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Comment by k2enemy | Hacker News Reader

> A spokeswoman for Intuit, Tania Mercado, criticized the direct file project as a “half-baked solution” and a waste of taxpayer money. “The direct file scheme is a solution in search of a problem,” she said.

Wow, I thought that Intuit would have gone for a little more subtlety.

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On the plus side, intuit saying something like this is exactly what I want to hear regarding a program like this. I would have been deeply suspicious if they were anything other than enthusiastically opposed to it.

Or they’re saying this because they know the IRS effort doesn’t have competent people on it (think what happened with the healthcare website when it launched) and is just prepping the waters for a “see we were telling you along this was a bad idea” criticism for congress people to spike it later. It’s really hard to intuit the strategy being employed so best to just ignore them altogether. And if this turns into a partisan issue at all (which an unclean launch might because people are dumb about government tech in the US), then expect the Trump administration to kill this if they win to prevent this from becoming entrenched and popular like Obamacare is.

I've used the US Free File Federal Taxes for the last five years and it just wasn't a problem, and I have yet to see anything that looked like programmer incompetence.

Now, that said, the way you debug your submittal is to paste an entire page of error gibberish that looks like very low level database error output into an entry box they point you to. Sounds gross! Ewwwww! Well actually I've been debugging c++ templates since forever and hohum it doesn't bother me. However... every single time it decoded the problem and told me exactly what I needed to do. It has taken me 2-4 tries each year to get it debugged and then it sails right through. The final result I've fed into two different state forms and that has sailed right through too. All free, and not that much of my time.

Now if they can get the UI for normies painless, which I suspect is the main programming problem (I don't say that UI programming is trivial), this will take off like a rocket ship and the US can the join the coterie of civilized nations that do this for all their citizens.

If you're referring to Free Fillable Forms, the error messages are not DB errors, but "business logic rules errors". They do look like gibberish, but buried inside them is a code that can generally give a pretty clue as to the error.

I agree that it would be much nicer if they said "The amount of line 29 of Form ABCD does not appear at line 18 of Form WXYZ".

Even nicer if you never had to manually transfer amounts between forms.

Oh yes I am sorry; I didn't mean to imply that I thought that the DB was throwing an error. What the filing process email message body stated looked something like approximately "Form line xxx violates schema requirement such and such: <more gibberish>".

I was thinking when I scanned the message was that I bet I could reverse engineer the problem from this back end generated text but why not do what the instructions say and just feed it into the parser box? And every time the next email message gave me exactly the thing I needed to do. It was cool, for a weird sort of nerd.

So no, I was casting shade where the process was right in the sunlight: I made the mistake, and the business logic caught it, and told me correctly every time what I needed to do to fix it. I liked the whole process a lot.

Yeah, me too! Been using FFF for about 8 years now.

This is why we still have the income tax system that we do. It’s a $14 billion a year industry. I’ve talked to people who work the lobbying system very hard. There’s lots of wining and dining to make sure no one messes with the complexity of the system.

We need more people who are immune to lobbying in government positions. We’ll see how this goes.. depending on the next election cycle this will either get quashed quickly, or, fingers crossed, might fight on against a growing backlash.

Which is really the main issue. Offering a more accessible free version to file taxes is great, but the real problem is the need to file taxes at all for a lot of people. The IRS already knows the relevant info: Your employer sends W-2 information, your bank and broker are sending the various 1099 forms for interest, dividends, stock sale gains/losses, etc. Same for your spouse and kids/dependents. Don't even need to itemize in a lot of cases, since the standard deduction is preferable in many years.

Unless you're dealing with foreign income, are a business, or do a lot of contract work for cash, I don't see much reason why the IRS can't just handle all the taxes automatically - apart from the fact that some company wants to charge me $150 a year to file my taxes and making sure that my tax situation (which would fit on a beer coaster otherwise) is as complicated as possible.

