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Comment by mhp | Hacker News Reader

Open source US tax filing application. Basically TurboTax but free.

Why can't the government just send me a bill? If they're able to detect that I've slighted them, they sure as hell have a reasonable idea of what I owe.

Even better -- there should just be some kind of flat tax or other very simple approach. 100 years from now, people are going to scoff at how ridiculously over-complex our tax systems were, and how much of our GDP was spent on it. (But alas, this is not an idea a couple of motivated hackers can implement).

There was an article this week about how Intuit among others lobby to keep the tax code difficult.

The hardest part is putting out a MVP for the 1040, but allow it to be extensible. I believe that it will be very popular and forks will come in very fast.

At the least, it should allow import of data from other providers ( turbotax, etc ) so that data can be stored for as long as one likes.

A big advantage is to allow amended returns ( example I need to amend my 2009 return ) - One just pulls out the 2009 code base, put in the previous data from turbo tax and amend it.

I love this idea and I'd be interested in backing something like this. However I do worry about the liability of something that is constantly in flux like the US tax code

I agree that I love this idea. Maybe this can be one of the first products in open sourcing the government. People care greatly about taxes.

sites like freetaxusa.com do taxes very well, and are free in most cases and extremely cheap for the services it does charge for

from an end user perspective, if it's already free then being OS doesn't really add any value

Strongly disagree. Its not like TurboTax hasn't offered free options in the past. There are several reasons why an open source version is preferable.

Off the top of my head... Extendability, extra features and integrations, community updates, etc... __It depends on who the end user is__

If you're referring to the common user, probably not. But I don't believe thats what OP was suggesting. I'd be within the target audience who would want an open source version.

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