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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

I like TurboTax. It just works, year after year. The fee is worth the peace of mind that I wouldn’t have by letting a government program lose my submission accidentally.

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I switched from TurboTax to FreeTaxUSA this year and it was almost exactly the same (in some ways easier). The amount owed was identical. The IRS doesn't lose submissions and provides a very clear system for tracking the status of eFiled taxes.

"That's the secret"

Those tax prep companies like TurboTax spent a lot of marketing dollars on making it seem they are finding you secret deductions and other crap. There isn't. It's all pretty straight forward.

Some of it comes from the pre-online era where tax accountants did and still do commit fraud by falsely claiming deductions for individuals. And you eventually hear of a hundred million dollar IRS fraud arrest.

I did the same thing, but from TaxAct instead of from TurboTax. The big tax prep software companies have squeezed their last dollar out of me. I'm done with them.

For reference, here's what I paid for tax preparation over the years:

2010: $9.99

...

2017: $48.00

2018: $66.95

2019: $97.90

2020: $67.91

2021: $93.67

2022: $124.90

2023: $133.95 (at this point I said "Fuck this")

So from $48 to $134 (or +280%) over the course of 6 years and +1344%(!!!) over the course of 13 years. All to simply pre-fill some standard IRS forms and submit them for me. It doesn't make sense to pay for this.

TurboTax just submits your data to the IRS. There's no change in the potential for the IRS to lose your data.

Gotta be honest, the "government is unreliable" crowd are not people I think of as honest. Government works fine, and for less money, if you actually try to make it work.

They’re not. They take all the funding away, push for our tax money to go toward things that don’t help the overwhelming majority of citizens (and probably a similar number actively disagree with where taxes go, like bombing other countries), and then they create businesses to extract money from private individuals. They use it to create completely absurd and wasteful private industries for the soul purpose of making money. They aren’t solving problems, they’re exploiting problems they’ve created by undermining the government.

How unquantifiable.

The standard that government organizations run off of is "use up all the budget, or else your budget gets cut the next year". Are you going to lie and say that is not the case?

Be honest.

> use up all the budget, or else your budget gets cut the next year

I have worked at multiple large and successful tech companies, and groups in those companies operated under the same principles.

Currently Turbotax is electronically submitting the government and you're okay with that, but you think that if you electronically submitted to the government in a system specifically designed by the government for the government that it would be a higher likelihood of the submission getting lost? The system with using the government is only removing one of the independent pieces here. How can you not conclude that the likelihood of problems wouldn't decrease?

I hated giving my money to Intuit so they could lobby for our complicated and unnecessary tax filing system.

I qualified for using the IRS free option this year and I'm so happy and I hope I never go back.

I assume TT is doing the same efile process that any other program does. My CPA even uses efile.

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