> Unless you're dealing with foreign income, are a business, or do a lot of contract work for cash, I don't see much reason why the IRS can't just handle all the taxes automatically - apart from the fact that some company wants to charge me $150 a year to file my taxes and making sure that my tax situation (which would fit on a beer coaster otherwise) is as complicated as possible.

I imagine there are heavy software development costs, on par with what it might take to build Turbotax itself.

For instance, someone is going to have to figure out wash sales. Right now your broker does it, but you can wash sale across accounts, which requires you (or more reasonably tax software) to both detect this and track the adjusted basis in perpetuity. More complex events, like straddles, further exist, and even consumer-grade tax software won't handle it correctly.

Even implementing the tax code correctly for regular income is difficult. Examples of calculating Net investment income tax correctly due to ambiguous tax code changes (https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=271074&...)

I have no idea what "wash sale" is. I only heard that term when I was reading the help page in TurboTax, which I'm effectively forced to use.

Seriously, I doubt there is more than 100k people in US that have this "wash sale" any year. I'm so tired of every time someone suggests automatic tax filling, there is always one guy bring up some tax term that 99.99% people never heard of. Sure, if auto tax filling doesn't solve your wash sale calculation, feel free to go back to TurboTax. Let the other 99% people who have one job and no other complicated tax situation skip this yearly nonsense.

Beware the paradox of averages. I bet a lot more than 99% of people have some wrinkle with their return.

One person has a wash sale, another has some real estate stuff, another became disabled, another has child care stuff, another has education credits, etc etc etc.

Actually now I am curious how many people file the “simplest” return (wage only, standard deduction, and absolutely no other adjustments).

It’s probably less than 99% but it could be the majority in a given year.

> TurboTax, which I'm effectively forced to use

FWIW TurboTax is easily piratable. There are even instructions out there to crack it yourself with a .NET assembly editor.

I do my taxes in a VM without Internet access and mail in the filings, so there's no way for any information to be backhauled to Intuit or anyone else.

Literally anyone that owns stock could generate a wash sale.

Only 15% of Americans directly own any stock[0]. Vast majority of people who do is done through a 401k or other retirement vehicle.

[0] https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-americans-o...

Wash sale rules apply to mutual funds and ETFs also, not just directly holding stocks.

Note the proviso, taxes should be automatic "for a lot of people." Will taxes be automatic for Warren Buffet? No. For GE? No. For Suzie Q. Public? Yes.

IRS already audits at least 10% of the returns. They should have the entire tax system implemented as a software. It is madness that this part was hidden from the wide audience.

As many software projects, the internal system may not be appropriate for external use, but still they should have components very long time ago.

>IRS already audits at least 10% of the returns. They should have the entire tax system implemented as a software

The audits are accomplished by a human re-doing the return with the submitted information. (As no surprise, the low-complexity returns are often chosen)

This is a good first step. Ideally it turns into a "verify this all looks correct & add anything we're missing" kinda thing.

The article says that "in one possible scenario included in the agency’s report to Congress, the I.R.S. could fill out tax returns with information it already has." We can only hope :)

Great way to look at it. It is a significantly smaller jump once the Federal system is in place and already handling returns for millions/years.

That is how it works in many (most?) countries already - the US is an outlier in requiring every citizen to handle their own taxes.

A lot of US GDP is Rube Goldberg machines to skim off the economy. Intuit, Visa/Mastercard, private health insurance industry, etc. Lots of pushback to be expected as government fixes this (FedNow for payments, IRS improvements for taxes, healthcare reform, and so on). Onward.

It is how it works for most people in both the countries (on different continents ) I have worked in. Only people with high incomes or investment income or who are self employed or similar need to file their own taxes.

There are also cheap systems even for business returns - mine cost £12 for the company and I will use the free HMRC system for my personal return. It might be easier to use more sophisticated software, especially if your finances are complex.

> but the real problem is the need to file taxes at all for a lot of people.

