Very much so, if you&#x27;re opposed to H&amp;R Block and Intuit&#x27;s stranglehold on tax filing.

unless you&#x27;re extremely rich[1] or you&#x27;re a Scientologist.1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...</a>
2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1997&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;us&#x2F;scientology-s-puzzling-journey-from-tax-rebel-to-tax-exempt.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1997&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;us&#x2F;scientology-s-puzzling...</a>

Many agencies are well-intentioned but wear congressional straight jackets. It&#x27;s not all Anjit Pai land.

The IRS is perhaps the one government agency that just does not fuck around. It&#x27;s always sensible to make sure that filing for taxes is as smooth as possible, at least for those who wish to abide by the rules. Follow the money.

This is good news, right? I&#x27;m kind of amazed that good news is happening and that the lobbying forces (eventually) got defeated in this case.

More accurate: Intuit told the federal government they would absolutely offer a free e-file tax service next to their pay service, and then they used several lies and manipulative techniques so that folks could not find it or even discover its existence.

Of course they did not use it. Tax software companies went out of their way to make sure this would be the case. After all their shenanigans, they might as well have put Free File option in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.Related: TurboTax Deliberately Hid Its Free File Page From Search Engines<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;turbotax-deliberately-hides-its-free-file-page-from-search-engines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;turbotax-deliberately-hid...</a>HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19758126" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19758126</a>

The idea was lots of people could file for free using a private online service. Not many people at all ended up using it, since it wasn&#x27;t in the company&#x27;s interest to have people not pay them.

While I agree there is a money problem, it&#x27;s not quite so simple as just &quot;paying people off&quot;. The money goes to their campaign funds which I&#x27;m sure get abused sometimes, but they also get called out and prosecuted for it. Additionally, money donated directly to the politician&#x27;s fund is limited. Money paid to a PAC is very much separated from the politician. They can&#x27;t so much as coordinate with the PAC.So it&#x27;s more about having money to get reelected than a simple personal bribe.

&gt; What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens?&quot;Lobbying&quot; and &quot;campaign contributions&quot;, aka paying congresspeople aka straight up corruption but you can&#x27;t use the C word in US politics.H&amp;R Block and Intuit have been greasing palms for years to keep the agreement in place and encode it in law: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;congress-is-about-to-ban-the-government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;congress-is-about-to-ban-...</a>&gt; Those efforts have been fueled by hefty lobbying spending and campaign contributions by the industry. Intuit and H&amp;R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&amp;R Block in the last two election cycles.

The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.We have systems in place to push back against the slow but incessant march (back) to plutocracy, but we don&#x27;t always use them in a timely fashion. After almost 250 years there&#x27;s been some... entropy.Except it&#x27;s not entropy, it&#x27;s order (which helps with the sales pitch). Just not the kind of order everybody needs.

You&#x27;ll hear differently, but: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?list=PLKePI0ZbnT69klhhdVXnd9-eFdx5iIh5W&amp;v=5tu32CCA_Ig&amp;feature=emb_title" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?list=PLKePI0ZbnT69klhhdVXnd9-e...</a> the US effectively functions as a plutocracy. Public opinion and interest just doesn&#x27;t matter.

We have a huge constituency that believes that government taxes are the very worst thing to happen in human history, so anything that makes filing taxes easier gets heavy push back in order to support their “taxes are so hard and burdensome” narrative.

In Sweden it&#x27;s a form on a website. Simple, fast, comes prefilled with the regular stuff and of course free.

I think a lot of people don&#x27;t really want to download a piece of software made by the government.

In Australia you can do it all online. Took me about 60 seconds this year and $0. Admittedly I had nothing to claim or declare beyond PAYE and the auto-filled dividends.

&gt; a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system has been scrappedWhat kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens?There&#x27;s a lot wrong with Brazil but here I just download the government-provided software (that runs on Windows&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;Mac) and fill my taxes in 10-15 minutes. Every year they release a new version that is easier to use than the previous one.

Yeah, they range from very accurate to downright dangerous (the one about late pregnancies stands out as terrible). It&#x27;s not a consistently good source.

I think they get it mostly right for tax filing. But I find them to usually be pretty blinded by ideology when it comes to some topics and severely lacking in objectivity.

+1 to Adam Ruins Everything! Other commenters might scare you away, but it brings attention to a lot of things that go unnoticed by the general public. Of course, always check sources yourself, but there are some genuinely interesting things brought to your attention that you might have never thought about.

Not sure how factual Adam Ruins Everything is, but his skit on taxes is pretty damning for tax software companies: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Fj4anUL-LvY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Fj4anUL-LvY</a>

Not only quality journalism, but a really solid look at what modern data-driven journalism should be like.

ProPublica reported that after they published this story, people eligible for free filing contacted TurboTax to get refunds. At first, they were able to get refunds of the fees that they paid but once word got out the customer service reps stonewalled them. So ProPublica invited readers to submit stories of their experiences with TurboTax customer service.Quality journalism.

This is great news.The US is making great strides towards joining the rest of the civilized world in the 20th century, finally.

&gt;Now companies are barred from hiding their free products from search engines such as Google, and a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system has been scrapped.&gt;Under the new rules, participating companies also have to standardize the naming convention of their Free File version as “IRS Free File program delivered by [product name].”Respect to ProPublica for their commitment to this issue. I first learned of the Free File deal from their reporting and enjoyed the HN comments on their articles.On the 20-year fight to stop Americans from doing their taxes for free: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21281411" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21281411</a>On hiding Free File from search engines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19758126" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19758126</a>On tax industry lobbying: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21393758" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21393758</a>

One idea I though of in the past: if you have a very high income, your income tax rate can approach 50% (state+federal). If you donate appreciated assets to a DAF, and break the effects down by basis+gains, the numbers look like- 50ish% back after deducting the given unappreciated basis,- Selling the short-term gains would cost you half the profit, so the charitable deduction gets you roughly 100% of the after-tax profit from the trade back in your pocket.(Plus the upside of sending money to charity.)The math doesn&#x27;t work out for long-term gains though, and obviously works best when the asset has appreciated strongly. Not sure about the legal treatment of partially-donated options spreads or other complex hedging tricks to manufacture these gains and offset them against a loss.Not tax advice etc, all just guesswork.

Sure - look into something like a depletion deduction using the percentage method rather than cost method.This creates a complexity nightmare - as you end up with basis changes for s corp pass-thru&#x27;s etc that are not tied to anything &quot;real&quot; - ie, no additional contribution of assets or payment of tax on accumulated gains. This all makes things very complicated from recordkeeping, reconciliation and auditing perspectives.

Do you have a reference for the deduction greater than basis loophole? I spent a few minutes looking for it on google and couldn’t find a reference. It does seem non-sensical on the face, but I’d like to read more.

&gt; ...put some pressure or at least summarize what parts of the tax code are the most complex so they can be simplified.Trump&#x27;s tax plan did simplify things for the majority of W-2 workers on salary that used to itemize because they owned a mortgage. Now, most of them can file using the standard deduction.I don&#x27;t have a mortgage but have sometimes itemized depending on moving and work expenses, various deductions, etc. Those are now gone, and my taxes are easier as I don&#x27;t even bother keeping receipts and saving charitable gifts throughout the year. I come out a head, too, since the standard deduction was almost doubled.

Even if the IRS has their own filing program, Intuit and H&amp;R Block wouldn’t go out of business; People who want to make sure their getting the best would still use them, along with people just distrustful of the government.

Isn&#x27;t that like being arrested and hoping the court will streamline your judgement, sentencing and incarceration.In other words: the government and the IRS should have checks and balances to income taxation, not (literal) carte blanche.

