TurboTax Maker Intuit Funnels Millions to Lobby Against Easier Tax Returns
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Between this and intentional complexity of the tax system that hinders making the IRS more efficient and hides true tax rates that corporations and higher income people... I dunno, it's one of the blacker marks against America in this aspect of policy.
But I've without doubt decide I'll try as hard as possible to never, ever pay a company like that to file tax returns.
Paper takes an obscene amount of human hours to process in comparison. Online tax filings should at the very least be free, or even give you an extra tax deduction.
Source: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc152.html
The other thing to know is that e-filed tax returns are subject to an immediate sanity check (i.e., has this ssn already been used?, is this a valid zip code?), which doesn't exist for paper forms.
For me, personally, it was 7 business days this year, and I did the filing in all of an hour and a half, in an afternoon. And that includes the time spent trying out two other free apps to decide which ones I liked better.
How much would your answer change if you found out that there are only two people processing paper returns? 2^32 people? What if you found out that the types of returns that are mailed in are 10x more complicated/detailed than e-filed returns? Would it change if you knew there was an intentional processing delay on paper returns to increase e-file adoption?
One of the HUGE benefits of e-file for them is that there are sanity checks that happen almost immediately and if they fail the IRS completely rejects the return. This does two things:
1. ensures accepted returns look much closer to accurate
2. places the burden of rejection notification on the e-file transmitter. For example, if I transmit a tax return that the IRS rejects due to a re-used SSN, the onus is now on me to notify that filer that their SSN has likely been stolen and provide customer service on what they should do next. From the IRS perspective this is a huge win. For e-file transmitters and tax software providers this is an un-fun problem to deal with.
Would they really do that? It seems like that would give you two problems. Your SSN was stolen and now you can't file your taxes too.
The proper response would probably be to notify you, accept your documents (and the other documents presumably submitted by somebody else) tentatively, then do some investigation to determine which one is authentic.
I think the temporary phone shut down during the last debt ceiling government shutdown saga is now permanent.
Additionally, anything that makes things significantly easier probably requires a large up-front investment of man-hours and/or money. If you've ever dealt with government software projects, you can imagine how large of a project this must have been. That money has to be recouped somehow, and that won't happen by giving things away for free.
(Note: I'm not advocating for the sleazy behavior of lobbying against easier/cheap tax filing. I'm just making the case that there's business reasoning behind this, other than plain spite for the common folk.)
But surely the purpose of the tax system isn't just to collect taxes but also to create employment. Intentional complexity keeps programmers employed, I mean the sort who aren't "developers" but the sort who instead work in firms whose business model is their computer system such as banks and insurance companies.
Can you give me an example of this "intentional complexity?"
The income tax is complex for two reasons: 1) it's inherently difficult to define "income" in a practical way; 2) it's a tool used to further all sorts of economic and political policies.
The best class I took in law school was Federal Income Tax (I'm not a tax lawyer). It really showed me that things which seem unnecessarily complex, like depreciation schedules or the treatment of capital assets, exist to solve theoretical problems that can be analyzed mathematically.
Finally, it's not like accounting, pursuant to GAAP, is simple. And it seems obvious, to me anyway, that tax law must be at least as complex as accounting.
It is complex and it is intentional, this is how politicians reward those whom they appreciate and "punish" those who they do not appreciate. You can move from the non appreciated column through proper donations either directly or through advocacy groups or lobbying firms hiring the correct people. No, I am not being cynical, I wish I were
If you can do this in under 100 pages, you're doing really well.
The problem only gets complicated when you try to set policies using the tax code, to incent or discourage specific behaviors by making them more or less beneficial. A tax code that treated all sources of income as identical would get far simpler.
Say I'm a shopkeeper. I sell you a candy bar for $2.00, and receive a payment for that amount? Is that my income? No. The credit card processing fee, the cost of getting the candy bar delivered from the wholesaler, and the cost of the candy bar itself must be paid out of that $2.00, but do not represent changes to my own wealth. Deductions exist to go from "gross income" (the payments you receive), and "taxable income" (the amount that your wealth actually increases).
