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Comment by GreedClarifies | Hacker News Reader

So in its initial form it is indeed a complete waste of tax payers money.

Shocking.

Absolutist takes like this never achieve much.

Yes, it could be better. But an mvp-type launch that does some things well, without trying to achieve everything on day one, would definitely not be a "complete waste". If successful, it's laying the base for the next iterations of functionality.

For a lot of folks, they have one or two W2 forms to enter, and that's it. It's really not that hard. If even a million or so folks get benefit from it to start with, that's great, and we should then build on that.

The IRS should play try to create an actual MVP. Create an API which allow for efile (which I assume already exists given turbotax) and create an API which allows the download whatever information the IRS has on the tax payer.

Then allow companies or open source software to create whatever value add they want on top of these APIs.

That sounds like a minimalist launch.

That does not sound like an MVP. Then it’s up to random chance that they create the right API format and then someone makes an app to use said API and doesn’t also use it to steal data from gullible people. You’ve multiplied the number of ways this can go wrong and reduced the chance that anyone would use it.

You've increased the places where things can go wrong (in third party client apps) while not having any control over their quality. We'd hear "oh, IRS opened things up!", then deal with a dozen half-baked clients, and conclude "IRS sucks at something so simple!".

Agreed - public API first is the wrong place to start.

Let's also remember the context of this project. It's not just an overly-cautious MVP rollout. This project is something that has tremendous resistance against it, for stupid reasons, but the resistance exists nonetheless. Much like ACA benefits, people will only realize it's actually a good idea after they've gotten used to it. Starting small, with a minimal project that is most likely to succeed, is the best way to ensure that the project can continue at larger scale in the future.

"It isn't completely and totally perfect from the very first moment so it's a complete waste of time and money"

How does it feel to be the smartest person on the planet?

If it gives feature parity with the existing solution, it seems fine as a start. At least we'll presumably be able to file on a .gov now instead of freefilefillableforms.com, which seems like it was chosen to be intentionally sketchy looking.

Edit: actually looks like it doesn't reach parity with the existing free e-file system and only covers the simplest cases, and "the annual cost of a direct-file system could range from $64 million to $249 million" sounds absolutely absurd to me.

The high end estimate would be for 25 million households and would mostly go to customer service [0]. It may well be too high, but "absolutely absurd" doesn't seem fair.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5788.pdf#page=18

The customer support costs make that seem more reasonable (or at least I'm not familiar enough to judge), but $7M in technology costs to go from 5M to 25M users without an increase in product scope seems very steep. Like even with 100KB of data stored per user, which seems like way more than necessary, that's only 2.5 TB. So storage isn't the issue. And if everyone did their returns in the last possible hour and did 100 requests/return, that's ~700k requests/second. In actuality the load should be far lower; maybe it'd peak in the thousands. I'm not seeing why there would be any variable technology cost at that level, much less $7M.

Putting some concrete numbers on the infrastructure, for $500k you could have like 10 servers each with 60 cores and 32 TB of mirrored NVMe storage. Any one server could handle the load while being almost completely idle (i.e. you're really just buying extreme redundancy). So what are the other $6.5M for, and how is that an annual variable tech budget?

Why is it that when private institutions make software they’re suppose to “iterate fast” and quickly get an MVP out

But when a government agency is working in software, suddenly all the best practices are a “waste of tax payer money”

Seems silly

Who says iterate fast is always a best practice for private companies?

> So in its initial form it is indeed a complete waste of tax payers money.

Certainly no worse than the decades of fees taxpayers have been sending to Intuit and co.

I'm with you; if I still have to fill in the paperwork then quite literally what is the point? I'll continue paying an accountant to do this bullshit. This 'new' system is useless to me.

You're not the only taxpayer in the country. Other people might benefit.

You have an accountant, so you're already a minority of citizens. Open your mind.

I don't want an accountant, all I want is the system other countries have where the government fills out the forms for you and all you do is sign; this is what everybody has been asking for, for years, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. If they can't or won't give us that then there is no cause for celebration. My taxes aren't complicated but I detest paperwork and have anxiety over all of it. I don't hire an accountant for fun, I do it because I don't want to fill in the damn forms!

If I have to fill out the forms myself, then it's utterly pointless. I could already do that if that's what I wanted. Not rhetorical: what is even new about this, being able to do it without using paper and pen? Big fucking whoop, thanks for nothing IRS.

You're not me. The tax situation covered by this initiative fits my needs perfectly. Fine, there's nothing wrong with you paying. Not all of us have that kind of money.

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