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Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

Oregon made its own turbo tax competitor and it's great, and getting better every year. I was really looking forward to Direct File. (I used an accountant this year so I didn't get my chance.) Back to filing my own returns by hand next year.

Thank you, DOGE brainiacs who decided I had to keep doing it the inefficient way.

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USA doesn't need a TurboTax competitor (of which there are many - I worked for one which struggled in the US market). It needs reform. TurboTax should be unnecessary.

This is perfect being the enemy of good.

No it's not. We already have good alternatives to turbotax.

They are all private businesses which have to make money somehow. Refusing to host a good free public system because it would be more perfect to simplify the system is literally perfect being the enemy of good.

I misunderstood GP and read it as "not needing more commercial competition", instead of "not needing publicly funded (government service) competition". I agree with you.

Being able to file taxes is ideally a public good.

For private enterprise, the benefits are to encourage more complex tax laws, and to add MORE challenges that they can intermediate.

The incentives for governments are to get it done easily, cheaply and at scale, without differentiation between users.

Plus we know how this is done globally. We even know that tax filing is intentionally made as painful as possible to ensure American voters hate filing taxes even more.

I think you misunderstood my point, which was that abandoning direct file (which is good) because what the system really needs is reform, is allowing that desired reform (the "perfect") to be the enemy of that good solution.

These things are not mutually exclusive. I agree that simplifying the tax code would be a good thing. But I don't think it's any more likely in a world without Direct file than in a world with it.

That reform needs to be a lot more substantial.

What I read in the article is an account of corruption on a staggering scale, permeating the democratic foundations of the US.

I agree that TurboTax should be unnecessary. And if you want to make it unnecessary by simplifying the tax code, go for it. In the meantime, we should have a free and efficient direct-to-IRS method of paying taxes that doesn't rely on paying extra fees to a middleman.

Massachusetts also has a really good website for online filing (unfortunately state taxes only).

Just found, after seeing this thread, IL also has a great (seems that way) State tax filing website. Good thing - it can import your Federal Return information.

https://tax.illinois.gov/programs/mytax/il-1040.html

Cali too

What's the URL for California?

https://ftb.ca.gov

Easily searched, but I wanted to make an observation, why is it only the government who actually makes use of the hierarchical nature of DNS

> why is it only the government who actually makes use of the hierarchical nature of DNS

Search engine rankings.

And it's not even all of the government, plenty of counties and even their departments have random domains leaving you wondering if it's just an elaborate phishing attempt

I could do without it. At this point, the domains are for authenticity. I don't need hierarchies of Wikipedia domains for language and mobile view, for instance.

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