Intuit that Intuit should be charging $X to citizens to file taxes. Some politicians, either superficially, or truly authentically/rationally, think government should not be allowed to do anything a private enterprise can do, and therefore categorically want Intuit to charge us $X as a middle-men instead of government doing the filing, in order for Intuit to turn profits. Consequently, although you're right that politicians have incentive to extort more money from Intuit, they likely want to work with Intuit and come to a balanced compromise so that Intuit is able to make huge profits off of our tax filings.

This all makes sense if you ignore that politics are suppose to be representing the people who vote for them. I don’t think I have talked to anyone on any side of the fence that think you should have to pay for filing basic taxes.

Uh, no.

A politician is supposed to represent all citizens equally, even those which did not vote for them.

In a proper democracy, the voter is assessing candidates for a job. Once elected, that job is to do right by all citizens, by doing what they believe is the correct choice, correct way to do their job.

We are supposed to be electing someone to make decisions, based on their beliefs. The election is a job interview.

anudatt

Man, you haven't talked to enough people then. Come up with the most absurd opinion you can about any political topic and you will find a small but aggressive group online that is convinced it is the only rational option.

Plenty of conservatives genuinely believe, for whatever reason, that it's impossible for "Government" to do something well. They then elect people who promise to make that reality and then point to the obvious, purposeful struggles of our government as their reasoning.

Then you aren't talking to enough people. There are plenty who believe that easy tax filing will also make it easier for the government to raise taxes in the future. And enough who just flat-out believe the government shouldn't be doing things that a private enterprise can do for a profit.

And it's not just the "government shouldn't do it" crowd, there are also those that believe that profit motive makes it more efficient and costs less overall.

Many Republicans have signed Grover Norquist's pledge, and he explicitly opposes making it easier to file taxes on the belief that doing so would make it easier to raise taxes in the future.

TurboTax has already made it easier to file taxes, so the cat is out of the bag. Maybe Norquist didn’t know what computers are capable of.

Needing to do your taxes at all on TurboTax is the whole point of the argument. It's a yearly annoyance everyone has to do AND often times you have to pay money to a company. Where in many countries you just get something in the mail already done for you since the government has the information already for most people. You can still file yourself if you want to amend something or have a special reason. That's how it should work.

Then why do I still dread doing my taxes every year? I literally only have a W-2 to file and I don't know why.

My tax return was 20 pages last year, and I expect it to be longer this year because I sold/bought a home. Tax return software does make it easier, but it's still not easy, and there's a good reason that everyone dreads it, even if they just have W-2 information.

OK, my taxes have to be hard to process because other people occasionally have hard to process taxes. That makes sense. Fair is fair; when people are struggling we make the entire country feel the same pain.

Right, but the IRS likely already knows all the information that goes on those 20 pages (or at least most of it), and could prepare your return for you, and just send you an email that lets you approve or amend it.

> explicitly opposes ... on the belief

Do we know that's a truly-held belief by this politician, or do we only know that it's an assertion or claim?

s/illegal influence/protected 1st amendment speech/g

SCOTUS said you can't regulate campaign funding basically at all, because money spent to effect speech is speech, and thus money spent on a political campaign is political speech.

If you actually were to say "I will pass this bill for $X", then that would be a bribe, and you could get kicked out of office or go to jail for that. But spending 30 minutes with a lobbyist behind closed doors and them just handing your campaign a check later on? Perfectly legal. The hush-hush nature of the operation means the only way you can squeeze a business for money is by getting everyone else angry at them too so that the business starts throwing campaign contributions around.

From the congressperson's side it's less "I sold my vote to this person" and more "If I vote for this, then I won't get all these contributions anymore."

The difference between a bribe and a tip is solely in the order of operations.

> SCOTUS said you can't regulate campaign funding basically at all, because money spent to effect speech is speech, and thus money spent on a political campaign is political speech.

Yes, and the SCOTUS is wrong.

Welp, you can take that up with ... oh, wait, that'd be Congress :-(

Buying senators is surprisingly cheap. This is why I think there's a huge untapped market for democratized/crowdfunded lobbying. I also think that democratization would expedite its demise, which is the end game that would benefit society the most.

Already done in Israel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobby_99

The problem is it isn't just a money thing. A lot of lobbying is about connections, "friends", long time working relationships etc. A random person walking up to an opponent politician with a large check wont get anywhere, no matter how corrupt that politician is. Political funding is absurd in this country, and politicians spend most of their time raising money for the next campaign, meaning a one time check isn't terribly useful to them compared to a long time, implied continued working relationship.

