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Comment by dguest | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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