Now, say I'm a farmer. I buy a new tractor. I should be able to deduct the cost of that tractor from what I make selling my crops. But should I get to take the deduction for the full value immediately? No! Unlike a candy bar, which is gone as soon as the customer purchases it, the tractor is a capital asset (an asset that is used to produce income). When I buy a tractor, my wealth just changes form: I have less cash, but I have a tractor. Over time, the value of the tractor will decrease. Eventually, the full cost of the tractor should be deductible, but because the tractor will help produce income over many years, the deductions should be taken over many years. Otherwise, because of the time value of money, the taxes paid will understate my actual increase in wealth. This is what "depreciation" is all about. Because it's impractical to actually sample the change in value of the tractor each year, it happens according to fixed "depreciation schedules." And when you sell the tractor, the difference between its market value and its value according to the depreciation schedule generates income or loss that must be accounted for.
Now, say I own a house (or stock). It's value goes up every year, which represents an increase in my wealth. Should I pay the IRS a tax each year based on an estimated amount? That would be very inconvenient, so we have a whole system of "realization events" that define when continuous changes in wealth must be "sampled" and tax paid.
As I noted in my post, a lot of this complexity just falls out of accounting. You're right that the various measures to use the tax code to create incentives/disincentives also complicates the situation, on top of the inherent complexity. But it's not a given that the value of these incentives/disincentives is less than the burden of the additional complexity.
3) It's probably the top target law for being gamed/interpreted in a creative way. The more loopholes are patched the more patches there are to find loopholes in.
Tax law doesn't have to be so complex though. For example, you could just have a simple income-bracketed flat tax that is just at a lower rate than current taxes without any deductions possibly. Or possibly better yet, you could get rid of the income tax all together and just use a federal tax on sales, real estate and money transfers out of the country. Granted, this would give the government more direct control over how much money is being collected on a daily basis and could result in some people feeling like they need to have a party with tea, but assuming we do live in a democratic society, something like a sales tax would be more understandable and visible to everyone (as the rate would be printed on all of their receipts) and it would probably lead to more oversight of the tax by the taxpayers rather than everyone just being concerned with paying less than they are asked to each year without getting audited.
But the darker side is the complexity that exists to let people with enough income and the means to obfuscate their true tax rate. We may have a top marginal rate of 39.6%, but even people who have a huge income pay nothing close to that. And it's in high income people's interest to keep it that way. It's also in the interest of the companies we're talking about to keep the tax code complex both because they're run by high income people and if the general population has a sense that the tax code is super complex for themselves, they're more likely to use tax preparers even if they actually have very simple taxes or just mildly complex.
So, yes, with a huge economy the tax code is going to be very complex. That's just politics and the nature of the beast, but there's more complexity than there needs to be because of interests who drive it to complexity for their deadweight gain and strive to keep it complex.
Previously, their system used Flash or Silverlight, and had horrible ui around tabbing between fields and copy/pasting. (Especially on the cap gains form).
This year, they're running jquery, bootstrap, and a whole host of other html5 javascripty goodness. The usability went up for me.
Might as well at least mention this year's revelation, which is that they fund fake Grassroots campaigns against tax reform: http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-g...
And time management is notoriously hard. Not to mention this will need security up the bum.
How much would it cost just to read all the documentation and have the program certified, so it can do what it's supposed to do without writers getting sued?
I believe that if it were to actually do the e-filing, the people who ran the e-filing would have to submit to federal background and clearance checks at those people's expense and the servers it ran on would have to probably get FISMA High certification, provided it actually posted to the Efiling API.
That's just my speculation, fwiw. But I think that's true.
Filing taxes correctly while maximizing benefits is incredibly difficult. There are tons of ambiguous rules and loopholes and fuzzy boundaries and it changes all the time.
This is how I do my tax return in Sweden:
1. Receive equivalent of W2, but all returns are already pre-calculated since the Swedish IRS knows all it needs to know to be able to prepare my returns.