I had an idea for a site that allows you to lobby the gov in a GoFundMe format after realizing how little money is actually moving.

Sorry, I can't tell if it's "I had an idea, but no one came to the site" or "I had an idea in the shower which I have not yet implemented"?

Because I 100% would meet reality where it is and buy my own lobbyist if I could get better outcomes than spitting into the wind at the ballot box

shower idea - i lack the technical skills and connections to actualize my dreams and ideas at present (can someone please help me with frontend).

The idea here is that you donate in favor of/against a bill you want. Then representatives that vote favorably to your preference receive a portion of the funds as campaign contributions. If lobbying is so cheap why can't it be done by the people for the people? I see dogs raise more than politicians on GFM.

It is an idea, the problem is you'd need to trust the middle-men (the lobbyist and brokers).

It isn't as simply as "the smallest piece of the pie the better," companies pay a lot of money for well-connected people who can get someone to sit down and talk. So while the public could pump tons of money into a GoLobbyForMe site, how you'd measure success Vs theft is tricky.

Plus there's often other corruption less easily combatted, like post public-office jobs, or their spouse/family getting a seat on some board, or similar.

Most people have a fundamental misunderstanding of how lobbying works. Lobbying money is used to pay the actual lobbyists to gather evidence, prepare presentations, and draft legislation proposals. Only a small percentage of lobbying money goes to the politicians. Usually, it's $1000 or so that the politician will agree to hear out the lobbyist. What actually gets traded at these lobbyist meetings is political capital, not money. "If you agree to these tax incentives, you can brag about creating 10,000 jobs".

This is why Bill Gates can't just spend $1 billion to lobby for a carbon tax, despite advocating for one. This would cause a lot of short term pain as the economy needs to readjust with no short term positive benefit, which would be politically disastrous.

Edit: Here's another more tangible example. Facebook spent millions to lobby for the government to establish standards for social media. If they can convince the Democrats to formalize guidelines of what constitutes as hate speech, they can offload some of the burden of their moderation decisions. If they can convince Republicans to require social media to become public square, that's even better because then they don't have to hire as many moderators. Unfortunately for Facebook, such a bill has no benefit from either side because now the politicians have to take responsibility for an unpopular act of censorship or viral misinformation campaign. That's why Facebook tried to establish an independent "supreme court" instead.

This was really insightful, thank you

A lot of it is also about seeking regulatory capture. If a governing body does not directly reflect corporate interests, there is usually a lengthy campaign to swivel that governing body into what is essentially an element of corporate protection. A lot of "pro-business" rhetoric is spun up in the revolving door of lobbyists and corporate representatives to governing bodies, and members of those bodies to the corporate world. That's how you get an EPA that protects corporate interests from environmental regulation rather than an EPA that protects the environment from corporate interests.

That certainly makes sense for some things, but for taxes it seems surprising that the political capital of creating 10000 jobs is more than the political capital of reducing the stress of filing taxes, saving citizens significant amounts of money on tax services, etc.

I think a big part of it is lack of education. Despite the fact that most people outside the US have a pretty simple and streamlined time of paying their taxes, I think most Americans think that the US system is just how it has to be. Or they're victims of misinformation campaigns that tell them falsehoods about how the American system overall allows them to pay less in taxes, or that a streamlined tax system would make it easier for the government to raise taxes in the future (an idea the GOP hates) without taxpayers "noticing" (somehow). To that point, there are still many people who believe that filing taxes should be painful, as a reminder of where the money is going, and exactly how much.

It's dumb, but... there you have it.

So in short, politicians instead of receiving input from lobbyists, receive verbatim draft legislation proposals and get to play 'who's gonna pay me more to choose which one I'm going with'?

They then use the money they receive from these lobbyists to lie to the people regarding what their job actually entails and self promote themselves as serving their community and country?

Oh and they get to play in the stock market with insider knowledge with impunity to further enrich themselves and get a path to become a lobbyist and get paid millions afterwards?

What point are you trying to make - that there is a convoluted game of politics they engage in to enrich themselves, rather than the simplified bag of money exchanging hands?

If so, you're describing a distinction without a difference as far as I can tell.

> Only a small percentage of lobbying money goes to the politicians

Either this article disagrees or the lobbyists are raking it in:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/23/politics/nra-political-money-...

It's the second one, though the NRA is a special case in every way.

Politicians become lobbyists for the companies they supported.

