FTC judge rules Intuit broke law, must stop advertising TurboTax as “free”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That's really the crux of this entire issue. Companies like Intuit have lobbied an industry into existence, and boy oh boy it's lucrative. Pointless "administrative courts" be damned, I like watching Intuit squirm.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/with-new-agents-heres-who-th...
The tech modernisation is supposed to cost about $2.5 billion over a decade or so. Just for rough numbers that's about what 1,000 developers would cost. That sounds like a lot but the IRS claims they need to rewrite 600 different applications, most of which are at least 20 years old. And the Individual Master File (IMF) is 60 years old.
No idea what the systems are and I doubt each one of those 600 will take the full 5+ years. But you could see how they could pretty quickly get to needing hundreds and hundreds of developers for years at a stretch.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3744.pdf
Looking over their tech modernisation plan ("Objective 4") in Publication 3744 they have a lot of work so the number is high but not like insanely impossibly high.
Also projected to earn $200 billion over the same timeframe thanks to finally having the resources to catch cheating millionaires.
It's great news for Intuit.
Sure but if you let the government do it you can be 100 % sure it will be the worst software ever designed.
They have no incentive to make it good. You know the drill.
The purely online based one now is very decent.
They then mandated you use a third party to file things like employee payments saying there would be free or cheap software to do this and listed a few.
Over time the free or low cost became more and more costly for something you have to submit to them by law.
It is a difficult issue as most of the government IT are straight up incompetent. (Just last week they gave up on a project after spending $2 Billion AUD).
The private industry would likely do a better job but then some people get rich, as opposed to a whole bunch more getting paid for what ends up in the bin.
Doing your taxes via self assessment is free and takes about 30mins to an hour online via HMRC.
Most people also go their entire lives without "doing their taxes"
It’s not like I’m not aware of bad software by government but the taxes ain’t it. Possibly because they are, in fact, incentivised to make it good.
And yet I regularly come across companies that manage to do even worse, despite having insentives. What should happen to them, Execution?
Taxes in Norway are a breeze, for example. You can design services so that they are easy to use for the taxpayer.
If you want a more local example, take a look at the Indiana DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). The upgrades took it from "Ugh" to "maybe I can do it online or take a quick trip into a branch". It might have degraded in the last 10 years (i moved away) but I didn't mind dealing with them. Getting an apostille (special stamp for international stuff) on a document wasn't bad either - you just needed to be patient and wait on mail.
Taxes can be like this.
And I'll mention that the government - and you - have incentive for this. Taxes that are easy to pay and easy to fill out for the average person means that there is greater compliance. Greater compliance means more revenue, and we can spend the time and money on other things (like auditing complicated taxes instead of people using a 1040EZ)
I expect the quality of government websites to improve exponentially as the old guard takes their "series of tubes" mentality out the door with them.
Australia is a good example. All online via their government website. Basically a glorified multi-page form, but it's autofilled with any data they've already received (e.g. salary paid and tax withheld by employers), and there's lots of guidance.
On the otherhand, in Japan they're just in the early days of doing e-tax (borderline unusable and still easier to paper file). But for those who even have to file (most people don't), you can fill in a one page paper form and drop it in the mail.
Whenever I see these articles about "turbotax" and whatever, I roll my eyes, same as whenever a discussion about "tips" starts up.
It's completely OK to take the best ideas from other countries and make them your own. It doesn't take anything from your own culture, and in fact frees up resources to do more of your own culture.
You only start having to file a tax return when you earn above £100k, and even then you can do it online for free at the government’s website.
Intuit as a business should not exist. Congress needs to make tax filing free and as automated as possible. I’ll be happy to see Sasan run out of business.
That said, while I agree the IRS situation can be dramatically improved - move the Free Fillable Forms program to the irs.gov domain instead of just linking to it, for starters, or just buy out one of the extant free programs and incorporate it - takes like this miss a lot of important factors.
1. US taxpayers are filing federal and state taxes. The state tax revenue agencies are completely independent of the IRS. While free federal filing would be nice, you've only solved no-more-than 50% of my problem. (Many people have to file in multiple states.)
2. This is relatively well known, but the US tax code is generally more complicated than many other countries. This isn't so much of a problem except that US taxpayers are obsessed with making sure the government doesn't get one over on them. They are always on the lookout for deductions and credits, frequently that they may not even be actually eligible for. I personally know a lot of people who have illegitimately claimed commuting mileage on their taxes, for example. So the complexity is a desired feature, not something you can just remove without consequence.