Yes

In New Zealand where I live most people do not file at all. Tax is all "payroll tax" and sales tax

I have just joined that system myself (after several unpleasant years of not being on a payroll. Whew!

> We need more people who are immune to lobbying in government positions.

What we need to do is stop pretending people like that exist, and come up with a system that works despite people's self-interest, greed and corruption.

Maybe what we have is the best we can do.

This is always my frustration when people suggest things for governments. You cannot design a government that relies on people being good. You have to design a government that highly discourages bad actors, make it easy to eject them, and operates while they exist. It's a crazy hard optimization problem and isn't going to work if people are just smart or good. And I never understand why people suggest fixing government by giving government more power and nothing else.

More transparency would probably be better. Make them wear NASCAR style jackets and all that.

I worked at a government "lab" (MITRE) that maintained the IRS system. The system was allegedly so complicated that if the tax code and the software conflicted, the software won. The stack is legacy and intentionally on minimal life support.

> intentionally on minimal life support

Key word: "intentionally".

Maybe spending billions of dollars lobbying should be illegal

It’s not that lobbying is a major slice of $14B, it’s that they actually spend only $3m and it’s effective:

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

Notoriously there is also a large contingent of anti-tax politicians and citizens that oppose making paying taxes easier. Their reasoning being the more friction there is the more likely that you will pay attention to how much you are being taxed and support their policies that cut taxes.

Not working. I'd pay more for a convenient tax system.

I will never in my life comprehend how lobbying isn't just bribery with extra steps. The only distinction between bribing a cop to get out of a speeding ticket and a megacorp lobbying random politicians is that the megacorp has much deeper pockets, absolutely ridiculous

1. It's like how networking isn't cronyism

2. Politicians need to know how the businesses they're regulating work, and theoretically they gain a lot from being able to talk it over with the businesses themselves (the existing ones, mind you - not the future ones which might be stifled, and currently have $0)

3. Lobbying is another word for talking with your local politician, what megacorps do (and what basically everyone means when they say "lobbying", really) is paid lobbying, i.e. run the "lobbying" errand on your behalf. Banning the former type of lobbying is impossible, and banning the latter is hard to do when it's a legitimate service for people who have more money than time (and also might violate free speech laws, and also is hard to actually stop)

4. Fuck paid lobbying, it does more harm than good

"There’s lots of wining and dining"

You mean the congressmen are bribed by free food and alcohol? Asking as a non-American.

This should shed some light:

Bill Gurley: "2,851 Miles" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM

Just came back to check replies. This is a great talk.

He mentions Obamacare and the digitization of records, which is very on point and a similar issue. In the interview he mentions, Obama says:

“In some cases, you have economic incentives against making the system better; you have service providers — people make money on keeping people’s medical records — so making it easier for everyone to access medical records means that there’s some folks who could lose business. And that’s turned out to be more complicated than I expected.”

I think “more complicated than expected” is a hilarious and sad way to sum up the whole mess that is greed and Washington DC combined.

Thanks!

Too funny. So it's a solution in search of a problem... that they also try to solve?

...and Intuit knows a thing or two about "half-baked solutions". ;)

So it's an endorsement from Intuit.

Industrial complexes, all of the obvious ones, have gone too far; it only takes one to push for unfair-unreasonable terms.

The next step of citizen's countering Intuit's particular complex is for automatic tax filing to occur.

The W2 doesn't count as voluntary, unless you bear witness against yourself, by filing for a return and identifying yourself as a taxpayer –waiving your 5A rights.

Rest in piss Intuit

From the article and from a poster below:

"For the pilot participants will have to enter their own financial information, the I.R.S. said."

It is indeed a complete waste of taxpayer money unless they actually prefill with the IRS' data.

Why would you say that? If a taxpayer can copy the fields from their w-2 and have it provide a straightforward and correct filing without trying to divert them to dark patterns trying to steal money from them, that is a huge benefit.

Consider it an MVP.

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