To secure those huge salaries politicians will accept proposals from companies that hire ex politicians as lobbyists. This way you get to pay for proposals, but the pay is an indirect transaction, but everyone knows how it works so politicians play ball. That is the main reason they wont listen to just anybody, its because you wont pay them huge salaries in the future, not because you come up with bad proposals for them, that doesn't really matter if they get tons of money from you when they retire from politics.

By the same token could not $3.5M be raised to lobby in the other direction?

Not only the stuff other people have said about how that money is actually spent, but...

The market sets the prices.

Sure, the politicians might want more, but I'm sure there are others who would be just as effective who could want less. Then the political contributions flow to your competitors instead of you.

And there are other factors. If you're too obviously corrupt, maybe you get voted out anyway. Maybe you don't even see what you're doing as corruption. Things just happen to align. Or maybe you see it as a win-win. You get something, you do good for your constituents, the lobbying group gets what it wants, etc.

The truth is way more complicated than "corpo stooges carrying big sacks of dollars to fat cat politicians".

A journalist once told me that, when they were new, they weren't surprised to learn that corruption was going on in their city, but they were surprised that the amounts of the bribes were so small.

I think it was George Will that said "The problem with politicians in America isn't that they can be bought. It's that they can be bought so cheaply."

that's just the down payment. Politicians make the real money when they leave and get a spot on the board of directors or some other fake role that pays them 7 figures for doing nothing. Or their spouse gets some favorable job or business deals. Feinstein and Pelosi are both worth hundreds of millions via their husband's business deals

there's also a thriving business of laundering money through politician's shitty books they have ghostwritten for them

This is my understanding as well. The majority of the money between politicians and business entities or wealthy individuals moves out of band and out of sight.

Lobbyists are the glue that makes those deals happen. So the $3.5M went to pay the lobbyists to negotiate the much bigger deals that ultimately sway the opinions of the politicians.

I wonder if the post-Watergate "campaign finance reform" was not about stopping the influence of lobbyist but rather putting in limits that make it cheaper to buy politicians.

If the limits came off and it became more expensive it might put an end to it. If it cost $10 to get $1 in tax savings people wouldn't bother turning the tax code into Swiss cheese,

Meanwhile, in normal countries:

- salaried income is automatically submitted to tax authorities

- capital income going through financial institutions is automatically submitted to tax authorities

- the deductions that concern most taxpayers are managed automatically

And so it for 80% of taxpayers, tax prep is exactly 5 minutes, and for the next 10% it is 2 hours.

And then, Americans explain that bureaucracy is quite worse elsewhere.

Honestly they're terrible people, but their software is okay. If they're going to continue to undermine the IRS' efforts - and the IRS wants to provide clean modern tax filing software - they should just buy the business off Intuit.

You heard it here first folks: I'm calling on the US government to nationalize TurboTax.

It's the pragmatic choice.

Can't reward this extreme rent seeking behavior, even if that means it would cost more for IRS to rebuild what Intuit provides. It's not about the money. You have to send a message. Otherwise you'll just encourage future poor behavior. Intuit has been up to this fuckery for two decades [1]. We build the public goods, then we defend the public goods.

I would rather donate directly to the IRS project to replace Turbotax [2] before giving Intuit another dollar.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34764952

This can be fixed; just make the nationalization a forced affair for a fixed price (far below what the company is “worth”), with no option to turn it down.

The same should be done with ETS (Educational Testing Service) as well.

Was honestly shocked to learn ETS is a third-party vendor and that our government isn't producing the (oft poorly-designed) standardized exams used in various states.

Absolutely no reason these exams shouldn't be designed in-house.

As a former educator, I actually believe the ETS/college board/etc. moats are less durable than they seem. Lots a vague but oh so serious testing security concerns. Low frequency raises stakes unnecessarily. Big teams doing a lot of brute force development work. All of this paradigm is predicated on a lack of trust in the accuracy of classroom assessments. I believe that is a solvable problem with the development of an assistive assessment tool that monitors instruction and continuously creates/curates assessment items for immediate deployment by instructors. Focus initial development on the tool as an instructional utility and build broad trust in the data through frequent/low stakes/longitudinal assessment over time. Assuming broad adoption, attack their moat from below.

I don't disagree with you, but doesn't the IRS already know most of the information you're putting into the forms?

It doesn't know your deducations.

"Do you have deductions? Click here for wizard or form."

And its even more likely that people just click "standard deduction" to make it even simpler.

thats exactly how it works in japan, same with "any additional income you'd like to report" function

Most people are covered by the standard deduction. For those that aren't they'd still file as normal.

This doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing. The IRS can send you a statement of the tax they've computed for you, and you can review it. If you don't accept their computations, then file your taxes like you always have.

The majority of American taxpayers don't itemize, and take the standard deduction.

For those who do itemize, I expect the IRS does actually know all of the deduction for some people, and most of them for others.

The very small percentage of taxpayers who aren't covered by that can click the hypothetical "I want to add more information to my tax return" button.

I actually think this might be a great solution. Buy the shareholders out at a fair price, stop the damn lobbying, get some pretty good tax software in the process.

I'd say buy the shareholders out at a rock-bottom, unfair price. Doing otherwise would perpetuate perverse incentives. It would tell people that it's a great business model to build a for-profit company around providing a service that the government should provide, lobby hard to prohibit the government from providing that service for free, and then eventually strong-arm the government into buying your company for much more than it would cost the government to build and operate a workalike product.

I don't see the point in the IRS running TurboTax themselves. The IRS should simply keep track of everyone's taxes and automatically send refunds or bills accordingly. Spend any extra money they have on auditing the rich.

This is how it works in New Zealand. It’s not impossible.

In a lot of countries yes. At the very least the IRS could let you login and see the information they have about your earnings.

You can: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/get-transcript

Data for previous year are not available until well past April 15.

True, but you also don’t really have to file until mid-Oct. (You have to pay a reasonable estimate by the mid-April date, but the practical filing due date is 6 months later than that. See form 4868.)

There's no reason for the delay though. They get you your refund sooner, so they have the past year's data.

It's simply insane that this isn't how it's done in the US.

I think the idea is that the IRS would buy TurboTax, and then write some sort of bridge that auto-populates TurboTax with all the info it needs so most taxpayers to have very little to do.

But that seems like more steps than you'd need. The IRS already must have the ability to fill in everyone's tax returns, because they're able to calculate what nearly everyone owes, pretty accurately. Since tax returns are basically "follow the instructions and fill in boxes so that you can eventually get a final number", then that must mean that the IRS can already do that.

The problem isn't that the US government is incapable of making a better system than TurboTax. The problem is that TurboTax only exists because they lobby to prevent the government from doing so.

From that perspective, TurboTax isn't worth buying for anywhere close to what someone may evaluate it on the private markets.

The US government should buy it for $3.5MM, since that's what Intuit values it at through lobbying.

Hell, the IRS must already have a system that does nearly all of what TurboTax does, because they also know, ahead of time, what the vast majority of taxpayers owe. I'm sure they don't have a nice web UI on top of it all, but it's possible that building something on top of it would cost less than nationalizing and operating TurboTax. They'd still have to write a bridge between TurboTax and their systems in that case, anyway.

Now this is an idea I could get behind!

I'm all for better public services, but the Federal Government making the software that states use to collect taxes would be a disaster, purely for petty political reasons.

They wouldn't though. It would instead be industry capture as intuit is grossly compensated through a back channel that never gets allocated a budget to run an audit of. Then with a guaranteed revenue base, all the developers would get sacked as they coast.

You'll need actual real socialist* legislators who are well educated in actual real socialism* in order to pull that off without some wacky neoliberal private-public bait and switch nonsense.

* - as opposed to the legislators accused with the label "socialists" who actually work towards regulated free market structures as advocated for by Friedman and Hayek.

How has Intuit avoided antitrust investigations? I'm not talking about TurboTax. Intuit's Quickbooks is basically a monopoly in the U.S. with all of the attendant characteristics of a monopoly ... poor performance, huge price increases, taking advantages of SMBs and sole proprietors that are forced to use it for their businesses.

Sounds like an opportunity for some competition.

Sounds like an opportunity to get rid of unnecessary regulation and eliminate the system that is built to support tax filing companies. There's no good reason that taxes aren't automatically calculated for basic returns and you just need to sign a document. It's done in other countries. But their monopoly and lobbying have led to the government making the system more rather than less byzantine.

And even if the government "filed" your taxes for you, I'd imagine people could always file their own returns if they wanted to.

exactly.

Because the reigning ideology of anti-trust until the last year has been consumer welfare [0], where a monopoly is basically assumed ok unless you can demonstrate definite harms to consumers.

[0]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/peeing-in-the-economists-...

Monopoly would imply that there are no viable alternatives, which isn’t really true at all. There are dozens of companies with similar products.

I don't know what QuickBooks market share is, I have seen estimates between 60 and 80%. But there are definitely a lot of direct competitors as well as indirect competitors gnawing at their heels with services like invoicing and payroll and payments. I don't see any real barriers to entry created by intuit, especially since the QuickBooks export format is an open format.