2. If I'm happy with my W2 and pre-calculated returns, I simply send a text message with a PIN code to submit my returns.
3. If I'm not happy with my pre-calculated returns, I make the necessary changes in a simple form and mail it back to the IRS. Most people never do this.
The incredibly heavy handed penalties for making a mistake can be quite frightening.
The seeming assumption that anyone who has a foreign bank account or property must be a tax dodger is insane.
After reading how it's done in Sweden: "Wow, our system is horrible."
I have a friend who I watched do her taxes recently. TurboTax probably asked her 100 questions over the course of the process, and for about half of those questions it contained at least one term that she had no idea what it meant.
You can say that we just shouldn't have deductions for these sorts of things, but that's a very programmer way to look at things (we need to get rid of these features because they would be hard to program). It's also not theoretically sound. An income tax is supposed to be a tax on net accretion to wealth. Expenditures that are non-consumptive should be excluded from taxable income because they don't represent an increase in wealth.
The less people have to think about and understand the staggering amount of taxes paid the better.
The same way that it already does know many of those things -- you know those student loan interest, mortgage interest, etc. statements you get at the end of the year that you rely on when filling out your tax forms, and that the tax forms refer to by form number? Yeah, not only are the people you paid required to send those to you, they are already required to file them with the IRS, as well.
There's some things that may not be amenable to this solution, but many taxpayers aren't effected by them and the workload if you reduced filing to addressing those would be minimal -- the IRS just sends you your precomputed "basic" return, with instructions on the handful of potential adjustments you might need to report and document and send back, and a deadline to do so if the basic return isn't all you need (along with the same deadline to pay any balance if the basic return is correct, or any remaining balance on the corrected return.)
Then, if nothing is filed before the deadline, the IRS sends out refunds (if applicable) or starts collection on any amounts due and not paid.
I think a system where the IRS says, "Here is what we know about your tax situation. We have calculated your taxes. If we owe you, and you agree, you don't have to do anything. If you agree, and you owe us, please pay us. If you do not agree, ammend this information and submit, with payment if necessary."
Forcing each American to start with a blank form seems wasteful, to me. It's a reproduction of work. I absolutely agree with your upthread comment about taxes being inherently complex, so please don't mistake my comment for an argument against that point. But I think that many Americans would be able to just accept what the IRS suggests, or at least use what the IRS says as a starting point. I think that the existence of the 1040A and 1040EZ forms support this point. (I tried finding numbers on how many people use those forms, but could not.)
If you do need to file anything, everything is now done digitally. No papers to mail. Every single tax form is provided in a very well-organized form system that also validates everything and support subforms ("This field requires that you submit a 27b-6. Click to enter it now."). It was a godsend when I was working as a freelancer and was doing my own accounting, because you could actually do your own accounting without going crazy.
* We have languages for defining business processes & workflows (e.g. BPMN/BPML);
* We have open-source workflow engines (such as Activiti in Java and others all over the language spectrum) that utilize BPMN and terms;
* We have open-source ways of maintaining changes to these things over time.
I know it would be a monumental task, but why not start an open-source org to tackle Tax visibility at Federal and State levels?
With enough civic-minded hackers and accountants (both of which I believe exist), we could begin the process of transcribing the tax code into an interchange format. Then as we begin to see the updates each year, we can track the changes via source control.
Does anybody know if efforts like this have been undertaken anywhere else? Otherwise, I may have found my passion project.
Furthermore, does anyone know anything about the process by which Intuit makes this happen? They clearly have workflows and inputs into them; they had to get there somehow. I'd be interested in any/all knowledge that could be opened up on this.
then again, it could depressingly turn out this is the only viable strategy to actually get the desired outcome of a simpler tax code.
The tax code is complicated because of all the other lobbying by every interest group in the U.S. For example, banks and realtors lobby super hard to keep the mortgage interest deduction.
Tax simplification is politically hard because any change creates winners and losers, and they all fight hard one way or the other. One man's loophole is another's reasonable exemption, deduction, or credit.
