IRS has launched its free tax filing service, Direct File, in 12 states
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
* Consent to the collection, use, and sharing of their personal information to third parties (i.e. data brokers).
* Agree to binding arbitration and a waiver of class action rights.
* Agree to limits on liability for any indirect, punitive, special, exemplary, incidental, or consequential damages.
* Consent to arbitrary termination of the account at any time for any reason.
Login.gov (https://login.gov/) is the obvious choice for a login service. Enough excuses.
Login.gov does not provide a sufficient level of identity assurance (IAL2 [1]) to serve as the IDP for this pilot and IRS functions in general (ID.me liveness check and facial recognition). IRS is working with Login.gov to upgrade Login.gov to deprecate ID.me for this purpose [2] [3].
Would it make sense to not proceed with this pilot until this was ready? Certainly not; Login.gov will catch up and meet IRS in the future as Direct File expands next filing season. Very similar to when Social Security Administration (ssa.gov) transitioned from ID.me and their internal IDP to Login.gov.
(Login.gov partners with USPS to perform in person identity proofing for those who cannot perform remote proofing via a mobile device)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691325
[1] https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30430851
[3] https://fedscoop.com/irs-to-adopt-login-gov-as-user-authenti...
- Yes, the privacy infractions listed by esbranson are accurate.
- But we don't have an alternative right now.
- But something better is coming! It's totally right around the corner!
I'm very pleased to see dissatisfaction of the form "this isn't good enough; here are ideas for incremental improvements to it", but have totally lost my patience with the far more common "this isn't good enough; we should do nothing instead".
I've noticed as well, it's quite common that when a well-constructed solution takes much more time (and may be harder to identify) than an quick fix, proponents of the quick fix will claim that the 'do it right' folks are actually saying we should do nothing.
In my view, "partial solutions piled on partial solutions" is just life as a human being, where the alternative to that is not perfect solutions with no piling required, but rather no solutions. And yes, it is just like software, where incrementalism is also the better approach, in my view.
> proponents of the quick fix will claim that the 'do it right' folks are actually saying we should do nothing.
We don't think you're actually saying we should do nothing, just that it's the common end result, despite your best intentions.
And in the sphere of politics in particular, I think well-meaning people who really do want better solutions are often used by more cynical people who really do want to do nothing, for their own ends. Like the tax software industry lobbyists, in this case. Or like how old school environmentalists often find themselves aligned with fossil fuel industry lobbyists when it comes to building renewable or nuclear power generation, or transmission lines.
I don't begrudge people their dislike of partial solutions, I just don't subscribe to the same strategy.
I don't think the person you're responding to is a perfectionist. He just has a different view on how to improve things.
These aren't intractable, or even difficult, problems to resolve. Literally the only thing you have to change is some text.
The corollary to this is that the text is difficult to change for precisely the same reason that people dislike it: it holds legal baggage. If it were "just" some text, you could ignore it. But it's text that is related to contracts and agreements that would need to be renegotiated and audited and more I'm not thinking of.
Progress must include work: otherwise it is no longer progress.
My objection isn't to your opinion that we should make progress or change, it is to trivializing the complexity of that change.
They literally have an alternative that they've already rolled out. And they've stated the reasons they can't use the more modern IDP yet. What's so hard to understand about a v1?
Don't make perfect the enemy of good. The rent-seeking of tax preparation businesses is a bigger problem than these privacy issues. That doesn't mean those aren't also a problem. (And I'd be shocked if Intuit has a less problematic set of terms with respect to privacy...)
But what the IRS is doing here is the correct prioritization of problems to attack.
> But what the IRS is doing here is the correct prioritization
I read this as: "saving money, and keeping it out of unscrupulous hands, is more important than preserving our privacy and freedom". I don't agree with that, and you shouldn't assume that others agree with your take.
Indeed, I assume my take on that trade-off is the less popular one amongst the commenters, and perhaps also the readers, of this thread. But I do think it is the far more popular view among the population at large. And part of the reason I'm commenting here is to point that out.
The government saying "we are being more scrupulous than TurboTax" from the start, with a clear plan to improve is really only net gains. And the normal objections about things being worse because government don't really apply, since the IRS ultimately needs and has this information anyway, the risk is just them sharing it.
There's no justification for the IRS needing higher security than free fillable forms or normal turbo tax to deliver a similar self prepared efiling, so they are repeating the same crime the next level down, choosing a private system to provide something that benefits the IRS and is of negative value to the tax payer themself.