But, there definitely should be a lot of scrutiny for any additional acquisitions that Intuit makes, because they are definitely big enough to just buy any company that begins to challenge them.

They are like a version of Adobe, but across more industries. There are competitors like Xero for small business accounting.

I'd imagine most of QuickBooks' continued market share is momentum from CPAs who drive SMBs to QB. One platform to interact with for all your clients makes life easier.

In this market there is plenty of compeition that is driving down prices. me personally i switched from hr block to freetaxusa and i saved 50$. As far as markets and antitrust is concerned there are no monopoly problems here.

I wish an agency like the CFPB or FTC could step in to say, although the market here is "working" there are still consumer concerns not being addressed that you must address.

Because every market in the US conveniently turns into a Duopoly which is never subject to antitrust. Intuit has H&R Block.

What product or service does HR block sell that overlaps with Intuit? I cannot think of one. Intuit sells software, HR Block sells cheap (and probably bad) tax advice.

Intuit has a market cap of $114B and HRBlock has a market cap of $6B.

They both have online tax filing, TurboTax's most popular consumer product and what we're discussing in this thread.

The boxed software is a niche consumer product or targeting SMBs.

It's not illegal to have a monopoly. From the FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods.

I wish unreasonable methods included taking away the value of someone else's labor

Then basically damn everything qualifies, unless management and the business decides for some deranged reason to work for free any business would qualify. Hell, so would working in the same field because it lowers the value of the labor by competition. Neither assumption is what could be called reasonable.

Employee owned businesses are a thing. Management still gets paid. They all profit equally.

Maybe Taylor Swift needs to have a public Twitter spat with her bookkeeper. At least, that's what got the ball rolling on Ticketmaster.

What's a viable alternative to TurboTax for those who are unable to self-file? I know Intuit is an evil company, but whenever it's tax season and I'm confronted with either (a) learning how to file my own taxes or (b) kicking the can down the road and paying Intuit $100, I choose (b). I had an accountant for a couple years because my taxes were complicated due to changing states. My accountant charged me $1000, which I did not mind paying because my taxes were complicated. When my taxes became substantially less complicated last year, he still charged me $1000, which I _did_ mind paying. So no more accountant! The unfortunate reality is that Intuit's software works well and they've priced it at a point where most people just accept the fee and move on. As we get nearer to Tax Day 2023, I feel that I'm just going to accept their fee and move on with my life, even knowing how problematic they are.

Is there a viable alternative (cheap tax software)?

Is there a simple source of information where a person can learn everything they need to know about filing their taxes in an hour or two? Taxes seem to be kept intentionally arcane because so many make a living from understanding it without allowing me to understand it.

If the fee is a flat $1,000, the other way to get more value is too complicated the hell out of your situation. Have you ever thought of starting a nonprofit foundation?

I’ve used FreeTaxUSA and recommended it to many friends. Federal is free and state is $15 (if your state has income tax). For W-2 plus investments and house, it was a breeze. And they cover many more forms than just that: https://www.freetaxusa.com/supported_forms.jsp

I'd seen recommendations on here in the past for FreeTaxUSA so used that for the first time this year - already got my refund as well! It's free for federal filing, and $15 for each state filing. The interface is easy enough to understand, and I appreciated the many options - it does help to know what deductions apply to you, so at least a cursory understanding of your old filings is probably necessary. I believe it can import your old TurboTax filings and figure stuff out from that, but it's not something I did and was easy enough to set up and finish in the span of an evening. The various deductions are laid as a questionnaire, and I appreciated that they were marked as rare deductions that most people don't need - but there in case you need it.

Over the years I've greatly appreciated being able to download the tax app and save my tax prep work as honest to goodness files. It does sound archaic, but when I want to run a what-if scenarios, it is as easy and duplicating the file and editing to my heart's content. This can be a tricky operation with some online options. Navigation and direct form editing tends to be a bit better in desktop versions too.

For downloadable software, I've used TT but have more recently switched to H&R Block. It works fine, and at a decent discount from TT (~$35 for H&R Block "Deluxe", including state return).

I can't wait for Intuit to go the way of the phone book and telemarketing companies. Disappear overnight without so much as a whisper and not a single tear would fall. They are a blight on the public.

Their existence is a good litmus test/proxy for determining if or whether the complete capture of our so-called democracy by corporations has receded.

They’ve been doing this for decades now. This isn’t a surprise in the least nor do I expect them to stop unless someone speaks up for our rights.

