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Comment by LostLocalMan | Hacker News Reader

It's not hard if you have simple incomes and deduction, it's just a bloated process that you have to pay to complete (if you make enough money) and you are at risk of penalty if you accidentally fat finger manually copying printed text into a computer since the IRS already knows all the values and will know if you submitted something wrong.

What would be better is if the IRS just sent you the stuff they know and you affirm that it's true. This prevents people from accidentally committing tax fraud and eliminates the need for middle income Americans to pay a yearly fee in order to be law abiding.

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You can't accidentally commit tax fraud. Fraud requires intent. Errors on forms are not fraud.

Yes if your tax situation is simple, the IRS already knows everything. In many other cases (even something pretty common like self-employment income) they do not know, and you have to tell them.

> eliminates the need for middle income Americans to pay a yearly fee in order to be law abiding.

Yearly fee? I had to pay for turbotax but I was under the impression that it was because my income is very high.

I don't know, it makes sense to me the way the IRS does it. If I get a massive windfall and the IRS didn't send me information about it, then I would be able to just not file it because I would know they don't know about it. Not so if I don't know what they know.

TurboTax doesn't charge for standard federal income filing, but they do charge for some forms of return, and for state taxes, and for audit protection.

Even with the "free" standard offering, it's been lucrative enough for them to lobby heavily to prevent taxes from being easier, just to funnel the majority of the country through their slow filing flow and try to upsell to all of them.

> I don't know, it makes sense to me the way the IRS does it. If I get a massive windfall and the IRS didn't send me information about it, then I would be able to just not file it because I would know they don't know about it. Not so if I don't know what they know.

Ideally the IRS would tell you what they think is accurate and you'd submit amendments for anything that's not accurate. That's no different than the current arrangement since you already need to report all income, it just eliminates the extra cost and effort for the majority of Americans that don't receive windfalls.

I used CashApp Taxes for three years now (was Credit Karma). It's free and has the same thing as TurboTax.

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