They’re a government agency. Especially for a voluntary pilot, it makes no sense to lower standards that way.
Again, they already accept efile from providers that do not follow these standards. There's 0 benefit to upping the requirements here.
No evidence of this happening. If anything, the pilot is proving they made the right call. It’s doing well despite ID.me.
For paid, professional preparers (who don't use TurboTax, but rather commercially available software designed for practitioners who prepare dozens or hundreds of returns), the security requirements are higher, even if not quite IAL2. The IRS has worked for a number of years now on a "Security Summit" in concert with all the pro software vendors to tighten up their security, resulting in drastically less filing fraud than in previous years. By "filing fraud" I mean filing returns using a false identity, not simply reporting wrong income or deductions.
Do you have any evidence they're even working on this right now? Last news I heard was 2 years ago when they promised ID.me was a temporary solution for that tax season, but it sure looks like that was to make the public happy, and ID.me is here to stay.
Note: This isn't an argument against releasing the tax tool, I'm just commenting on the login.
Maybe not, but it absolutely makes sense for me to ignore this pilot until/unless they stop using something like id.me.
If not wanting to have my data exposed to yet another data broker makes me "super-privacy-sensitive", then so be it. As currently implemented, this program is simply a nonstarter for me because of the use of id.me.
I am immensely disappointed because I really want to be able to file my taxes in the way this program is aimed. Well, what I actually want is for the IRS to compute my taxes for me and send me a bill, but this would be better than nothing.
I'm also disappointed that I can't use this this year, because I'm not in one of the pilot states. But that's what makes it a pilot program! It's explicitly not intended to be used by everyone at this stage.
If this were to become required for everyone, and still leaked tons of data to a third-party at that point, then I would be right there with all of you that it's unacceptable. But we're far from that point.
Some people just can't be pleased.
False and false. No wonder you can't understand?
I will never participate in facial recognition to file my taxes. Never. I'd rather go to jail.
I've filed online in a foreign country and it was a breeze. California as well... breezy enough. Neither required privacy invasion by a malicious third-party.
It's time to ask yourself, what exactly are you rooting for here? Your creepy insults come off as very self-serving.
I'd ask you to consider how the companies with the dominant products in this space afford the "file for free" products that most people use. Perhaps it is altruism? Or maybe it's the normal way that companies offer free products that collect a lot of personal information, by profiting off that data.
I'm incredibly sympathetic to people here who don't want to personally use this until it is no longer using ID.me (I may well make the same choice if this were available at all in my state this year), but I'm incredibly unsympathetic to criticizing this pilot program for not waiting until this problem (which the vast majority of people don't care about) to be solved.
It is available in my state but does not handle some detail (this year) I need. But still I won't touch it with a ten foot pole with F.R. etc, and not going to be chastised for saying so.
It's not like complaining here on HN is going to influence even one percent of the non-technical public anyway. And I learn things from others griping. :-D
> Login.gov’s identity verification process does not currently conform to the IAL2 specification because it does not include biometric verification.
https://www.login.gov/partners/our-services/
> Login.gov continues to work toward achieving certification of compliance with NIST’s IAL2 standard from a third-party assessment organization.
https://www.login.gov/policy/how-does-it-work/
https://developers.login.gov/overview/
https://developers.login.gov/attributes/
> In FY 2024, Login.gov plans to offer a solution that complies with the IAL2 level of NIST 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines.
https://www.login.gov/docs/login-gov-roadmap-november-2023.p...
Are you confident login.gov will be caught up and avaialable by next filing season and if so based on what?
Your cite at [3] above (thanks!), is dated Feb 2022, and doesn't have a timeline, but also sort of implies that login.gov should be ready by the "next" tax season (Feb 2023), when it says "While Login.gov is not expected to be ready in time for use by taxpayers during the current tax season…"
So this is now the third tax season since then that login.gov is still not available. What leads you think it'll be available next filing season?
(Note: I am not saying it may not make sense to move ahead with the pilot in parallel anyway, instead of blocking on waiting for auth solution work. Certainly in a normal industry software engineering scenario, parallel development is often better than blocking. I don't really have an opinion here. I do wonder what the budget allocation to login.gov looks like and if it's really being considered a necessary component of this product or not…).