The IRS is always hiring software engineers [1]. You could go there and help them do it.[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jobs.irs.gov&#x2F;careers?field_usajobs_category_ref_tid%5B%5D=26" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jobs.irs.gov&#x2F;careers?field_usajobs_category_ref_...</a>

Fantastic news!Now let&#x27;s have the IRS start building out their free e-file program and IDEALLY put some pressure or at least summarize what parts of the tax code are the most complex so they can be simplified.A lot of the tax code complexity comes from congress messing with the logic of taxing folks on their income.And yes, simplifying the tax code would get rid of loopholes like deduction that can exceed the cost of the item placed into service (!) which make zero sense AND create tax vs gaap difference that have to be tracked over long periods of time.Another one to get rid of - phantom LIFO inventory unless the inventory is real.

I&#x27;m sure if it was a new turbotax.io startup it&#x27;d be popular.

Yeah, and doctors have always been at war with disease.  Good for them.

Assuming positive intentions, it&#x27;s unlikely that this is a snarky trivialization and more likely that it is acknowledging&#x2F;praising the persistence of the topic.

That certainly was not my meaning!Sometimes I add little twists into these things to make them less bone-crushingly tedious. Occasionally they cross a line. That&#x27;s how I find out where the line is.

&gt;HN has always been at war with TurboTax.&quot;Snarky trivialization of activism on this issue&quot; seems like the very kind of thing you&#x27;d normally discourage.

Or did dang just admit that HN redacts and changes old posts?&lt;dramatic music plays&gt;

I suggest you change &quot;HN has always been at war with TurboTax&quot; which unless I&#x27;m mistaken is a reference to 1984, in which history is rewritten retroactively[1]. To me this phrasing seems to imply that half of your links would be strong support of TurboTax.Since this whole subject includes a lot of doublethink (such as the fact that according to a video someone posted in this thread, the Free File Alliance is a front group to hide free filing), I think it would be better not to include phrasing that suggests doublethink. I could be misreading your comment, though.It seems that you might not have been aware of this reference? (But the other people responding to your comment are picking up on it.)[1]&gt;To hide such contradictions, history is rewritten to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces are accustomed to doublethink and accept it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nineteen_Eighty-Four" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nineteen_Eighty-Four</a>

These are individual posters. Many in the HN community support conservative policies because it benefits their business, not the individual.

HN has always been at war with TurboTax.Edit: looks like this line didn&#x27;t go over so well. To avoid distractions, I&#x27;m going to move these links to another post and mark this subthread off topic.Links moved to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21924055" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21924055</a>.

When I&#x27;ve guessed wrong, I&#x27;ve also been rewarded with unexpected large dollar figure checks in the mail. I did once make an error that cost me, and someone at the IRS was excellent in working together over the phone to get things square.

The &quot;penalties&quot; are just what you owed plus interest. I think the IRS will only charge an actual penalty if they think you were deliberately trying to avoid taxes.

Have you actually gotten a penalty? The IRS is just interested in gathering its taxes, it has no interest in punishing you. You have to mess up pretty hard and&#x2F;or deliberately to get the IRS on your case.

I&#x27;m not an American but I&#x27;ve been doing US taxes for 10+ years. There&#x27;s never been any guessing involved. What were you trying to guess?I&#x27;ve underpaid precisely once, when I didn&#x27;t know about qurterly reporting, and the so-called &quot;penalty&quot; was nothing unfair -- just the interest the money earned in my account instead of the IRS&#x27;s.

As an average Joe it seems like it can be pretty much impossible to figure out the rules in any number of corner cases.For example. I&#x27;m considering installing Solar Panels on my house. The entirety of the official IRS guidance (in the manuals) is this:&quot;Qualified solar electric property costs are costs for property that uses solar energy to generate electricity for use in your home located in the United States. No costs relating to a solar panel or other property installed as a roof (or portion thereof) will fail to qualify solely because the property constitutes a structural component of the structure on which it is installed. The home doesn&#x27;t have to be your main home.&quot;So of course the first question you ask is &quot;Ok, I have to fix my roof to install solar, and that appears to be covered. But does it only cover the part of the roof covered by the panels or does it cover the entire roof job? Does it cover the costs of only a basic roof job or a premium job? If it only covers the portion under the panels what is the procedure to prorate the costs?&quot;It wasn&#x27;t clear to me so I called the IRS help line, figuring that this is their job. They are the ones that ultimately decide one way or the other if my deduction is valid or felony tax fraud. The official guidance from the help line is &quot;We do not offer guidance on that issue.&quot; The money we are talking about isn&#x27;t trivial either. It can amount to thousands of dollars, guessing wrong could theoretically mean actual jail time or massive fines if someone at the IRS decides to make an example of you.Like WTF IRS. I&#x27;m trying to do right here and you&#x27;re literally making it impossible.

They&#x27;ll tell you, if you file a FOIA request.But then the documents they send are poorly documented, and very difficult to extract the required information from. The documents you want might also arrive after the annual filing deadline, or never.And what they calculate for what you owe never includes optional means of reducing tax owed. So in some cases, the number you calculate for yourself can be both lower than theirs and yet still correct.If you are in a business that includes a lot of cash transactions, or have to report additional income from sources that do not automatically report on a 1099 or w2, a FOIA request should be able to tell you what the IRS already knows about, and can prove that you earned. That will allow you to calculate how many patriotic brownie points you will earn for reporting those sources that aren&#x27;t already noted in your file. As with many things related to government administration, be warned that if you choose to play stupid games, you might win stupid prizes.

W-2 would be an end all if not for deductions which can change throughout the year and do not apply equally to all tax payers.the raise of the standard deduction; doubling; in effect made deductions simpler for many and transferred wealth back to those earning less

100% agree. To me they seem to be playing this perverse game of knowing how much you owe based on your W-2s then not telling you, waiting for you to file and guess how much you owe just right. If you guess wrong tough luck, you get penalties years later.

They could provide an API to the states that makes doing the state return (once federal is done) very easy.  And provide a link, etc.

The states can do their own application. If you&#x27;re issued a W2, the issuing party will usually send a copy to the IRS and your state&#x27;s tax office.

It would be nice but that&#x27;s on a per state basis and would need to be provided by either third parties like Intuit or state governments.

Virginia used to have an online system like that.  It was wonderful, so Intuit&#x2F;H&amp;R block lobbied the state legislature and had it killed.

CA built theirs ten years ago and should have twenty.

What about States? Should the IRS make a online form that will do your state tax too?

I assume you mean 1040EZ, as most people aren&#x27;t in the habit of issuing 1099&#x27;s. But you&#x27;re absolutely right; hopefully this news is a precursor to further undoing of the tax prep lobby&#x27;s efforts.

Are we reading the same article? Don&#x27;t invent partisan issues, the article makes it clear it&#x27;s not a &quot;Republican&quot; thing, it&#x27;s an Intuit thing.

Both parties have been very much in charge of this tax situation in America. Both parties have had many, MANY, majority rule situations over the past decades they could have done anything else about it. Nobody would have been stopping either of them at different points in time if they ever wanted to cash in on their party rhetoric.

&gt; Voting mattersGerrymandering and voter purging matters

&gt; It is largely due to Republicans that we don&#x27;t have such a program. Voting matters.Except I don&#x27;t get to vote on single issues like this. The US is a republic and I get to vote for leaders who supposedly represent the voting population to which I belong.Problem is, there is never a viable representative who even somewhat closely matches my views on all issues - especially since the parties have so much influence in elections.So it&#x27;s not very helpful to just imply that I should simply vote for someone else.Voter education is important for issues like this. If an idea becomes popular among a party&#x27;s voters, the party will start to support that idea, which in turn influences their candidates.