I have a very simple tax situation. I get a paycheck twice a month and sometimes I buy and sell shares. The idea that I have to go through a multi-hour exercise when all of this should be accomplished via computers automatically is stupid to me. It’s companies like Intuit that are trying to protect their moat and hurting us when it should be a quick payment or refund form we get once a year like a Costco rebate check.

For anyone looking for alternatives, freetaxusa and CashApp are both great. I used the former for one year after I couldn’t get TurboTax for free anymore. Federal is free and state is $15 per.

Switched to cashapp for the past two years because it is completely free. Both are a smooth experience.

Tax season is tax lobby rage season!

IRS builds task force to explore running its own free e-file system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34764952 - Feb 2023 (199 comments)

IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34462122 - Jan 2023 (247 comments)

IRS will look into setting up a free e-filing system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32753099 - Sept 2022 (408 comments)

The IRS could be on the verge of changing the way Americans file their taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32550841 - Aug 2022 (17 comments)

IRS will study free tax filing options - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32502321 - Aug 2022 (25 comments)

TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31072202 - April 2022 (394 comments)

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 (587 comments)

Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409523 - Feb 2022 (122 comments)

Why do Americans have to pay much to file their tax returns when the IRS knows? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267361 - Feb 2022 (22 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)

California tried to save the nation from tax filing, then Intuit stepped in - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28944200 - Oct 2021 (283 comments)

The IRS has a big opportunity to fix the way Americans file taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28177289 - Aug 2021 (12 comments)

UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998452 - July 2021 (53 comments)

Good Riddance, TurboTax. Americans Need a Real ‘Free File’ Program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27902380 - July 2021 (248 comments)

Intuit will no longer be a part of IRS Free File program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865625 - July 2021 (140 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 stops firms like TurboTax from hiding free tax-filing products in searches - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948935 - Jan 2020 (25 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)

Filing Your Taxes Is an Expensive Time Sink. That’s Not an Accident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19572917 - April 2019 (155 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)

IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before midnight deadline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860086 - April 2018 (97 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)

Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13990391 - March 2017 (386 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)

US Senator Warren Introduces Bill to Simplify Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492025 - April 2016 (155 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)

TurboTax Maker Intuit Funnels Millions to Lobby Against Easier Tax Returns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7595440 - April 2014 (182 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)

Intuit lobbies against California's free tax filing service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1569169 - Aug 2010 (29 comments)

... To the surprise of no one. That's what regulatory capture + corrupted democracy (ie "lobbying") looks like.

They are already connected to the IRS. I forgot to add in an Economic Impact Payment when I filed with TurboTax last year. 5 minutes later, the corrected 1040 came back to me. They already know everything, I don't know why they make us do all the work. Maybe in case THEY miss something?

I have yet to see anyone defend Intuit's bribery and corruption on any forum. I'm sure there are plenty of Intuit employees on HN. Do any of you want to defend the other side? Or maybe a non-Intuit employee can play devil's advocate?

I wish more people would blame the government officials for being so susceptible to lobbying and refusing to enact policies to curtail the behavior rather than be angry at individual companies for lobbying. As the old saying goes, don't hate the player, hate the game. Intuit is just operating in the best interest of their stockholders and employees. It isn't their job to operate in the best interest of society. That is the government's job. This situation is a governmental failure not any problem with Intuit specifically and it happens in plenty of other areas besides tax reporting.

They are players in this game too. They could "lobby" Congress to change the laws to allow them not to be shitty. But they won't. Part of stopping the game is shitting on ANYONE who wants to play that wah

>They could "lobby" Congress to change the laws to allow them not to be shitty.

You are expecting a publicly traded company to lobby the government on behalf of a change that will negatively impact the company's financial viability? That seems disconnected from reality.

I'm really curious how lobbying for something like this works in practice.

I work with (non-us) government and while I don't doubt some background level of corruption, in experience there's always been an emphasis on documented probity and making defensible decisions.

How does that $3m of lobbying actually work? Do lobbyists provide arguments to lawmakers (are there any except the tenuous one that the taxpayer money could be better used elsewhere?), or is it literally just spent on wining and dining the right people and asking them to block specific legislation?

There must be a myriad ways. This was on the front page today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835096

If Intuit can get results with < $4m in lobbying that's an incredible rate of return. They made $2,066m in net income last year.

For the influence they've clearly had there's got to be other money flows.

Lobbying is surprisingly cheap. We should probably pay our politicians way more, uncomfortable as that sounds to many.