[3] https://fedscoop.com/irs-to-adopt-login-gov-as-user-authenti...
IRS functions in general when conducted via paper or electronically via existing third parties also do not have to this level of identity assurance, so its kind of hard for me to believe that this is a hard minimum for the function. That justifies compromising privacy.
I'm all for privacy, but isn't privacy the opposite of what is needed on IRS.gov
If you're logged into the government website to file your taxes (or get a refund), there should be strong KYC controls in place asserting with extremely high levels of assurance - the individual logged in is who they claim to be.
How can you do that, anonymously (in a private way)?
--
EDIT: it seems like folks are saying this is primary due to using a 3rd party biometric service for login.
The IRS announced over 2-years ago, they are transitioning away from that.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-announces-transition-away-f...
You lose the basic right to access courts of law, and ID.me gains nearly unlimited capacity to harm you without repercussions.
2. Higher security with your tax information is a good thing, and we shouldn't avoid it because some other systems aren't capable of it or haven't integrated yet
If the auth flow for a government service goes through a foreign nation's ccTLD, that's a terrible, terrible precedent to set. Hopefully the US is on good terms with Montenegro, now and forever.
Having lived in the US I know things get complex when you start mixing in state taxes, but this is federal taxes right? Or wrong?
But the state/county/city and even other amalgamations of governments such as “metropolitan”, “transit”, or other special case governments have the ability to tax and their own jurisdiction for implementing how to collect it.
In my opinion, the complexity is at a point that it is a drag on national productivity. And on top of that, it enables lots of corruption where anyone can simply claim plausible deniability and pay a small fine well worth the low probability of being punished.
But the reason it's a mess is really really simple, lobbying. Tax prep companies have lobbied against a government solution for a long time now. Requiring everyone to spend $100, $200, or more per year is their subscription model and they like it that way.
Additionally some states (I am looking at you CA and NY) are absolutely rabid when it comes to coming after you for what they deem is their share. They will keep hounding you for years after you have moved away from the state. NY in particular enforces a withholding on additional income that's more than the maximum state tax rate, which effectively means that they get millions of dollars of interest-free loans from their taxpayers.
Plus community property laws make calculations even more messy.
1) The tax filing prep companies spend ridiculous amounts lobbying to ensure both that the tax system remains complex, and that they are the only way to deal with that complexity. Fortunately, the effectiveness of this has been gradually waning, leading to things like the new service the article describes.
2) Taxes in the US are genuinely quite complicated, for some good reasons, many bad ones (including the aforementioned lobbying), and even more neutral-but-complicated ones. Both major political parties have a tendency to add extra complexity to the tax code for their own ideological (and often purely political) reasons.
(But despite what many people like to propose in response to this, a flat tax wouldn't actually make things better, because progressive taxation is very important for mitigating the staggering inequality in our current system, and is not even the primary cause of the complexity. The primary cause is the difficulty of agreeing on exactly what constitutes "income", combined with many often-conflicting attempts to incentivize or disincentivize various things through the tax code.)
What really sets the US apart is 1, very few other countries manage to witness so much criminal energy getting put into legislation without simply collapsing.
Also, for-profit tax filers have aggressively lobbied to combat simplifying the process for decades.
Federalism:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism
> Here in the UK […]
Not federated:
As often with US oddities, the explanation boils down to "the US is big enough to make corruption really attractive and wealthy enough to be able to just ignore it".
It's fragmented because states here in US have their own laws, taxes, etc. So do local municipalities. Some cities collect some types of taxes, some others and so on. When it comes to stuff like taxes it may be easier to think of US as the EU.
Non-free is because of lobbying by various tax prep companies. It's a large business and here in US there is thing about not wanting the US government to compete with companies. So all these parasites popped up and now are saying "you can't compete with us, it will destroy us!". They always say something how anyone can get paper forms and mail stuff in, so all the electronic stuff is not needed and is just a convenience.
The US is a for profit country. Virtually everything is done with the intent of making profit, rather than to benefit citizens. This is different than other developed countries, and the reason the US is so rich.
Prisons exist to make money, not to rehab (or punish) inmates.
Higher education exists to make money, not to educate.
"Healthcare" exists to make money, not to heal people.
(The list goes on and on).
Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the government (money is speech, after all) to keep it this way.
So when it comes to filing taxes, the goal is to make money, not to provide a service to citizens that is convenient, easy, free, etc.