&gt; There is no reason the IRS shouldn&#x27;t have a simple, online fillable 1099EZ that makes the calculations and validations for you.It is largely due to Republicans that we don&#x27;t have such a program. Voting matters. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;the-stanford-professor-who-fought-the-tax-lobby&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...</a>

Is this what you&#x27;re talking about? It doesn&#x27;t have the intelligence for the W2 reference, but it is fillable. This how I&#x27;ve done taxes. Fill it out, print it off and mail it to the right address.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;pub&#x2F;irs-pdf&#x2F;f1040.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;pub&#x2F;irs-pdf&#x2F;f1040.pdf</a>

&gt; Just don&#x27;t outsource itBut how else would you charge millions for half broken and otherwise still shitty software and UIs? Sorry I&#x27;m super bitter because all the government sites are absolutely garbage and so many links for more information, explanations, other forms, etc, don&#x27;t even work and makes dealing with anything related to the government the most frustrating experience.

Accountants make errors too. Literally had the accountant forget to take the 5500x2 ($11000) ira contribution earned  income deduction on my parents taxes, until we double checked.

Add in 1099s, and it would probably cover 99% of the population.I&#x27;m happy to pay my taxes. I&#x27;m very much NOT happy to collect all of my information and carry it to my accountant. And then be afraid that I forgot something.In fact, if its the accountant&#x27;s lobbying against this, I&#x27;d be happy to pay $400 (what I pay for tax prep) into an accountant retirement fund or something, just don&#x27;t make me collect all the information that the IRS already has.

You mean 1040EZ? Because a 1099EZ doesn’t exist, I think.

The big problem here is that without good validation being used, the system could be subject to data compromise&#x2F;identity theft type attacks.

They pretty much have what you want through the free fillable online forms. Everything is digital, you simply enter the numbers from your documents and calculations are made for you. It does not do any SSN verification though.

&gt; I&#x27;m sure USDS could have it ready in less than a year.The federal government provides a lot of valuable services that private companies can’t or won’t do, but building something like that in a year isn’t one of them.

The IRS already does the calculations and knows what you owe. They have to so that when people file, they can verify that filing. The problem is that is requires citizens to even have to think about doing it and that is a major pain point Intuit et all are feeding off of.

They kind of do. I&#x27;ve been using &#x27;Free File Fillable Forms&#x27; linked from the irs.gov free file website[0] for the past 10 years to do my taxes. These forms don&#x27;t calculate _everything_ for you, but substantial portions are calculated.One caveat is that you can&#x27;t attach forms you&#x27;ve been sent from your bank or employer or whatever; you have to transcribe your W-2, any 1099s, 8949s, etc. This can be tedious. I don&#x27;t know if e.g. TurboTax somehow makes this better.I am sure that there are people for whom free file fillable forms is not enough, but IMO these people should probably be working with a CPA.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;filing&#x2F;free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;filing&#x2F;free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...</a>

There is no reason the IRS shouldn&#x27;t have a simple, online fillable 1099EZ that makes the calculations and validations for you. And while their at it, match the SSN to the w2 info that they have on file. This would take care of 80% of the population.Just don&#x27;t outsource it. I&#x27;m sure USDS could have it ready in less than a year.

The recent movement seems to be heavily precipitated by the discovery that Intuit was hiding its Free File pages (apparently first found by this Redditor [0]), with the stories sparking investigations at the federal and state level.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;np.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;technology&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bgj6oz&#x2F;turbotax_is_blocking_search_engines_from_indexing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;np.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;technology&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bgj6oz&#x2F;turbotax_...</a>

There&#x27;s a large backstory documented by (mostly) propublica, some of it is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;inside-turbotax-20-year-f...</a>Essentially:
 * IRS wanted to open tax software business to private companies.
 * Intuit has a variety of products with similar names and each has a free offering for a specific set of tax payers (e.g. income below some number). IRS + US Gov bought the story.
 * Intuit caught doing a variety of false advertising, misleading documentation, adversarial website editing, etc. They make it impossibly hard to find which is the free version of whatever you need.So this is a big first step away from the draconian Intuit monopoly. It would be interesting to know what precipitated this change.

I can only speak to myself.TaxHawk ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taxhawk.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taxhawk.com</a> ) is what I&#x27;ve been using for like almost a decade. Federal filing is free, state filing is only is $15. You&#x27;re free to use the free federal option without having to pay for the state option. No tiers, no dark patterns, no upsells. The UI is fantastic (and the UI is the entire point of using software, otherwise I&#x27;d just fill out my 1040 by hand like I did for many years). You can pull up the 1040 for any of your previous returns.I&#x27;ve mentioned it on HN before and one reply said they used it to file because of my recommendation and it was both better than TurboTax and saved them like $100.

Care to mention any of these better options?

This is great news!I really hope the IRS creates it&#x27;s own site, they would need to advertise it heavily though, way way too many people think eFile = TurboTax. There&#x27;s already vastly better options out there but very few people use them or know about them.Edit: I think the real killer feature would be to pre-populate the &quot;IRS e-file&quot; with the information the IRS already knows about you. That would get people paying attention.

They should implement something for the simple cases first. Like the standard deductions, no investment income, no business income scenario. That will probably handle 40% of the filers with one page of input.

We need a simpler tax code with fewer deductions before a simple tax form will make sense. Otherwise people will just get their simple tax form and pay TurboTax or someone else to squeeze every penny out of the deductions.

Basically how we do it in Norway, and probably lots of other countries that does it automagically.1st of April every year we get our pre-filled tax form (digitally), which we have to look over. If we find it to be alright, we don&#x27;t have to do anything (deadline the 30th of April) and the taxes have been filed.
All financial institutions sends data to our tax office, so it&#x27;s all there.

If the government can pre-fill my tax form, why should I even have to file taxes to begin with?  Just send me the pre-filled information each year and tell me I need to correct it if it&#x27;s wrong.  Otherwise, I shouldn&#x27;t have to do anything.

We need pre-filled tax forms.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;the-stanford-professor-who-fought-the-tax-lobby&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...</a>

Wow I would love to hear the inside story on this one.I think we&#x27;re all motivated by both survival and doing good, and I see an overall trend towards more doing good, as survival gets easier. Is this a case of that? Who drove it? What internal processes allowed public service to overcome corrupt lobbying pressure?

Great, sounds like TurboTax will still be able to compete if the IRS gives people tax filings precalculated, as TurboTax can say &quot;We can save you $XXX!&quot;

That&#x27;s such a nonsense argument, though. Having the IRS pre-fill basic forms for you would not obligate you to accept them. People could still compute their taxes themselves (or pay someone else to do it).

An actual argument I&#x27;ve heard from TurboTax shills is that tons of people underpay taxes now with the self report system, and having the government pre-fill forms for you to rubber stamp would effectively increase taxes on the working class.

Does the government automatically know what you spent in business expenses? Or what charitable donations you made? Or what property you may have lost during the year?

Even a lot of the more complex things could be automated.For example, the only slightly complex thing about my taxes are capital gains and interest. It would not be hard to have my brokerages&#x2F;banks coordinate with the IRS to autopay my taxes on that as well, just like my income taxes are auto paid.

It&#x27;s the same problem as with auto repair and medicine. It&#x27;s nice that we have competing providers, except we don&#x27;t have the expertise to judge their performance.