I'd recommend targeting the folks with relatively simple taxes (salaried/wage employees with limited and structured investments, nothing super fancy) who make more than the Free-File cutoff, and then work your way out from there. The "I own 4 businesses and have 17 different investments all structured differently with various business expenses that are different degrees of write-off-able" group isn't your target, and there's already FreeFile options for folks making poverty-level wages.
The toughest part here business-wise is probably the liability - TurboTax and HR Block and whoever have armies of lawyers and PR and insurance to handle cases like a user getting audited and blaming them or catching flak for clients over-paying. Those armies are there to protect Intuit, not the end user, but they're fairly important nonetheless.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tax-compactor-free-income...
The cost is mostly tax analysis, but those labor prices are much cheaper than developers (which we could do easily).
This also goes for consumption taxes - a 9% sales tax added at the register feels more intrusive than a 20% VAT included in the price tag, even though the VAT is much higher.
Why waste all this time from millions of people tens of times a day just to add 9% to a price?
For example, in Massachusetts we pay a 6.25% sales tax. Though across the border in New Hampshire, there isn't a sales tax at all.
Or do you pay different amounts of tax based on where you live, rather than where the business is?
Example: There is a walmart in both Cityville and its suburb Township. Cityville has a 9% sales tax but Township has a 7% tax rate. Both stores can advertise that they're selling a tv for $500, even though it costs $545 in Cityville but $535 in Township.
This helps prevent people from driving to the Township store to save money, because the advertised price is the same and most people won't think about the tax rate difference.
With itemized receipts, you have a line for the sales tax which serves as proof, if the tax were included in the price, you'd then have to have special indicators for which items are taxable on the receipt, and then calculate for each item on each receipt.
My gf who is a student was told by turbotax she owed over $300, after doing it on paper, the old fashioned way, the tax liability was 0. Why? The tuition deduction didn't apply on the EZ version of the form.
Ultimately turbo tax takes a conservative, strict and rigid approach to taxes, but as anyone knows this isn't the reality of doing taxes. For anyone with a moderately complex return, I think it's better to hire a tax professional, then at least you'll LEARN something for your money (which can be about the same amount!).
That said, I do agree with Intuit here. I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that the government is capable of making software to either provide a service similar to TurboTax or to correctly pre-calculate your taxes. They don't have the technical expertise so they'd have to contract it out. We saw how well that worked with healthcare.gov. They are not incented to "find every deduction" like a private tax preparer is, quite the opposite in fact. They also simply don't know enough in many cases. They don't know what my self employment income and expenses are, for example, until I tell them.
The only way that government can make taxes easier is to simplify the tax code itself.
As far as I've seen, no one has done a movement to ban tax paperers (either online or in person). If Intuit or H&R Block can provide a better website for $39 or whatever, they can. The question is if the agencies in question shouldn't develop their own replacements to paper tax forms.
Can you imagine it was 30 years ago and if, instead of getting tax forms mailed to you every year (or photocopies from the local library for a pittance 5 years ago), you had to walk down to the local H&R Block or other private company and pay them $40 to get the forms they wrote based on the tax code to file your taxes? It's pretty much the same thing.
Nothing the government does is free, and implemnenting online filing services would be something they (and by that I mean we) would pay billions of dollars for, and it would be poorly implemented, insecure, and it would crash constantly from overload during the month of April and especially on April 15th. I'd rather let Intuit do it for 1/1000 of the cost, and even at that, a cost that I would only pay voluntarily.
Yes and no. When the government wants to get quality software that solves real problems and saves taxpayer money, it manages to do so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replannin...
"We saw how well that worked with healthcare.gov."
Keep in mind that healthcare.gov was overburdened with moronic, ideologically driven requirements that were still being finalized a week before it was supposed to go live. It was being set up for failure from step one.
I think they may have adjusted things compared to last year; it imported my data from last year (a new feature), and I thought there used to be a "Basic" product between "Free" and "Deluxe".
