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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

I did my Canadian taxes for me and my spouse on a free filing site last night, in less than two hours, for $0. Everything was prefilled; practically the only thing I had to fix was to convert an imported investment statement from USD to CAD, and double check that everything was accurate.

I welcome the Americans to the delightful convenience of hassle-free taxes!

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It is bonkers that the IRS cannot prefill information for the majority of Taxpayers.

This last year when filing my taxes with a paid turbotax product some value was auto-filled and looked about right. After submission I was notified that the IRS rejected my form because the field was wrong. They did not correct the field or otherwise communicate what they believed the value should have been. Tracking down what number they actually wanted there was a hassle. So... they have on file what they expect your taxes to be, will reject your filing if you get it wrong... but won't just use their gathered values to do your taxes. Very frustrating.

Huh, I've never had my filing rejected but I've had the IRS send me letters a couple times. Once a year or two later, the other time (last year) a few weeks later or so before I got the refund: each time they told me exactly what they thought I'd missed.

Which still highlights the absurdity of making me re-enter the stuff they already know.

In most cases, you know the information (and may have to file) before they’ve processed it. Request your tax account transcript (what they know about your account) on April 15 and again on August 15. I can pretty well guarantee they’ll be different for the prior calendar year.

It might be stuff they’ll eventually know, but it’s not necessarily stuff they already know at the relevant time.

I don’t typically get 1099s until in February. I suspect wouldn’t get you pre-filled tax forms until late March.

Rejection is usually something the IRS can suss out immediately when you e-filing such as incorrect SSN for dependents. Correction letters are just form letters from automated audits, usually forgetting to input a 1099 misc from some bank account.

They'll send you a letter with the wrong value and the value they think is correct. And if you agree, you usually don't have to take any action (beyond maybe paying more).

They could. They just want you to confess the things that are harder for them to track. So they pretend they know more than they do.

Most people get money back from the IRS. If anything, making tax returns optional for people with just employment income would mean the IRS would keep more money.

Well, they can; that's the service the article is discussing?

> less than two hours

> hassle-free taxes

That's still a crazy demand on the time of someone paying for everything. My bank, my employer and my brokerage all report on me, the IRS should be able to just mail a check or a bill most of the time.

"Less than two hours" does sound like a lot. I'm also in Canada and spend about 10 minutes per year on my Canadian taxes.

Settling with the US government as an expat, on the other hand... I pay handomely for somebody to handle that.

Let's all absorb the HN moment when Canadian taxes are preferred to American taxes.

I have a bunch of USD-denominated stuff for which my brokerage doesn’t always issue complete tax slips for, so it required going over my statements to double check that everything was being accounted correctly.

My wife’s (uncomplicated) taxes basically took 15 minutes. You do always want to check to make sure that you’ve hit every tax deduction you can - for example, work-from-home deductions, donation deductions, even things like paying for news subscriptions gets a tax credit. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t get reported to the CRA, but which you can claim tax deductions on.

My C-corp taxes took about half an hour with turbo tax (just software development contracting).

It really puzzles me what is so complicated about filing taxes as someone who only has employment income.

Here in Norway I just have to look it over on our IRS' own site (so no selling of private data to god knows how many unknown third parties), add a couple of items they don't get automatically, like a private loan, and click save. Less than 10 minutes.

For years the big hassle was that housing loans only got put on one of us, but since we're both paying on the loan, the loan and deductions should be split as well. So that had to be manually calculated and corrected on each of our declarations.

However last year they fixed that. Now they get the split from the property ownership registry and distribute the loan and deductions according to that. For most people they pay similar to their ownership, typically 50/50, so no need to change that anymore.

Our IRS' has a quite good internal development team[1], rather than relying on contractors for everything. Their digital solutions has been several steps ahead most other agencies.

[1]: https://www.skatteetaten.no/nn/itjobb/ledige-stillinger/

So this free site was not run by the government of Canada. Are you concerned that you just gave all of your personal and financial data to a third party site? If you’re not paying anything they’re likely data mining your data and selling it. And we haven’t even talked about the security implications of trusting your data to these companies.

that’s how free file works in the us….

Due to a similar approach to privacy, I use GenuTax, which is a Windows program not a website, and does not send anything anywhere except to the tax authority. Not everyone cares about this aspect of privacy and security, but for those who do, there are options, both free (GenuTax) and paid (StudioTax, etc.).

It can be even better - in the UK unless you earn over a large amount, or know for a fact you have some special circumstances, you never have to do a thing.

My employer submitted all my T4 information to the CRA. My investment services submitted all my tax forms to the CRA.

UFile downloaded everything for me, autofilled my return, submitted it online back to the CRA and charged me $30 for the privilege. LMAO

That's why I use one of the free options. Both GenuTax and WealthsimpleTax are free to use and user-friendly, albeit in different ways. What extra thing does UFile do to justify its price?

At the time it was just the convenience of getting it done and moving on since I’ve been using it for over a decade. Next year I will probably just use WealthSimple, since I have fair amount of investments with WS anyway.

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