&gt; Americans on the whole don&#x27;t trust their government quite a lot. If the government just said &quot;you owe X in tax this year&quot;, nearly everyone&#x27;s knee jerk reaction would be that the government is overestimating and cheating them.That&#x27;s why most governments that do self-declaration services make it so you can review what tax rules they based amounts off of. It&#x27;s not like tax law is super easy elsewhere and without complications. I should never have to pay a fee just to declare taxes to reconcile things for the IRS. That is a basic governmental responsibility to give me that service for free.

&gt; 1040EZ, if you even know what that isI think you buried the lead here. American public schools, part of the American government charged with teaching children and funded by taxes, don&#x27;t teach kids how to pay taxes to the American government (maybe it sometimes happens, but it&#x27;s certainly not standard.) It&#x27;s ludicrous.

I think it comes down to who people trust.Americans on the whole don&#x27;t trust their government quite a lot. If the government just said &quot;you owe X in tax this year&quot;, nearly everyone&#x27;s knee jerk reaction would be that the government is overestimating and cheating them.On the other hand, you can pay a flat fee to let a third party fight the government on your behalf. That&#x27;s something that many Americans like the sound of.I think the real problem is that the tax system is complicated, and turbo tax does a good job of making it feel even more complicated than it is. You can fill out your own 1040EZ, if you even know what that is, but people have this sense that the tax system is full of loopholes and they want to exploit that.

Corporations are people, money is free speech, and our politicians are bought and paid for. They have every incentive not to make things work better if corporations are profiting from the broken status quo.

&gt; They know all of your income down to the centIf you have a W-2 job and all your investments are in a bank or brokerage, but they still don&#x27;t know your filing situation, dependents, other income, or deductions.Not that I&#x27;m justifying the current system. It&#x27;s just that the IRS only knows the big picture for most people. The rest is complicated.

If it was automatic, income would be missed. The government would be revealing what it doesn&#x27;t know about, and people would not supply the missing information.Under the current system, people aren&#x27;t sure what the government is aware of. Because we get in trouble for leaving things off, we are more likely to report everything.

Completely agree. Tax preparation is actually work the government should pre-fill. Australia does this. You can do your taxes online free and&#x2F;or get an accountant or an army of accountants if your affairs are that complex. Frankly, the government should do the initial assessment for you generated automatically from the many, many existing surveillance systems already in place. They are watching all financial transactions and you might as well assume they are.To even imply otherwise, and I&#x27;ve seen other comments say they shouldn&#x27;t &#x2F; don&#x27;t have this already in place... even when social media companies are slurping data every way they can... seems absurd.All that said, you should go through each item and correct their mistakes. Those matching systems aren&#x27;t perfect.

What they don&#x27;t know is my charitable deductions. My charitable deductions greatly reduce my taxes. If I went with their automagical tax filing process I&#x27;d lose out on those deductions.

The IRS will intentionally not give you any deductions and the cost basis for any capital gains will be $0 regardless of what you paid. The intent of the &quot;return&quot; they file for you is to get you to file a real once since their version will say you owe a lot of money.This is all explained in the letter they send you should you fail to file.

Everyone who replied to this with &quot;But what if...?&quot;: we are not talking to you.  To a first approximation, literally everybody else does not have your problem -- they have W2 income and their filing status is very probably the same as it was last year.  If you got married you filed a marriage license; if you had a kid your name was likely on the birth certificate.  The IRS could guess everybody&#x27;s taxes and be right at least 80% of the time, quite probably more like 95%.  It really would be an existential threat to H&amp;R Block, and good riddance.

Most countries have this &quot;automagical tax filing process&quot;. And what kills me the most is that America actually secretly has this same system too. Yet every year we have to go through the charade of filing taxes ourselves, when the governemnt already knows what we owe without us needing to round up paperwork, W2 forms, 1099 forms, and so forth. Yet they make us do it anyway.Don&#x27;t believe me? Simply don&#x27;t file your taxes next year. You will get a letter from the IRS sent to you that literally tells you what you owe. They know all of your income down to the cent, they know what you owe. This automagical system exists. Yet the only way to &quot;use&quot; it is to either not pay your taxes, or to pay them wrong.Yet every year, the IRS makes us go through the charade of putting our taxes together and all the work (and money) that it entails, when the whole time they know what we owe already and expects us to pay that unless we can prove them otherwise.

The thing of it is, the US government hasn’t run on tax revenue for over 20 years. Clinton was president last time the US had a balanced budget.

It&#x27;s by design. The GOP wants you to rub your face in the fact that the government runs on tax revenue, in the hope that you&#x27;ll develop an allergy to taxes.

&quot;it is the exact definition of why we pay taxes: for the government to provide services that are common to the country´s citizens&quot;I disagree with that definition. In a limited government, taxes are only for specific purposes, not any service that might be commonly (or even universally) needed&#x2F;wanted.You can agree or disagree about whether a limited government is good, or whether tax filing services should fall within those limits. But it&#x27;s certainly not the definition of taxes to be for any and all &quot;common services&quot;.

&gt; They&#x27;re used to encourage people to do or not do things:They might be better if this were the goal if people could actual interpret what they&#x27;re being encouraged to do!

Or people do understand how taxes are used and fundementaly disagree that taxes should be used for those purposesTaxes sole purpose should be to collect money to provide services, Nothing elsethey should not be used to socially engineer the society the way the government sees fit, that is not a free society or a functioning democracy&#x2F;republic at that point

a) The great majority of the population who perceives a salary not needing to file taxes.In the United States, and many other nations, the vast majority of taxes aren&#x27;t collected from payroll. If that was the case, things would be easy. But there are hundreds of other ways that taxes are collected, and they vary from person to person.More importantly, taxes aren&#x27;t exclusively about revenue generation. They&#x27;re used to encourage people to do or not do things: Save money, invest money, buy houses, have babies, buy cars, add solar panels, and thousands of other things.There are plenty of people who shout &quot;flat tax!&quot; whenever this topic comes up. But they&#x27;re mostly people who have only led simple lives where the IRS only touches them on their paycheck, or who don&#x27;t understand the full range of how taxes are used.

Citizens do demand it, but the US does not have a government that is in any way responsive to the demands of the general citizenry.

Not if you into account the price of health insurance...

how would that affect ease of tax generation? You would still need to have the proper congressional authorities vote on the matter, no? And sure, when I am in sweden I get taxed more because of VAT and such, but having a national standard where I can just declare my taxes for the year by pushing a single button for free through the government tax app is a benefit to outweigh any worry that you will get shafted by new taxes. In the US it just seems backwards and no excuse can justify this. Horrible system.

&gt; But a platform of “we’re going to make taxes painful so the government is afraid to raise taxes” gets a lot of votes.I&#x27;ve never heard anyone promoting the idea of keeping taxes complicated to avoid higher taxes.There&#x27;s nothing inherent in complicated taxes that stops the government from raising rates.Conservatives have long wanted the flat tax (file taxes on the back of a postcard) and lower taxes, so simpler lower taxes.I think the reason it became so complicated was because businesses lobbied for special rules and tax breaks that made things complicated in the first place. Businesses are now setup to take advantage of these loopholes (Amazon passing $0 in taxes, etc.).TurboTax was built as a result of complicated taxes and they lobby heavily against a simplified tax code.It&#x27;s not some cabal of citizens wanting to keep taxes complicated, it&#x27;s the industries that benefit from the current tax code that wants to keep it this way.