There is, but it seems like they're not pushing it as hard this year: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/basic.jsp
"When all else fails, read the instructions."
Maybe its also an indictment of the tax code, but I don't see why I should give turbo tax a break.
It is what every web and mobile startup, it seems to me, deep down aims for: a monopoly, an unfair advantage. It is what, between the lines, you are taught at YC and what every VC expects of the "unicorn" portfolio companies that strike it rich. Fight to get to #1, wipe out the competition, reap the winnings, and, oh yeah, strike down any threats from, you know, up-and-coming competitors. So it goes.
It's business. It's ugly. If you don't like it, why are you doing a startup? If your startup is wildly successful and IPO's and turns into a giant, you don't think you will have to pay a lot of lobbyists to control the legislators?
It seems weak to beg the government to protect your precious company. It also smacks of hubris to believe your business is somehow so special that it needs to always be raking in cash despite 'progress.'
Disclaimer: I don't understand business.
No, I think I'd be sipping cocktails on the beach. (This is probably why I'm an employee rather than a founder)
I want a letter in the mail saying, "If you don't fill out any paperwork, this is the amount we will return to you/ bill you for. If you get a different number, send in your paperwork by 4/15."
Doing taxes is a ridiculous waste of most people's time.
I don't know anyone who genuinely enjoys using TurboTax. I'm surprised there isn't more legitimate competition in this space.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/turbotax-maker-li...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/turbotax-maker-li...
Each site has it's own culture (and each site has cultures within cultures). Like any mid-sized company, Intuit has a broad mix of personalities and talent levels. If I had to put them on the couch and nail down the core problem it's that they haven't really done anything groundbreaking lately. All the weird management issues you're reading about in those comments are because they're trying to hang on to what they have without moving the ball forward. All IMO of course.
I've been told by friends that there are less expensive programs out there, but the ~$80 that it cost me to do my taxes on TurboTax (Deluxe + State eFile fee) doesn't seem horrible (ie it isn't worth it to switch to something else to save an insignificant amount of money).
It does seem a bit backwards to have to pay to eFile in CA - I used to mail in my returns to get around this. But, at the end of the day, it's easier to just pay to eFile, and it only costs me maybe $20 more (plus I save a trip to the post office).
Overall, I've optimized to just using TurboTax, and I'm sure there is some laziness involved in that decision, but overall, unless something else is much much better, there isn't too much impetus to switch.
And in fairness, there's benefit to sticking with them year over year: that's a lot of data that gets transferred automatically. Most of the less expensive alternatives are horrid (I've used almost all of them). There's a good reason they're the king of their market. My point is simply that no one's giving them legitimate competition in the space and that surprises me. My evidence was only to point out the low-hanging fruit to go after (and while that low hanging fruit wouldn't be enough to sway a 10-year user, it's potentially enough to sway earlier users)
The verbosity of TurboTax seems like a feature to me, not a bug, in that it pre-answers many obvious questions.
I don't enjoy using TurboTax because I don't enjoy doing my taxes no matter how good the software. But I certainly don't blame TurboTax for that.
Maybe "enjoy" is a high bar? But surely there's room for improvement.
(Of course, I'd much rather have what other developed countries have and make TurboTax obsolete.)
I've never used their native application; maybe it has worse usability than the website?
I'd expect that the reason why Intuit refuses to change things (clarifying and streamlining questions, better navigation between forms, etc. etc.) is a fear of risking that which "already works." Unless something significant changes in the market, I don't see Intuit re-envisioning TurboTax anytime soon.
This type of tax-code-manipulation must certainly have been happening since the dawn of time. That, or it was written to confuse the public on purpose.
Finding, reading, learning and understanding the tax code is no mean feat for a layman that was told nothing of it in school (none of us Canadians were taught taxes in public school). And this is coming from a relatively smart person who willingly reads cryptography papers and learns new programming languages for fun.
How much more difficult does TurboTax propose that the IRS make filing? Should we get individually filed returns notarized by our deceased relatives as well?