For-profit private prisons are the minority.
The only thing it could have done better is some kind of integration with the federal return, since as it is, you have to manually enter the W2 and 1040 data, but that's not much hardship. Potentially error-prone, though.
I know they're working to improve it for next year.
At its core, most people in the US can file taxes very simply and for free. A typical guy or gal who works a normal job and doesn't own complex investments, gives to charity reasonably but not extravagantly, etc. can file 1040EZ on-line or on paper, and the equivalent state version, for free in a few minutes. I've done this in the first few years of my career.
Layered on that is a bit of "complexity" that occurs when you engage in activity that the government seeks to reward or discourage. EG if you start a business, or partake in equity, make more complicated types of investments, hire people, donate large (relative to your income) - then your tax work gets proportionally more complex.
According to the IRS, almost 90% of filers take the standard deduction - so you can take that as a rough proxy that only 10% of filers deal with more complex situations.
The fact that state taxes further complicate the situation is a small price to pay for the diversity of lifestyle that the US offers (kind of like the complexity of Unix is worth it for the freedom over the simple interface of IOS for many people.) I live in NY which is a very high tax state and therefore has complexities that are worth navigating if you're in that more complicated 10%. We could have chosen to live in a lower tax state and face a very different tax code (but also very different lifestyle in other ways) but I am happy to take on the complexity for the freedom of the choice. And as I said, for most people the state tax is a very straight forward calc/file.
There are some HIDEOUS situations, I got a taste of that when I worked in Connecticut but lived in NYC (which has its own tax on top of NY state) but that's so rare and again, the edge cases are worth the main case.
Also, this is definitely the "MVP" version of this, and I would venture people with incomes totaling more than 250K have at least one other thing "not supported yet" and it makes for an easy filter.
This particular limit must be because once over $1,500 of interest, a Schedule B must be included with Form 1040, adding complexity they had to leave out of scope for now.
In general, the higher the AGI, the more complexity as various phase-outs start kicking in, requiring more forms or worksheets.
OP wasting our time, not helping ppl out
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/03/11/how-new-...
Negatives:
There is still an unavoidable 20 clicks to select your health insurance, there is no way to get some .csv output or even chart to compare plans. Everything is clicking clicking clicking.
Most people probably don't need to compare 200+ plans, but by not having the UX the insurance companies win.
Positives:
Everything is explained in understandable terms. I don't think its possible to mess things up.
I know billion dollar websites are prob a bad idea, but if we can create over a billion in savings/GDP growth, it should be a no-brainer to invest in stuff like this.
It's not as if the government doesn't have experience employing software developers. When you introduce a private company into the mix you get a perverse incentive to jack up the price as much as said private company can get away with. And since uncle sam has an infinitely deep pocket book, you can imagine how easy delays and budget ballooning can be.
I'd much rather the government waste $1 million on 10 lazy devs that are hard to fire (because, government) then have them spend $1 billion dollars on garbage rushed work that probably cost the implementing contractors $30k to actually produce (So much of the initial work was simply outsourced) and who knows how much to go back and fix.
Then I took an unexpected job and had to pay all of it back, but that's another story. :-)
IMO, I wish the government would have found and replicated (or contracted?) the service I had used before HealthCare.gov existed [0], and just bolted on the subsidies and other things they do. It is still functional today, and I've used it to get insurance since HealthCare.gov went live (specifically off-marketplace, but marketplace-compliant insurance), and it is my first stop anytime my HealthCare.gov insurance tells me the price is going up. I compare with eHealthInsurance, if eHealthInsurance is cheaper, I go with it instead.
* https://time.com/10228/obamas-trauma-team/
* https://www.pauladamsmith.com/blog/2023/10/the-10-year-anniv...
(And of course the related Hacker News threads.)
I'd hate to see how "not-alright" projects ended up.
I guess they had to be scrapped after wasting billions of dollars?
Doing your taxes is so easy here - takes me 30 mins max, all online and there is even a mobile app to set reminders and give you updates on any rebates or messages.
Dam...
And that is excluding state tax return, which most have to do too. A sizable group of American tax filers, maybe even most, cannot do their taxes in a few minutes.
Honestly I see America like a collection of large countries as groups of states almost. They are so different in so many ways.
But they make you waste time and money on “filing taxes” instead of just sending you some automated paperwork to approve or contest. Why?