1. This doesn&#x27;t make any sense. The easiest way for the government to impose more taxes is to raise the percentages on the taxes they already collect. Private filing has nothing to do with it.2. Americans don&#x27;t have the lowest tax rates in the developed world. Mexico, Ireland, Chile, Turkey, and South Korea all have lower tax rates[1]. And in some cases the governments provide more services with less money because they&#x27;re not spending half their budget on occupying other countries.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taxpolicycenter.org&#x2F;briefing-book&#x2F;how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taxpolicycenter.org&#x2F;briefing-book&#x2F;how-do-us-taxe...</a>

&gt; Why wouldn&#x27;t citizens demand a public tax filing process?Because they don’t want to make it easy for the government to impose lots of taxes. Americans have the lowest taxes in the developed world. Not especially for rich people, but for everyone else: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;inline-images&#x2F;IB-big-government-high-taxes-middle-class-2-CHARTS-page1.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;inline-images&#x2F;I...</a>.This isn’t the work of some secretive cabal of billionaires. Rich people hire accountants to do their taxes anyway. The absence or existence of free tax filing doesn’t affect them at all. But a platform of “we’re going to make taxes painful so the government is afraid to raise taxes” gets a lot of votes. (In my view, is nothing bad about people being confronted once a year with the cost of the government to themselves. I just looked at my taxes for 2018 and concluded I’m taxed too little and would rather pay more for a government that offers more services. But people should be making that decision with eyes wide open.)

&quot;Why wouldn&#x27;t citizens demand a public tax filing process?&quot;Our government doesn&#x27;t respond to citizens, only corporations.

It&#x27;s mostly because so many special interests have gotten loopholes put in for their particular pet project, simplicity be damned. That&#x27;s just the way politics works in America.

It&#x27;s intentional.
Anti-tax republicans believe taxes should hurt. 
That&#x27;s the main reason it&#x27;s still not automatic.

This USA tax thing has always baffled me... it is the exact definition of why we pay taxes: for the government to provide services that are common to the country´s citizens.There´s nothing more common than tax collection: rich, middle class or poor. Why wouldn&#x27;t citizens demand a public tax filing process? Even in Mexico we have an automagical tax filing process that makes:a) The great majority of the population who perceives a salary not needing to file taxes.b) For the rest of the people, those who don&#x27;t do anything fancy, just click one button in a portal to do the filing, and everything is calculated by the tax authority.c) For the small percentage that do more complex things (I&#x27;ll say it is between 5% and 10% of the population) still can do it in the portal for free, or hire an accountant.

The Credit Karma blurb is here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.creditkarma.com&#x2F;tax" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.creditkarma.com&#x2F;tax</a>But -- the hard bits are state-specific support, and the supplementals K-1, 6250, et al. Anyone have first-hand experience with CreditKarma tax filing?There&#x27;s also TaxAct -- anyone tried it?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taxact.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taxact.com&#x2F;</a>

Yeah. TubroTax is around $40 to file. CreditKarma offers their own version which is free. The controversy is that the IRS bound its own hands in saying it couldn&#x27;t make its own filing software.I see no problems with private companies charging a Fee to provide a better service.

It&#x27;s quite a bit more expensive here in the U.S.  The issue is that many of the people they are steering away from the free filing (i.e. low income) would benefit from it the most: they have very little money already and their taxes are often a very straightforward tax table lookup.  So most would receive no value from a premium tax prep service.

Thanks so much for sharing. I wasn&#x27;t aware and will try it this time.

If you&#x27;re in Canada I can&#x27;t recommend SimpleTax [1] enough. Donation-based, so free or what you can pay. Was recently acquired by Wealthsimple.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpletax.ca&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpletax.ca&#x2F;</a>

So in Canada I pay about $15 CAD to file for my household. It takes 20 mins and is submitted digitally.Is this the equivalent of the issue in the USA or is it more expensive or something? I get that free filing is kind of obvious as a right, but the online service really does give me $15 of value so I&#x27;ve never thought to be upset by it.

TurboTax will be remembered as a classic example of extreme capitalism.

Freetaxusa was a very easy experience last year. Federal is free, state is $10.I haven&#x27;t read their privacy policy. Perhaps a profile of me was sold to dozens of companies - but I think they fit your criteria pretty well.

The vexing question: Why does there seem to be no space in the market for an honest, quality vendor? As in Fastmail, Costco, or the pre-Amazon Whole Foods?Are there so few customers willing to pay a truthful, higher sticker price that such a business cannot be sustained?

The mantra for Intuit, indeed for every for-profit company in the Valley, is to grow or die. Even a rockstar exec like Bill Campbell couldn&#x27;t escape that imperative. Intuit decided they had to keep growing their market to survive and they chose to go after the huge majority of taxpayers who really didn&#x27;t need their services. Once that decision was made, the logic of eliminating your competition followed as a matter of course, and the IRS itself was and still is their biggest potential competitor.

One of the sad things behind the story: Bill Campbell was Chairman of the board at Inuit while this was going on.His story is inspiring. I’m a capitalist at heart. But I’m not a monopolist or a crony—and hope not to become one.The best among us aren’t perfect. We should take this as a cautionary tale.

The article says the IRS will make its own free filing system.So how is there still a &quot;deal&quot; with tax software companies?Isn&#x27;t the whole deal that the IRS would not make such software?

&gt; I see this as a good example of how policy makers write policy with good intentions but without a fundamental understanding [...]I agree with your argument in the general case, but in this case that seems like what they would want: not to exclude the possibility of advertising or SEO for the other products, but to rule out doing reverse SEO (or just robots.txt to exclude it from search engines) on the Free File pages.

From the article: The addendum also expressly bars the companies from “engaging in any practice” that would exclude their Free File offerings “from an organic internet search.”Note the term &quot;organic&quot; which suggests the page &quot;naturally&quot; ranks in the first few hits. The agreement doesn&#x27;t seem to prevent Intuit and others from both buying ads to populate the top of search results and SEO&#x27;ing the crap out of it to make their stuff rank at the top &quot;organically.&quot;I see this as a good example of how policy makers write policy with good intentions but without a fundamental understanding of how gamed Internet search is in order to make it profitable.

Yeah there&#x27;s no reason that in 2019 we should even have to file. Everything should be automated for 85% of the population  and they just receive the bill. Only a small percent would actually need to file due to certain circumstances mostly by people that are using special business structures to minimize taxes.

Assuming you&#x27;re a traditional W2 worker, yes. But many people have other income sources such that the IRS doesn&#x27;t know how much you owe until you report it.

I just want to move to a system where the IRS sends me a bill, they know how much I owe them.

You can have the irs figure out how much you owe if your income is simple enough. This is similar to a lot of countries just taxing you at your income sources and not requiring you to file a return. However, the American system has a lot of deductions, exemptions, status modifiers, etc... so you often need to pay less than that, hence the need for everyone to do tax returns.

You don&#x27;t go to jail for filing a wrong number accidentally.  Only if you are intentionally lying&#x2F;hiding income.  I know people who didn&#x27;t pay tax FOR THEIR BUSINESS for several years and they settled the debt for much less than they owed and definitely did not go to jail.  This is just misinformation.

The thing people misunderstand with the government not being able to figure it out is because there&#x27;s a huge variety of complexity that is truly individual based. Did you make a contribution to a tax deductible IRA? Did you make a retroactive payment to that account in the following tax calendar year? There&#x27;s a ton of variables going on here, where the government doesn&#x27;t have this all-seeing system where everything gets accounted for across the vast array of income sources and employment statuses, dependents, filing status, and all the increments and decrements to those things through time. There&#x27;s no one central source where all this information is collated and waiting for someone to turn the crank and grind out a number from. Folks have to remember that nothing is implemented by default.The effort to reduce the complexity of the 1040 into 6 new schedules was a great way to factor out those with complicated situations such that the majority of tax payers are oblivious to those nuances. The crux of the matter is that legislators passed into law all these onerous mass of rules to turn various levers to entice and discourage certain things and bite those with progressive tax rates. It is precisely the existence of these rules as to why the government doesn&#x27;t know what tax valley you land in that huge parameter space. It will not presume to know your specific circumstances but assume that you being aware of your own money and circumstances are in the best position to know these things. At the least one thing I learned is that with tax laws if you have no idea what a thing is it probably in not applicable to you.Needless to say all of this would be much more simple if we just pay a flat tax on all income for all people. Nothing simpler than that.