It usually takes me about 12-24 straight hours of work, and this is for a simple sole-proprietorship that just tallies up income and deducts expenses.
I manage to get it done properly and on time every year, but realizing so many schortcuts along the way that "they" could be making for us yet fail to year after year... it's really quite infuriating.
That, and the fact that I have to do the work to figure out how much I owe them. :/
I am proud to have completed my taxes myself and will strongly urge everybody I know not to vote for TurboTax with their wallets and why.
One reason the complex system is tolerated is that the people it really hurts are very few. A friend of mine has never been audited and does nothing shady but spends roughly $30,000 on tax accountants every year preparing his returns because they are so complex. Fortunately for the rest of us, we just have to waste an inordinate amount of time with Turbo Tax.
The UI is pretty crap but on the whole the app works pretty well. It can 'pre-fill' quite a lot - stuff like salary that has been pre-taxed (called the PAYG system here), share dividends and franking information, bank interest details.
I wish company tax returns were similarly simple, but those have to go in either on paper or electronically through an accountant.
This is the stuff that a computer can do very well, but is tedious and error-prone for me.
Moreover, the last time I used TurboTax and I'm sure this is true with TaxCut still, it wants me to decide if I want to file jointly or separately. Why in the world should I have to make that decision or do the returns twice. The software should be intelligent enough to do the calculations both ways, and present the better answer, with the option to overrule it.
If the government was making this software you could see it being this bad, but these companies are supposedly competing to do it; but it is still awful. Arguably, this is because the tax system is awful, but most of this is just coasting.
I also would expect that the state software wouldn't be very good (at least for unpopulous states), but most of my issues are with the federal return.
$10MM seems like a pittance. That's like what...2 minutes of superbowl ads? Can you really buy legislation for this cheap?
Lots of conservative/anti-tax/right-wing/libertarian types see the difficulty of doing taxes as a feature, not a bug because it makes people hate taxes in general and more likely to vote for Republicans/fiscally conservative politicians.
Yes - because filing is so complex. If filing were simple, people probably wouldn't mind. So a complex tax filing system makes people lean conservative, and therefore vote conservative. So it's in the interests of conservative politicians for the tax filing process to be complex.
They're creating a lot of ill-will for 35% of their business.
[1] http://investors.intuit.com/files/Intuit%20FY13%20Form%2010-...
If anybody would like to use their skills to fix this issue with me (ex Intuit TurboTax engineer) please hop over to this Ask HN and send me a message (email on thread). Also check the website for a bit more context: http://taxcompactor.com
It's a pretty big project, but it's very doable by a small team from this community. Tax preparation is fundamentally a software engineering problem, which is convenient.
Need everything from testing to project management with myself floating between roles. Remote is welcome - I'm in California. We'll use Basecamp, Github, Jira, Skype? to work - productivity suggestions welcome of course. True collaboration and fair equity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599443
There are a few really great folks that have already reached out. Email me for details and we'll go from there. I'd love to hear from you.
Go to tax agency home page and login there.
Go to the form for normal taxes.
All values are prefilled. Check two boxes (if you want to register two very common deductions).
Save and back up one step.
Submit tax declaration by looking through all numbers again and clicking submit.
Turbotax: - Has a terrible UX/UI - It has to update itself with a 100mb payload every time you open it from Jan 1 - Apr 15 - Doesn't actually advise you how to plan for your taxes. It's reactive to what you did. - Uses shady pricing and lots of versions to get you to spend more instead of just being straightforward. - Works hard to make you dependent on them
When you hear about the rich only paying 10%, 15% or whatever low bracket; they did it by putting their money in the right places and sometimes investing or spending it at the right time.
Where is the startup that is basically my accountant without the cost? Can we really not programmatically understand tax code and financial strategy?
Isn't that what TurboTax does? I don't know about a bunch of different versions, but the online version works just fine for me, and is pretty snappy. Sure, they upsell you to file your state taxes, but the $30 or whatever is worth it to me to avoid the duplicate work.
