Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

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> “A direct-to-I.R.S. e-file system is a solution in search of a problem,” said Tania Mercado, a spokeswoman for Intuit. “And that solution will cost taxpayers billions of dollars.”

Funny, I think she has conveniently recast "the problem" as whether to replace the commercial tax filing industry with something that might be free to the taxpayer. Because yes they doing just fine, thank you, paying us for that convenience, so there is no problem if you look at it that way.

But if the problem is helping people file their taxes easier, then clearly Intuit didn't think that that was a solution in search of a problem, for them to build a whole industry around it...

Funny how entrenched interests will go to great lengths to redefine and recast what the fundamental goal of the government should be. And usually that recasting is some kind of distraction away from the question whether the government should serve the people, or serve specific entrenched interests.

Everyone is falling for tax-prep propaganda by even implying that this is a new service.

The IRS already prepares your taxes for you. There is simply no way around this: they have to prepare them to check the numbers they get from personal filings (or from Intuit etc). The additional service is the one that compares the forms people send against the form the IRS already has, and then has to follow up on every minor discrepancy.

So the direct-to-I.R.S. proposal isn't adding anything new to big government: it's eliminating an utterly pointless literal box ticking service they currently provide for free, at the expense of tax payers, and for the benefit of Intuit and pals.

If you think filing taxes is annoying, imagine working at the IRS with this system.

I don't live in the US and as such have never interacted with the IRS, but you're equating actions with a very different scope.

Looking at it from a game development Perspektive:

The tax filer(intuit in this example) is the client running on untrusted devices, The tax office is the server which has to do a sanity check for each action to assure they're not cheating.

Essentially the "client" has a lot of branching actions it could generate and the server only has to validate one of these.

From my perspective this client should be provided by the government with public apis for alternative implementations, as they're the one's providing the server.

It depends on the extent to which "validation" is recomputing exactly the same information. If you have a game that runs every single computation server-side it's not a sanity check, it's just a game running on a server. What we have set up is more akin to a game that runs both server side and on the client, with some added latency on both sides because every update has to be cross checked between the two.

You don't see a lot of games like this, because it would be absurd.

To be fair this is a slight oversimplification. I've lived in the US and dealt with the IRS, and while most of the information must be completed server-side there are some things (like deductions) that would indeed need an API. I think your suggestion, allowing multiple clients to use that API, is a good one. But there's no reason to force the client to recompute everything the server already has.

> The IRS already prepares your taxes for you. There is simply no way around this: they have to prepare them to check the numbers they get from personal filings

I'd be interested to hear that I'm wrong, but I believe this is not true. The IRS almost certainly does not calculate on their end what your taxes should be, but rather uses some much cheaper heuristic which they compare to your return and if it's "close enough" then the amount they stand to recover from auditing you is less than the cost to audit, and the IRS simply accepts the difference.

Exactly this. In particular, the IRS does not/likely does not have knowledge of a range of taxable income that we are bound to self-report: sales of goods and property, cash tips or payments, small consulting projects, rent you earned renting out a room, etc. The deductions side is even more opaque to the IRS, for example they have no idea how far you commuted to your job, or that you cared for a sick parent, or that you made tax-saving energy-saving improvements to your home.

The system is essentially an honor system with a barb for those who get caught cheating.

My experience with TurboTax was that in two subsequent runs on the same tax year the refund I got would vary by 20-50% (I had to start over at one point). I didn't dig in: and the reason I was using TurboTax is that I didn't care.

So I'll take the IRS heuristic: better than the Intuit heuristic.

Your experience does shed light on TurboTax, but how does it give us any insight into the IRS heuristic?

OMG. But the problem already exists. It's THEM. Intuit.

Also, one could say that Intuit wouldn't be left out, they still could create software that could connect directly to IRS, and they have great experience to offer the best solutions to taxpayers (do they?). But of course, then they would have the 'captive market' experience they have now.

I'm Spanish, and, although our tax filling system is not the best, it still baffles me how far behind us is the US one in this case.

Tax filling season is near, and for most people (if you don't have investments or weird tax deductions), you just ask for a pre-filled "draft" from the IRS equivalent. You review your salary and taxes numbers on the web site (nowadays most of the info is sent directly from banks and so on), and just hit "Accept" if it looks OK. If something's weird just re-fill the form numbers.

Also, Intuit size always baffles me.

I've been checking on their Open Source work ( Argo CD, Argo Workflows... come mostly from Intuit. I hate the Corporation, not their people ;) ) and when they talked about their K8s deployments in KubeConEU past year I was surprised by them.

Straight from their slides:

  900+ teams
  5000+ developers
  230+ clusters
  7000+ namespaces
  ~77320 nodes

This one kind of cracked me up though (2018)... I wonder what their AWS bills are...

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/h5-data-centers/intuit-s...

She previously worked as a Congressional Intern in DC, and as a Press Aide at the California Department of Justice under Kamala Harris (later a Press Secretary)

Hence the term 'Revolving Door' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)#

> "And that solution will cost taxpayers billions of dollars.”

And how much does taxpayers already pay for Intuit for this priviledge?

I'd have lost my crap at this if I was in the same room

That's different, because all that money is going into a huge, publicly-traded, rent-seeking corporation, so it's OK.

Isn't the byzantine tax system itself part of "the problem"?

The direct filing vs. no direct filing kerfuffle is relatively minor in comparison.

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