I forgot to file one of several 1099 forms one year. I got a friendly call from an auditor. He explained what the discrepancy was, how I could appeal if I wanted, and what the payment options were. When I told him I&#x27;d take an IRS loan (i.e. a payment plan with interest), he advised me it would be cheaper for me to get a loan from family, friends or the bank.This was about as far from being threatened with prison I&#x27;ve ever been... And believe me I&#x27;ve come pretty close to being arrested (during exercise of my 1st &amp; 4th amendment rights on multiple occasions).

It&#x27;s pretty disgusting. Summed up in one of my favorite tweets, which went something like&gt; Gov: you owe us money. It&#x27;s called taxes&gt; Ctzn: oh ok, how much do I owe you?&gt; Gov: you have to figure it out&gt; Ctzn: oh well, then I owe you 0&gt; Gov: no, no, we know how much you owe, you have to figure it out, and by the way if you get it wrong you go to jail

&gt; decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government can&#x27;t do anything properly... which requires actively sabotaging anything that is being done properly.

See the sibling comments about Grover Norquist; this wasn&#x27;t incompetence: there&#x27;s actually a pretty strong political group in favor of this kind of thing.

From a refactoring perspective this actually made a lot of sense. One source of truth (1040) not three (1040, 1040A, 1040EZ). The complex parts of the 1040 have been refactored into separate functions named Schedule 1, Schedule2, ..., Schedule 6. The problem isn&#x27;t in the forms its in the laws which necessitate line items in the form to begin with.If you think about it the 1040 has taken on the more simple case as the default and the more complex cases have been shifted into schedules. That&#x27;s a good thing in my book.

The new 1040 is not much different than a 1040EZ. Just split over two sheets with a few extra cells for filling in results from optional forms.

Along the same lines, there used to be three different tax forms: the standard 1040 form, then two progressively more simplified forms for people who didn&#x27;t want to do itemized deductions.Well, the GOP takes power in 2016, and declares that they will &quot;reduce&quot; paperwork by removing... the two simplified forms! Now everyone has to fill out the complete 1040, which is also now strangely cramped and calls out to a dozen different worksheets, since the GOP also wanted to brag about how the form &quot;fits on a postcard&quot;, and it has to contort itself to use every square inch of paper. A miserable experience! I miss the 1040-EZ.

&gt; Their reasoning is if taxes are &quot;too easy&quot; then somehow Americans will blindly accept tax increases so they actually want to keep tax filing as difficult as possible.It&#x27;s simpler than that: They want taxes to be a pain in the ass so people hate them.

I am definitely not a Grover Norquist fan, but I do taxes for a living and a lot of people are VERY surprised at the amount that is withheld from their paychecks, but they never notice how much it is unless something happens and they are required to write a check.A couple illustrations:It&#x27;s very common for people to owe tax at a lower rate than they did the year before, but be upset because they have to write a check (and this is when the amount is trivial relative to wealth, so it&#x27;s not because of financial inconvenience). They don&#x27;t think in terms of tax rates, just in terms of do they owe or not. Owing is worse than not owing, regardless of total tax paid. And these are successful, otherwise financially savvy people.There are also people who try things they think are &quot;tricks&quot; to maximize their refund that are literally just paying more in. They think a giant refund is great, not realizing that it&#x27;s just money that they could have not sent to the IRS in the first place. Once again, owing bad, refunds good.This is all to say that I believe people are indeed, to some extent, blindly paying more taxes than they would agree to if they had to write a check every month for the amount due. For a lot of people, even people who don&#x27;t make very much, if they paid their half of their payroll taxes with a check every month, it would be pretty close to the biggest bill they have each month, and it goes basically unnoticed by most people.For the record, I don&#x27;t have any problem at all with current tax rates, but I know very well what they are, and I think if there was more transparency and education, I don&#x27;t believe it would lead to people wanting to raise tax rates, but that&#x27;s just my opinion.

There&#x27;s actually some wisdom in that sentiment I imagine since many personal finance sources suggest putting everything on autopay be it savings, utility bills, etc because you&#x27;re less likely to screw things up or deviate from the course. It&#x27;s human nature to let inertia set in and have one less thing to think about. In fact there&#x27;s an age old saying to this phenomena: _out of sight out of mind_.

It&#x27;s also anti-tax activist like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform who hate automatic filing and prefilled forms too. Their reasoning is if taxes are &quot;too easy&quot; then somehow Americans will blindly accept tax increases so they actually want to keep tax filing as difficult as possible.

Yeah, I don&#x27;t buy Norquist&#x27;s theory.  Making taxes easier doesn&#x27;t make them any more palatable.  Probably the opposite because people would have a better understanding of how much they&#x27;re paying.  Right now, a lot of people mindlessly fill in their needlessly complex forms, and pray they get a refund or don&#x27;t owe more than $20 or so (because that&#x27;s all they have in their wallet).

There&#x27;s also a political lobby (see: Grover Norquist) for the idea that filing taxes must never be made easier, because that will make them more palatable. Combined with their axiom that taxes are inherently bad, the result is an argument that tax filing should actually be as painful as possible. (The surprising strength of this lobby is one possible reason that the &quot;file your taxes on a postcard&quot; idea died a few years ago.)

For non-americans reading this I presume the parent poster means &quot;paying on top of the amount already withheld by the government&quot;, not total income taxation.

&gt; I decided to click through turbo tax who found me a lot of deductions related to student loans and things.We require any companies who collect interest payments on things like student loans to automatically report that to the IRS. We could then have the IRS fill that in for your tax return automatically.But special interests don&#x27;t want that to happen.

The majority (~70%) of tax-payers don&#x27;t have $12k&#x2F;$24k (single&#x2F;married) worth of things to deduct. Yet, ~90% of tax-payers use either a CPA (~50%) or tax software (30%) to file.Between overly complex rules, heavy advertising, and lobbying, the tax prep companies have us all convinced we&#x27;ll go jail if we don&#x27;t pay $40-$400+ for prep services.

But Turbo Tax is only useful because of how terrible the IRS is. It&#x27;s a whole cottage industry propped up by a complex tax code and poor filing system.In Norway, the government already has the data needed for your tax return: Withholdings, bank interest, capital gains, property income, loans, etc. The exceptions are things like foreign income, property, etc. that don&#x27;t get automatically reported.The tax return is automatically filled out for you, and if you don&#x27;t amend it by the deadline (which you do by logging into the government portal and editing the form, adding additional forms, etc., all digitally), it&#x27;s automatically submitted as-is.(And the forms are simple! When I look at my US tax returns, which are prepared by a CPA, I can barely make heads or tails of it. But I could easily do a Norwegian tax return from scratch myself without a CPA.)Most people don&#x27;t need to anything at all, even if they have a situation that in the US would require a bunch of number crunching.The above is also true about most European countries, by the way.

Back 10 years ago I had a complex tax situation and my gut feeling on reading the IRS booklets is that the tax preparer (I tried 2 of them) were taking the &quot;safe&quot; route to prepare it. I called up the IRS hotline and they directed to me an expert who agreed that I could file it in a better way that saved me $5000+. And they were even willing to go over the form line by line to help me fill it out. I&#x27;ve heard that since then the help lines have been gutted as part of a crusade to weaken the IRS in auditing rich people.

