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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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 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'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.

Now this is an idea I could get behind!

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