Their lobbying is a separate issue, but I have no problems with the actual product.
It walks you through filling out your tax lodgement step-by-step and even calculates your expected return. It's not the nicest piece of software, but after having read this article, I am greatly appreciative that it exists at all.
1. If I incorporated a C-Corp on June 2013, and I told my lawyer I want my fiscal year to end by March 31, when is the deadline to file the tax? Is it still April 15? (I hope not, I haven't filed)
2. Is there any free tax filing solution for business? Considering my company has zero revenue (it doesn't even run, but that's another story).
FYI, I'm not a US citizen.
1. According to [1], you have to file by June 15.
2. You can do the taxes yourself if you're brave. My company didn't file a tax return for the year we operated and didn't have revenue. When I shut down the company this year, I paid for a tax accountant to help close up shop properly. He said we probably should have filed a $0 return. He went ahead and filed a late return along with our final return. It didn't really cost us anything extra, but based on my experience, you may want to find a tax accountant who's willing to give you some free advice--perhaps one who's doing good work for someone you know.
[1] http://www.taxact.com/reference/library_calendar_fytaxpayers...
in germany filling taxes took me about 5min.. that really because you need to go get a paper and give it to your company. Its otherwise more like 0 minutes since theres barely anything to do (which is.. logical, as its pointed out, they already have the data).
in the US, after hours and hours of reading and trying to do it myself, its still hell. using turbotax means its going to take 30min instead of a month; all that for "$30 a year" or close to that.
That's certainly fucked up.
I assume that what you meant by that is merely doing what is required for your employer to withhold taxes from your salary.
The (for most employees optional) Einkommensteuererklärung might be doable in 5 minutes if you know it like the back of your hand, have all necessary data immediately available and no special cases apply to you at all.
Otherwise, if you use the Germany equivalent of TurboTax, merely reading and answering "no" to all the questions that determine whether any special cases apply to you would take longer than 5 minutes.
That's a far cry from what the taxes are in the US
And the large number and high fees of tax advisors in Germany would seem to support my view rather more than yours.
you guys have it good in comparison, you just dont realize how bad it is elsewhere.
I guess it would be nice if there were a free alternative to TurboTax, but at the same time, I kind of don't really care, so I'm happy to let them get away with whatever they're doing. I know Lobbying isn't illegal in the U.S., and I don't think it's all that immoral either.
In Canada the BS is similar however I'll make sure to never buy the software from TurboTax.
I guess maybe Intuit is just "playing the game" but the fact that our government is being made purposefully obtuse and inefficient should make anyone mad.
If you think "The government is purposefully obtuse and inefficient all over the place", I agree. I'm just trying to fight the good fight one thing at a time.
If you accept that it should be there, then you can pile up a zillion other similar services, middle men, etc that have no reason to be but collect yearly money (and thats billions).
Just think about the amount of human time wasted if money doesn't talk to you. When you multiply it by more than your own wealthy self, it's scary.
No come on you guys, April first was two weeks ago.
I still think the lack of easy government-provided online tax systems is insane, but that's how the other side justifies itself.
The "free" tax return would serve who exactly? What if the government "forgot" to mention a few tax breaks? Maybe the government should offer free tax returns for the plain and simple ones or for those with very low incomes. Paying $50 to $100 to do your taxes when you pay, say $10K in taxes, isn't much.
US axes are very low compared to Sweden and most EU countries.
No come on you guys, April first was two weeks ago.
It's also worth noting that the article is not talking about the actual complexity of the tax code itself. As far as I know, Intuit is lobbying on the subject of tax preparation technologies, not lobbying against tax simplification in general. (As some comments seemed to imply.)
The government already has the information to do most people's taxes for them. They don't need end-user web based tax prep software.
California is still offering ReadyReturn but it only covers the simplest cases. Likewise a federal return-free system would only cover a fairly small portion of taxpayers unless there were significant changes to tax law and/or IRS operations.
The real root of the problem is of course our broken political process.