Or we could put them in jail for corruption, for much cheaper.

lobbying isn't corruption.

Could you educate me about the difference?

As far as I know, commonly lobbying means funding the whole party instead of an individual person. Also, lobbyists are usually required to register somewhere, which seems to be mainly a ceremonial thing. Until now, having looked up on that quite a few times, I haven't spotted a to-the-point summary of what's really the separating line other than these two points.

It absolutely is a form of corruption: paying money to influence our government. Being charitable: it definitely looks like corruption and we should avoid even the appearance of corruption.

Maybe. A public corruption trial would likely take a few years and cost seven figures, then the Federal Government's cost to imprison someone is ~$36k per year.[1]

[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/01/2021-18...

The supreme court's opinion on political spending means you cannot just make the current system of lobbying illegal, because SCOTUS will just strike that law down.

> We should probably pay our politicians way more

Lobbying is legal though. I am not sure if thats case because we want politicians to make money.

I would use sortition instead of elections and then pay them 95th percentile salary, plus 4 years of the average of their last N years private salary upon returning to the private workforce for retraining and reintegration.

Elections are basically a mixture of corruption-fest to curry favors and a popular contest and the skills needed to get elected have almost nothing to do with the skills needed to do the job. Just get a random but large enough sample of the populace.

Yeah they need to be:

- paid enough during not to care about the bribe

- paid enough after not to care about loosing the next election

Corporations will just bribe more, they can afford it. I don't think the public can outspend them.

Really surprisingly low number here. $3.5 million doesn't seem like a lot to spend considering what I imagine they'd lose if they lost this tax-prep business. Did we lose a zero somewhere?

Sad that politicians can be "bought" for a measly 3.5 million. Especially considering the cost to Americans is probably in the ballpark of hundreds of millions, if not more.

There was a bribery scandal at my college years ago. But, what was more shocking than professors and teaching assistants accepting bribes, was how small and seemingly insignificant the bribes were. I recall one professor elevated the grades of an entire fraternity because they sent pizzas to his office after midterms (when the exams were being graded).

This is the same thing they've been doing for the past 20-30 years now to stay at all relevant as a business. The only reason taxes still cost to file is Intuit and the other scab companies that sell software to everyone. Cheaper to pay off politicians in "lobbying" them vs. getting a modern business model.

If turbotax was better than the free gov site then I would still use it. Good to have a free option though.

This year I tried Free File Forms and run into issues ... then tried TaxAct for $35 and run into issues ... then TurboTax for $139 did the job. There were issues but a live agent helped with that. At least I can tell that I didn't resign to evil Intuit without some struggle.

You gotta love the usage of social justice vocabulary with this. Find a way that it'll "impact low-income taxpayers" and suddenly it's morally correct to keep things from being more convenient for the vast majority of people.

The Soviet people endured 70 years of this. I'm sure they all thought it was just a fad.

Take off and nuke the entire tax code site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

The U.S. tax code is as inexcusable as the budget deficit/national debt.

Down with all of this folly, and let us replace it with something that is not a colossal dirty diaper.

Disappointed nobody has yet pointed out that it was Sam Bankman-Fried’s dad, Joseph Bankman, pushed for a free gov-run tax filing in California:

> In 2005,[22] Joseph Bankman worked with the state of California to create ReadyReturn, a pilot study with a completed tax return prepared by the state (not an individual or tax professional) that was available to single, no-dependant, standard-deduction, one-employer, wages-only taxpayers for the 2005 filing season.[23]

> When the FTB launched the ReadyReturn website, Intuit sued and lobbied California legislators to kill the program.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalFile#ReadyReturn

Why is that significant? If not significant, why are you disappointed?

Are you a part of SBF’s rep management crew?

lol, no, SBF should be in prison holding. Just an interesting coincidence that the father of the guy who was in the news non-stop tried to create a thing that everyone (except Intuit) agrees with.

But more seriously, 17 day account holder, are you a part of SBF’s rep management crew?

I think my questioning of your intention makes a lot more sense than your question, when you actually read (I have like 5 comments and no they aren’t about sbf or cryptocurrency or anything related)

Why do they even bother? Intuit has skilled coders, that could be put to more productive work. Like rewriting our tax code in Python. (Ha Ha only serious.)

We just need to go to prefilled tax forms.

I would prefer if they just steal the right amount of money from me in the first place and leave me alone

Flag on the play: illegal move of the goalposts.

Not government-run filing software. Fully-transparent and zero burden.

Search for "return on investment of lobbying".

Considering Inflation its actually a reduction in spending.