3. Because of the US federal system and US privacy rights, most countries collect much more information about their citizens than the US federal government. The IRS and the US federal government do not even know where you live until you tell it; unlike many countries, there is no such thing as registering with the government when you move. They don't know what, if any, children you actually have living with you - which at $2000 tax credit per kid, is extremely important information when calculating your tax bill. Remember that even a national ID program was/is extremely controversial in the US. So to have automatic tax prep that's even close to correct entails collecting reams of information the government does not currently have. You could maybe make a start by re-using information from last year, sure...but that's going to be inaccurate in a lot of cases which will then cause it's own problems - people incorrectly not applying for credits they should have and you don't know to correct them, and people realizing they can probably get one over on the IRS.
4. This is an issue that mostly affects educated upper-middle class people, not lower income people. I have struggled to convince most lower income people to use free! tax prep software at all. Most of them are paying companies and individuals to do their taxes, convinced that some guy with an office has the power to arm-wrestle the IRS and get them more back on their tax refund than anyone else via secret loopholes that don't exist on the 1040EZ. (They are wrong, except to the degree the less circumspect filers definitely commit lots of tax fraud.) You will never, ever convince these people to use the IRS website to file their taxes - that's walking into the enemy camp, in their minds. On top of this, they are convinced that making a tiny mistake on their taxes will result in severe fines and penalties and possibly imprisonment, despite the fact the IRS generally is very amenable to working with you. (Mostly. One guy I know was forced to pay his taxes twice because the IRS refused to accept the payment they had on record as payment, because whoever processed it did so wrongly somehow.)
But to prefill tax forms or do people’s taxes automatically, they would have had to have already collected this information and not on the client side. Currently, the federal government does not collect this information and no means really exists to do so and keep it up to date. This is in contradistinction to other countries, where often the government has up to date information on things like where you live and who your kids are and who is eligible to claim them and how old they are. Of course those tax forms are comparatively easy to prefill.
If you just want free “client side” processing with e-filing, that already exists and is called Free Fillable Forms.
I actually read that as "Satan" on the first read-through, and then I realized you were referring to the CEO of Intuit, Sasan K. Goodarzi. But the sentiment stays the same I guess :)
The US has the 1040ez which is the same idea, it's all that's needed for the majority of filers.
Anyway, with tax preparation software and electronic filing, the concept of "tax return pages" isn't very relevant any more.
It is astounding to compose this reply on a smart phone in a country with such a Byzantine train wreck of a tax system.
The situation would border on acceptable if the tax system actually did a coherent job of funding the government.
However, the arterial bleeding that is the government's deficit spending habit can only be said to have a notional relationship to the tax code.
Rather, the tax code seems to exist as a means to sculpt societal behavior.
Those who read HN and have some insights into stabile systems need to be thought leaders in reforming this mess.
/rant
Did they lobby an industry into existence, or did they beat the government at providing value to their own esoteric system by 15 or more years, and then lobby to keep their standing? I don't doubt the company is awful, but they're as popular as they are for more reasons than lobbying. At the time, they made one of the worst annual experiences fairly pain free.
I never understood the idea that the government ought to write their own e-filing software when others already exist, and quite affordably so; I usually get free tax filing from some TurboTax competitor (last year it was CashApp).
This is the most baffling take I've read on this subject.
The IRS are the ones we're submitting our tax forms to in the first place. Why on earth shouldn't they have their own e-filing service for the information they're requesting from us?
Plus they already have a ton of data on everyone's income and taxes paid throughout the year, so they can largely pre-fill these forms for us, saving us time and preventing mistakes. Why on earth wouldn't we want that?
Yes, they managed to outlaw providing such service by government.
For reference, Poland and many other countries have such system without such parasites like TurboTax (people with complex situations still have accountants or special software)
> Their job is literally to collect as much money as possible from people
The tax code clearly dictates how much is owed by each individual. Now a private company like TurboTax is literally out to get as much money as possible because that's how private companies work.
Regarding your knee-jerk partisanship: I don't think it's going to directly to Biden and Ukraine yet, the country is still paying off Donald's 2020 trillions of dollars in gifts to corporations that already had three years with enough tax cut money to do massive stock buybacks.
The IRS literally already has 90%+ of the information I need to gather and manually enter already - there's no reason for them not to provide a prefilled tax form as a starting point. Its just the Intuit (et al) are just a bunch of rent-seeking leeches that lobby to keep their obsolete business model relevant by law.
Private companies incentives is to save their customer money by not paying more taxes than they should, because that's where the value of their product lie.
I don't live in the US, so I don't know how things are done there. I live in France and we have a rather good government website, doing my taxes takes me less than an hour, but my situation is simple as I am an employee with very little deductibles. Most self employed people I know hire an accountant.