I have had a different experience. Last year I filled out my 1040EZ and was unhappy with the final amount owed. I decided to click through turbo tax who found me a lot of deductions related to student loans and things. I think I only paid like $35 and they saved me over a thousand I would have missed otherwise.And truthfully, it&#x27;s not a lot of money. I would gladly pay $30-40 just to not have to deal with the hassle of filling out a piece of paper and mailing it and all that. Now that the IRS seems to have a decent electronic system, I&#x27;ll give that a go this year and see if turbo tax is worth it anymore.Yeah, turbo tax is a pretty scummy company with all the lobbying and deception. I won&#x27;t argue that. But their product is genuinely good and provides utility to me, and I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the only one.

The Interstate Highway System, manned spaceflight, and National Parks come to mind.

Healthcare comes to mind since we&#x27;re discussing US politics.Roads might be the canonical example but I&#x27;m not familiar with any examples of privatized roads.

USPS is often faster and cheaper than private delivery companies, delivers to all addresses (unlike FedEx and UPS, which contract to USPS in rural areas), and would be profitable if not hamstrung by pension funding restrictions from Congress that are more stringent than private companies.

<pre><code> Prisons
 law enforcement
 firefighting
 warfare
 regulation of industry
 regulation of environment
 protection of civil rights
 equal opportunity employment
 employee benefits
 retirement
 healthcare
 research &amp; development
 protection of intellectual property
 passenger rail
 postal mail
 industry standards</code></pre>

How about fire fighting, defense, and the Internet?

&quot;What have the Romans ever done for us?&quot; [0][1]...&quot;All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?&quot;[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo</a>
[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epicure.demon.co.uk&#x2F;whattheromans.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epicure.demon.co.uk&#x2F;whattheromans.html</a>

Private schools have never succeeded except for tiny % of rich kidsAlso, big one, GPS

&gt; messaging that the government can&#x27;t do anything properlyI would love to hear about things the government has done exceptionally better than private companies. Please go on.

&gt; the GOP argument is: when government does things badly, they can go VERY VERY badly.Sounds conveniently like Regulatory capture: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulatory_capture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulatory_capture</a>.

Competition also plays a role here... not that there should be competition in filing simple tax returns... but competition often leads to better goods&#x2F;services. There is not much to incentivize a government run program to be better other than the current administration cracking the whip so they can get re-elected.

Sure, but that argument just doesn&#x27;t track. Both parties are similarly aggressive about big government programs and spending. The real variables are what they want to spend money on (health care or national security or schools or the Farm Bill or whatever) and where they think the money should come from (tax the beneficiaries of these programs or tax their children and grandchildren unto the tenth gener-- er, finance it with debt).Different stories get told during election season, of course. One of the most perplexing things about politics, though, is the way that everyone generally acknowledges that all politicians are shameless liars, but not during election season, when the person who&#x27;s hawking the tastiest-looking pile of horseshit is speaking God&#x27;s truth, and it&#x27;s just all the other politicians who are shameless liars.

&gt; Once a government program exists, it is very very hard to stop it and get the funds back ( from a political perspective ).Experience in the UK tells me otherwise. Our government has been doing little else for the last decade.&gt; It&#x27;s not so much saying that all government is bad, but it&#x27;s looking at worse case scenarios and balancing risk.It&#x27;s funny how worst case scenarios (like monopolies or oligopolies) aren&#x27;t considered for private companies. Doesn&#x27;t seem like a balanced risk analysis to me. Internet service would be a prime example of this in the US.Edit: oh, I forgot about healthcare. You guys are currently living pretty much a worst case scenario (bar there not actually being any healthcare provision).

And even worse if the government institutes some horrible system that benefits some key group it will never be removed.

I think are more steelman&#x27;ed version of the GOP argument is: when government does things badly, they can go VERY VERY badly.
It&#x27;s a risk viewpoint.  Whereas the progressive viewpoint letting government do more and more things.
The other risk is bloat.  Once a government program exists, it is very very hard to stop it and get the funds back ( from a political perspective ).  It&#x27;s unpopular to fire people.
When government does bad, it gets more money ( bigger ), to do worse things, or other pathological outcomes.  When industry does bad, it merely gets replaced by another company.
It&#x27;s not so much saying that all government is bad, but it&#x27;s looking at worse case scenarios and balancing risk.

The funniest and most ridiculous thing is when they cut taxes so they need to cut back on federal agencies so they cut the resources OF THE IRS so now the IRS can’t afford to audit rich people and their staff, only poor people. Perhaps it was intentional?(By the same people who complained the IRS was targeting them for audits.)

Based on empirical evidence the government is terrible at doing pretty much anything. I don’t remember the last time I had a logical, efficient, pleasant, and cheap interaction with a US government agency. I happen to have those with private companies all the time.

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “not giving a shit about the country”, as much as it is the simple fact that different reasonable people can have different opinions about collective ownership.Recall that both companies and countries are abstractions; they are not real. Some people (reasonably) think that it is logically impossible for a country to own something. Others (reasonably) think it is logically impossible for a corporation to own something. Reasonable people disagree on these things sometimes.

You can go further back to the founding of the nation for why this is. It didn&#x27;t start with the GOP. Things that would be nationalized in other countries like the railroads have always been private in america. Even when Alexander Hamilton and George Washington had taxpayers of New Jersey pay for the country&#x27;s first manufactories in Paterson, they were all private industries. Abraham Lincoln privatized all the railroads and telegraph lines after the civil war. (We had nationalized them for the war effort, so taxpayers paid for thousands of miles of railroad that was handed off to railroad companies.) You can even go further back, before the united states was even a thing and look at mercantilism, where merchants&#x2F;private industry ran the country, but it was understood that they were subservient to the nation, economic growth&#x27;s sole purpose was for national defense, and you took care of your citizenry because they were your troops. Thanks to the civil war, the 2nd industrial revolution, the gilded age, globalism, america has taken more and more turns towards &#x27;every man for themself&#x27; and not giving a shit about the country, so obviously well-intentioned privatization of public utilities makes less and less sense.

&gt;A substantial portion of the population believes it.I think it is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that these people were simply duped. The average person has tons of exposure to government incompetence in other arenas.

Yeah, I couldn&#x27;t come up with any either.

&gt; In the US, we&#x27;ve had decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government can&#x27;t do anything properly. A substantial portion of the population believes it.What are your top 5 well-run federal government programs?Slate likes these: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slate.com&#x2F;news-and-politics&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-top-dozen-federal-government-programs-in-history.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slate.com&#x2F;news-and-politics&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-top-dozen-fe...</a> Includes things like land grants, patents, and highways.Mother Jones likes transfer programs (for efficientcy measured by % of funds transferred, rather than effectiveness of achieving stated goals): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motherjones.com&#x2F;kevin-drum&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;chart-day-federal-programs-surprisingly-well-run&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motherjones.com&#x2F;kevin-drum&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;chart-day-fed...</a>

In the US, we&#x27;ve had decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government can&#x27;t do anything properly. A substantial portion of the population believes it.As noted in a sibling comment, the IRS could pre-fill forms that would be correct for the vast majority of tax payers (who take the standard deduction&#x2F;don&#x27;t itemize, have a single job, and no other edge cases). These people should not be paying TurboTax either way - the forms they need to submit are relatively straight-forward. People who do need a CPA would have to hire one regardless. TurboTax is literally just ripping off average tax payers.