It's time for a no-return flat tax. If Russia and Estonia can do it, we (USA) can too.

I'm sure the downvotes are for the Russia comment.

Okay, fine.

For the adults in the room - let's look at Estonia. They are known for getting rid of the post-soviet corruption and being at the forefront of tech-enabled government. All while providing great government services (free healthcare and university - at a low taxpayer cost). Why can't America mimic that?

- https://e-estonia.com/

- https://investinestonia.com/tax-competitiveness/

Out of curiosity, how does a flat tax country like Estonia manage incentives? It's the main thing that balloons the US tax policy - not by design, but for whatever convoluted quirks of history the US has settled on using tax incentives as a means of placing the thumb on driving public behavior, especially when dealing with a federal structure and 50 differing opinions of how things should be run. Want to encourage more children? Increase the child deductions. Want to encourage household solar energy production? Tax deductions.

A very intelgent question void of political bias (rare these days on HN). Thank you for that!

My other alternative suggestion to a flat income tax is a progressive sales tax based on what you want to incentivize.

Gas guzzlers? First class flight? Tax the shit out of them.

Solar roof? Basic groceries? No tax.

Used/preowned goods? Zero tax (a loophole for opting out).

Etc.

This has been going on for a very long time, and IMO the scale of the impact firmly lodges this in the Evil category.

Another reasonable framing is that Intuit is the primary reason your taxes aren't automatically filed for you (with an opportunity to provide corrections later, if necessary).

The real solution to all of this is to just get rid of the overly complicated tax code. No more deductions or credits. Everyone just pays some % of their gross income. Stop using tax policy as a way to pick winners and losers. The tax code is grossly stacked in favor of the wealthy. If you want to redistribute money to the needy then do so using direct payments.

Not only is it not getting simpler the tax code seems to keep growing as more exceptions and exemptions get added. I guess it's like so many legacy code bases that just keep growing with lots of patches for special cases.

According to the Public Law 117-154(06/23/2022), the U.S. Tax Code is 6,871 pages. When you include the federal tax regulations and the official tax guidance, the number of pages raises to approximately 75,000. This zip file (pdf) is 181MB [0].

[0] https://uscode.house.gov/download/download.shtml

I can't think of a single person who wants taxes to become more complicated. How on earth does this happen? This overwhelmingly defies the democratic consensus, thus absent some special constitutional protections shouldn't be possible in a democracy.

Given that the more complicated taxes are, the easier it is for billionaires to hide what they're doing, pay less in taxes, and even get money back out from the IRS, along with giving accountants a job, is it really that much of a surprise?

Because we each individually like the small exemptions we enjoy better than we like the idea of directly subsidizing those things.

My home mortgage deduction and the solar tax credits are great examples of popular policies that would need to be changed when we simplify the code

I briefly actually tried to read up on the laws that governed me, since I once heard "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and also was curious what, exactly, it would take to really, no kidding, translate the tax code into python or Mlang (https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34579236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208853 )

However, once I realized that -- as you said -- it's not just the law it's the court (and presumably IRS) rulings that supplement the law, that was too much for me and I noped out. My 2nd idea was to become an Enrolled Agent and then write up that experience, but I couldn't readily identify how much time and money that would cost

TaxGPT is our last hope.

We should stop attempting to subsidize desired behaviors and punish bad behavior with taxes. It's dumb and purposely utilized to put holes in tax law for certain friends.

I mean, if you make 10k a year your fixed costs leave less money for taxes than if you make 100k or 1m a year, so doing it on a simple percentage of gross income (rather than gross revenue) is likely to accelerate poverty, which is very much picking winners and losers.

Anyway the reason why we have deductions and tax breaks as such a big component is in large part because it is one of the things you don't need 60 senators to pass.

It would be nice to have this eventually, but this would be the political fight of a lifetime, whereas automatic filing can be done right now with a penstroke. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.

How about, every year all US public companies must print 3% more of their own stock, which is then effectively distributed equally to all US citizens as a form of UBI. No more income tax for individuals.

That’s at least interesting.

I don’t think it would work but it’s definitely interesting.

I’m pretty well convinced as a country basically no one charges shareholders enough for their limited liability in their corporation, and making the company share the benefit as well as the risk isn’t the worst way I can brainstorm to deal with that

I'm not sure it would 'work' either, but I'm curious what you think would be broken about it?

It would probably make companies less interested in going public, but I like how it changes the meaning of a 'public' company to be more pro-social than just 'anyone in the investor class can purchase shares'.

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