Sold a house and had a disbursement from an LLC this past year and TurboTax was under the impression we owed capital gains and a massive penalty. We opted in to their tax expert add on, a nice woman with twelve (12) years of expert experience! She also claimed we owed capital gains and her source for this statement was a blogspam link to a Myrtle Beach real estate agent detail how taxes work for OUT-of-staters. Not a factor for a lifelong resident and in any case I was shocked and appalled that this so-called expert cited me a f*cking WordPress blog for taxation resulting in a steep 5-figure sum being due.
Our new, beloved, local accountant has our taxes done in an afternoon and we saw a nice refund this year (God bless the child tax credits.)
So while Intuit may have a theoretical incentive they sure seem to be a lot more of a Comcast duty of care.
I worked in a tax prep business my family had for over 40 years. We fixed CPA trainwrecks and H&R Block Block/Jackson Hewitt knightmares for a living. Constantly batting down customer scams in the process.
I doubt the government would fail to include a deductible once declared. So it is on individuals to declare them. Same as it is with filling out information so a private tax service can do calculations.
Nearly every public facing industry lobbies Congress to protect their industries at the expense of the USA citizen.
One of the worst offenders is the US drug industry.
In Australia, our government can buy the exact same US drugs at a 79% to 306% (the average is 149%) discount to what American citizens have to pay. This only happens because or government barters with these pharmaceutical companies and gets a massive volume discount.
Thanks to Congress, these exact same volume discounts are not allowed and in fact there are laws in place that forbid the US government asking for any form of volume discount. This means USA citizens pay way over the full price for their prescription drugs, thanks to restrictive laws designed to hurt the US citizen and protect these companies.
Biden finally managed to force Congress's hand and soon the US government will be allowed to barter for a better price, but he only managed to get a change that happens in 2026. For the next two years American citizen will still be getting ripped off by these drug companies.
What is worse, most of the America population doesn't even realize Biden managed to bring about these changes, and no doubt should the GOP win in 2024 there's a chance those law changes might be reversed.
I have a good idea which candidates these drug companies will be supporting in 2024.
It’s been a weird change to watch. For most of my life it’s been my left wing and / or hippie friends who were super skeptical of the drug industry. Today, it’s a tossup between them and my right wing friends as to who is more anti big-pharma.
Except last time I've checked, even the English version needed a Windows system with Chinese characters to run properly (not even any of the Traditional Chinese, say Unicode, but some specific one). Also, there are printed paper bits to file sometimes in the end.
Nonetheless it's still good to have something "blessed", and it's also evolving.
I completely agree but I think its worth pointing out the recent controversy over better funding the IRS. Better funding the system to catch tax cheats makes it more fair, helps the middle/lower classes and is revenue positive and somehow that caused outrage. Some folks just don't have any interest in a functional system. It's always been the case but sadly these days they seem to have moved from the fringe to the mainstream.
1) When Ron Paul ran for office, they thought he was out of his mind when he said the IRS could be abolished. Until you realize that personal income taxes didn't exist before 1913, and started out at 1% revenue.
2) Many people are worried that when citizens are taken out-of-the-loop when filing their income taxes, that the amount of tax will increase dramatically without scrutiny.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/securities-and-e...
The issue people have with the status quo is that the SEC, FTC, etc get to play judge and prosecutor, so there are some definite conflicts of interest going on.
Veerrrry little of what they do is agreeable mega corp curbing things, its just rubber stamping agency opinions and masquerading it as due process
No, there's no conflict on interest here. They're a regulatory agency and their job is to regulate. Regulatory agencies don't treat everything like a court case and aren't supposed to. Kind of like how patent agencies will grant or reject patent applications but that's not them playing "judge and prosecutor", it's just them doing their job.
Conflicts of interest generally involve financial interest or similar, e.g. a judge making a ruling on a company while owning stock in that company.
There is no analagous conflict of interest here. This is just a regulatory agency doing its job.
People need to go back to junior high civics class then - prosecutor is and always as been a role of the excutive branch.
Even though nobody cares about the law in Turkey, on paper the public service outsourcing principle is limited, and it's a good regulation. For instance, a local government is responsible for maintenance of roads. If there's a topic which requires high level of expertise and out of context of daily operations, then it is allowed to outsource.
In parallel, tax filing and return processes are primary responsibilities of government. They should not be able to outsource this. Or they cannot defend that it's not their job description.
I'm living in Estonia, which allows me fill in tax returns and such under 10 minutes as a resident. It's an amazing experience. It's so easy and fractionless, it's something you don't care and forget. You know something "just works" when you don't worry about it.
You have to set up a company with multiple more hoops to even get docs.