I believe 2008 saw the start of mass enforcement of FBAR&#x2F;FACTA, stricter requirements on foreign banks to report American accounts, etc. Things got much worse with Trump and the Republican congress - with sections 962&#x2F;965 (transition tax&#x2F;GILTI tax), and 5471 complexity going through the roof. Anyone with a small business, or any sort of ownership stake, was hit hard by these terribly written laws and their onerous filing requirements. Being an American expat is a giant liability these days, which is sad, because I enjoy being American. Expats will unfortunately never have much of a voice, and I don&#x27;t expect things to ever improve, only get worse.

How did filing requirements change since 2008? I didn’t notice any differences. Also, you can use online tax preparations now as they seem to support 2555 and 1116 forms now, which wasn’t an option in 2008.

Now if only I could file my expat taxes via some public service. The filing requirement in the Obama&#x2F;Trump era for expats is literally insane, and I&#x27;d say even Kafkaesque in the truest sense. The way the government treats its expats w.r.t. tax is inhumane and makes me really dislike being an American.

75 days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21281411" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21281411</a>6 months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20119916" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20119916</a>8 months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19613725" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19613725</a>9 months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19392673" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19392673</a>2018: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17751383" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17751383</a>2017: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13853150" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13853150</a>2015: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9381437" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9381437</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9380232" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9380232</a>2014: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7595440" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7595440</a>2013: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5443203" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5443203</a>I&#x27;m sure there are others...The current submission passes the significant new information test, so we won&#x27;t count it as a dupe. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a>

Only if you don&#x27;t care who you hurt on the way to your goal.  We may have different definitions of sanity.

Ok, this makes me feel like maybe he had intention and thought behind this. I can honestly align with that thinking if he was doing it for this reason. It seems like the world only works with subterfuge, sadly. Is it impossible to be honest about what you want to do and move people in that direction, or is it only possible to motivate change by lying to people.I don&#x27;t love Grover Norquist, but I thought it was interesting&#x2F;open-minded of him to see Burning Man for himself. And, I align with the idea of reducing taxes. So, this makes me feel like he was not just a useful idiot if he actually did it for this reason.But, still, what a cost to bear. And, does the long term goal of reducing taxation by causing people to hate the IRS get him any closer to actually reducing taxes and&#x2F;or getting rid of the IRS? Obviously, that did not happen.

It is not insane, just not obvious what Grover’s aim is. He is anti-tax for a large number of reasons. By making paying tax painful for the majority of people he is trying to increase the percentage of the population that hate the IRS and taxes. All very sane if your aim is to lower taxes.

Look at it from the other side.How can you get the MAXIMUM tax revenue from your citizens?The easiest way is to do it slowly, and if possible hide it.#1 1913 implement an income tax#2 1942 implement payroll withholding (easier to take what you never saw)#3 make it convenient to just say &quot;ok&quot; to complicated taxes (free filing)I&#x27;m surprised they didn&#x27;t give you a &quot;tax break&quot; for letting the government do your taxes for you.

It&#x27;s so insane to me that Grover Norquist somehow lobbied against free tax filing provided by the IRS. It escapes all logic that he didn&#x27;t pay attention to what other countries do. It escapes all logic that he didn&#x27;t think for a moment about what the cost would be to citizens in (more or less direct payments to Intuit) and that&#x27;s not considering the incalculable cost of just gathering up all this documentation and put it into TurboTax.Billions of dollars in lost man power? Billions of dollars in wealth transfers from middle and lower class people? Probably more like Trillions.Norquist didn&#x27;t succeed in drowning the government in the bathtub. He DID successfully manage to keep the entire US citizenry drowning in billions of hours of wasted effort and billions of dollars of unnecessary expenditures. Good work, Norquist!

In the constant stream of bad news, it&#x27;s easy to miss a positive update like this.

This is the best news to Start the new year!!!

Only if working with individuals. If I, as a consultant, work with a company, that company requires a W9 from me, and they have to report what they paid me. And I also report what I paid myself in salary and pay federal taxes from every paycheck I make out to myself. So at least for me, they know everything there is to know.

Doesn&#x27;t work so well for the self-employed, alas.

Just fucking send me my filled out tax forms, like they do in other countries, you already know everything, and where you&#x27;re wrong, I&#x27;ll contest.

My pet peeve: I&#x27;ve used freefillableforms or whatever it is called for several years. It&#x27;s the only (free, online) option (I think) for someone in my income bracket. It&#x27;s not a bad system, but it is deliberately hobbled: it will do about 90% of the math for you, and about 90% of the &quot;put this computed value on line N of some other form&quot;.But ... not the remaining 10%. And there will be no errors if you fail to do them (other than your return being incorrect).I don&#x27;t know if it is better or worse to offer a deliberately crippled system.

Here is an idea from Russia: flat 13% income tax with deductible educational, medical, real estate and some other expenses.

I always use TurboTax online to complete my taxes and then copy all their info into freefillableforms.com to file for free.

I do get that angle of it, but that partisanship shouldn&#x27;t extend so far as to excuse lying to people.I guess what I meant by partisanship is, we could have a higher-level argument about whether or not the IRS should in theory have its own filing program, and that&#x27;s the way that Turbotax wants to phrase this -- that it&#x27;s just that Democrats want a government program. But Turbotax was blatantly involved in false advertising, lying to customers, rigging search results to get around their obligations.Intuit is putting out videos that say, &quot;Probublica just has an agenda&quot;, they want to make it a partisan issue. But it&#x27;s like a gun company selling guns that randomly explode in your hands, and trying to say that it&#x27;s an attack on the 2nd Amendment when they&#x27;re forced to issue a safety recall.When I describe the issue to people, I try not to let them have a partisan debate about taxes in general. When that debate starts to come up, I push back on the simpler issue, which is just that false advertising shouldn&#x27;t be OK.

Which &#x27;prominent people&#x27;? It sounds like an incredibly silly argument, one I had never heard of before.

&gt; is that if paying taxes gets too easy the average American will be less likely to push their representatives to lower taxes or to oppose new taxes that get proposed.This is problematic here (small EU country). People have no idea how much taxes they pay, and believe free (healthcare, schooling,...) is actually free, and that government can pay for anything. If average Joe (Janez here) would know how much taxes he pays for (eg.) health, and what kind of a shitty service he gets for that, he&#x27;d be protesting already,... but since it&#x27;s &#x27;free&#x27;, it&#x27;s ok, just so he doesn&#x27;t have to pay for it (out of pocket directly).

There&#x27;s a good Planet Money episode that explains how surprisingly it is still a partisan issue. The Republican argument, at least from certain prominent people in the party, is that if paying taxes gets too easy the average American will be less likely to push their representatives to lower taxes or to oppose new taxes that get proposed.

Excellent news, and congrats to Propublica for in no small part making it happen.This wasn&#x27;t just a shady operation -- Turbotax openly lied to customers about its free file program, it deliberately suppressed the program from search results, it lied to veterans. It was 100% acting in bad faith during negotiations with the IRS.Sometimes topics like this end up becoming kind of ideological or partisan; but in this case I feel like Intuit is just very objectively in the wrong, and that the IRS agreement for the free file program very objectively just was not working. I myself contacted Turbotax about their free edition and got personally lied to about the differences between the programs.[0]&gt; In this call, I was told that the form availability between the Free File and Free edition were the same, and I wouldn&#x27;t be eligible for either. To check this, I created a second account and added the same forms to the Free File program. I was never charged or told that I was ineligible. All of the forms were added successfully.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Piuv7KH37D4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Piuv7KH37D4</a>

The IRS already have all the information it needs to automatically file returns for many Americans... does that mean that some of us will just be able to confirm that our automatically generated return is correct?

IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax