afaik yes, its what the for-profit companies like turbotax use as well. While its "modernized" in comparison to older systems it was originally created in 2004 (and you can tell because it has XML galore).
I just looked up https://directfile.irs.gov/. While it says closed, the testimonies on this site speak to how easy the filing was. Almost feels like it is intentional to keep rest of the site as is with a small banner on top announcing the closure, as a way to hint at this stupid move by the administration.
When you look at the donations politicians receive and the ROI they produce you quickly realize that they are way too cheap. Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
> Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
Except those corrupt politicians want lobbying to be profitable, so they can profit from it too. And if they ask for too much, they’ll just bribe the next guy or may even try to put their own in office. Can’t have that!
I'm surprised that politicians haven't established burdensome and expensive professional compliance and licensure requirements for their own trade to restrict upstart competition. Every other trade pays them to implement the same so it's not like they're not familiar with how to do it.
The individual bribes aren't the whole picture. The bribes are statements of loyalty. If I am reliably donating to your campaign every couple of years, then I am probably not donating to your opponents' campaigns.
And loyalty seems particularly important with the current administration, because they have an agenda full of things that are illegal or otherwise unsavory and un-American, so they need a nation run by loyal henchmen if the agenda is to succeed.
Lobbyists aren't the problem. They are doing what they are paid to do.
If you donate to a large charity, there is a good chance some of that $ goes to lobbying, as it should. (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)
If you work at a large company, 100% chance it lobbies, for good reason. Large employers lobby for better mass transit (because parking garages are expensive), more housing (because it is cheaper to lobby than pay employees more so they can afford $$$$ houses), or friendlier business laws (no one likes paying more taxes).
Lobbying is everything from "help us use orphans as a source of cheap protein!" To "keep the national parks funded".
"Keep the national parks funded" sounds like a good use case for lobbying, until you realize it's only needed as a counterweight because lobbying diminishes the relative role of the democratic process itself in meeting needs.
We recently made a fairly large donation to a children’s hospital to support a specific research program. They directly told us that the highest-impact way to deploy the funds would be to pay lobbyists to try to get earmarks injected into federal bills. Like, >10x expected ROI.
Not all lobbying is straight-up mustache twirling. But it definitely left a bad taste in our mouths.
That kind of is mustache twirling. Instead of spending your donation on research, they would use it to divert money from some other cause to their own. Your donation may harm a different - and possibly more deserving - research program.
This would all be fine if the lobbying $ was only being paid to the lobbyists. The moment the $ flows to the politicians, it is what other countries would call a bribe.
This is a misleading characterization of the issue here. Let me pull up another very relevant analogy here. Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official? You are a responsible adult, after all. Bribes are needed for everything from housing permits to your kids' food assistance. How is it bad when it gets good things done?
Is this how you reason about corruption in government service? Unlike your argument about about lobbying, the problem is very conspicuous here - you're supposed to get those services without paying anything beyond the nominal service charges. They're your rights in an society where you already pay taxes to fund them. The government officials are already being paid with your tax money to do this job. What's even worse? If such loose and open-ended bargaining is permitted for basic essential services, then the only ones who will get those services will be the ones with money, not the ones who need it. Your housing permits and your kids' food assistance will become increasingly costlier and harder goals to achieve. That's why bribes are illegal.
If you look at this scenario carefully, it isn't much of an analogy. It's exactly the same situation, but with different players! When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests - because the public are the primary stakeholders in a democracy, and it's the utilization of their tax payments that these politicians are debating. Those politicians are supposed to be the people's 'representatives' who are elected and paid to listen to their constituents and lobby on their behalf. The public shouldn't have to 'lobby' with them too, especially for basic essentials like nutrition, national parks or tax filing!
What you call 'lobbying' in the US is known as 'political corruption' in most of the rest of the world. It's just a weasel word used to underplay the seriousness of such corruption. And as I pointed out earlier in my analogy, the rich ones outcompete the majority public here too. It's abundantly clear that even town councils favor big corpos even in the face of loud vocal opposition from the majority of their constituents. It's clear how much special treatment these professional grifters called 'lobbyists' get when they walk into the town hall just minutes before the discussion of a topic, while the town's people have to wait there for one and a half days without proper food, water or sleep in order to speak a few words in opposition. This is what happens when you legitimize corruption with cute terms like 'lobbying'.
> Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official?
We formalized it! It is called an application fee, and it is set high enough so they the government employee doesn't need to take bribes outside of their salary.
Other countries set application fees so low that government employees barely earn enough money to eat, so they take bribes.
NYC solves a huge part of their police corruption problem by just paying officers more.
> When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests
I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!
The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
> I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!
I touched this point in my previous reply. But let me reiterate it again. Those politicians are supposed to just talk to their constituents and represent their interests. That's their job description. If the voters who sent them to the legislatures have to lobby them afterwards, what is the purpose of these politicians anyway? Is their job to con the public into choosing them, so that they can leech the same public? Evidently so, and that's the fundamental problem with democracy in US these days.
> The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
While EFF and ACLU do a commendable job, their existence don't justify lobbying. It's the other way around. Lobbying make them a necessity to regain some semblance of balance and fairness. They wouldn't be needed if the politicians were doing their job in the first place.
Or voters should take some civic responsibility and stop voting for corrupt politicians. Americans seem to be either unable to make their own decisions without paid advertising to direct them or they're afraid of "wasting" their vote on candidates that didn't spend enough on advertising.
Or “politics” are too much of their identity and they always vote for “their guy” regardless of the merits. Education does not matter when the vote has nothing to so with rationality and is only rooting for a team.
Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.
Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do. They're like fucking Eagles fans. They have this weird "team loyalty" that I just don't get.
> Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do.
This part makes enough sense.
> They're like fucking Eagles fans.
Now you've gone and implied 95% of sports fans aren't that way?? I don't understand your argument any more.
this is just a more abstract "bootstraps" argument. schooling in this country has been systematically attacked and deconstructed, and as the burger reich's leader says, "i love the poorly educated". this is not "dum timmy votes for dum thing" it's "countless $ and effort and man hours have been devoted to making the american populace dumber"
Why? look at any polling breakdown for how the educated vote vs the uneducated.
Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
What I said is factually true, neither mocking, judging nor telling you off. If you believe saying something like, don't look at the sun or you'll hurt your eyes (and then you look at the sun and say that your eyes are burnt) is telling you off, then we have different definitions of the phrase.
This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.
It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)
> it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote
that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer).
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Restating my disclaimer of "It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems"...
> ranked voting methods ... can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
Can you clarify whether you're referring to some ranked methods (eg IRV), or all ranked methods (ie including ranked pairs) ?
> that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score) ? A quick skim of that VSE page has it talking about "utility", which I would imagine is a scalar per candidate representing "happiness" ?
The problem I have with Approval is that coming from our two-terrible-party system - do I Approve my latent terrible party or not? That choice seems purely down to strategy, compared to being able to rank them to say I completely prefer the new party/candidate over my latent terrible party, and my latent terrible party over the other latent terrible party. The dynamic also seems exacerbated knowing there will be a lot of people who continue to vote exactly as they did under plurality.
it's mathematically proven that all ranked methods can fail IIA. see arrow's theorem.
> Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score)
1. i did not define performance in a way that is congruent with approval/score. scores are not utilities. they are the modification of utilities via ignorance, normalization, and strategy.
2. that the correct social welfare function is just the sum of all voter utilities (the definition of "performance") is mathematically proven.
https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
approval voting obliterates IRV ("RCV") with any mixture of strategic or honest voters, so i'm not sure why you're bringing up strategy.
https://www.rangevoting.org/StratHonMix
i had a chance to visit arrow at his palo alto condo circa 2014. his theorem is nice and all, but it only makes sense to apply it to social welfare functions, not voting methods. yes, the correct social welfare function is just the utilitarian sum of all voters' individual utilities.
once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.
> I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing.
>
> It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
> It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!
However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
There are limits to corporate donations and lobbying, which is why the price of lobbying seems so low (see the linked blog post in the comments here!)
SuperPACs get around that, but there is a chance a large company like Inuit isn't agile enough to defend against a well organized political attack.
Ultimately career politicians care about being elected. Even corrupt ones need to stay in office and they'll happily sacrifice one small donor to keep the gravy train coming with all their other connections.
If an independently funded lobbying group walks into DC and tells a senator they just raised 30M dollars and 80k residents in their state donated as part of that, I bet people will start to listen.
The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation.
Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.)
The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant.
There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.
> The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation.
The fact that TurboTax is cheaper than a local CPA does not change the fact that Intuit actively lobbies to prevent free tax filing.
In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or “your taxes are complex, please work with a tax specialist”. Also in a sane world this would be free and the government would be incentivized to simplify the tax code so that as many people as possible were in one of the first buckets. In our world the government is aggressively lobbied for complex tax codes and prevention of free tax filing.
> A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
Define “regular”. Per TurboTax, only 37% of people qualify for free filing.
I have never tried to go through the TurboTax free file route but based on my experience with the paid service, I imagine they aggressively upsell free filers with the exact same scare tactics you associate with CPAs.
I suspect GP is simply misinformed about the reality of the situation. They also explicitly state “you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party”.
They are missing the context that only a fraction of filers are eligible to use free filing and that TurboTax paid something like 140 million to settle claims that they are misleading filers. That suit is why they now admit only 37% of people are even eligible to file for free.
Free Fillable Forms is free for everyone. It is technically a third party. It’s very simple if you have the average tax filing situation.
There are also other services that provide free efiling regardless of income, it’s not just TurboTax.
At the end of the day, you can always do the paperwork if you really don’t want anyone seeing your taxes and mail it. Could it be better? Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.
> In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or
As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
An additional factor is state taxes really need to be packaged together with the actual solution.
> Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.
Just passionate enough to say that everyone unhappy with Intuit lobbying against free tax filing and simplified tax codes doesn’t understand?
> As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
This is misleading. The IRS does have this because for most people it does not change year to year. It would also be trivial for them to provide a way to input this data if/when it does change.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is. You say you don’t care about this but seem very invested in defending Intuit’s lobbying.
You also seem to be simultaneously claiming that the US tax system is too complex for the government to feasibly automate and that filing taxes is trivial.
Either you hold contradictory viewpoints here or you have some undisclosed interest in this area.
I'd like to defend the notion of using a CPA a bit. I started using one when I became a partner in a passthrough LLC. I was now self-employed and was responsible for paying taxes on the businesses income as well as my own personal income. Filing that first year was incredibly stressful and time consuming, and I came to the conclusion that sometimes the right thing to do is to hire someone who knows what theyre doing.
Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial.
I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.
I think GP’s point was that the vast majority of individuals have taxes that look like “one W2, maybe a couple 1099s, and standard deduction.” Many of these people have been scared into using a CPA when they really just need to plug-and-chug a few numbers into tax software.
As soon as the words “passthrough LLC” (or “farm” or “S-corp” or “itemize”) are on the table, it’s usually worth it to pay $1,000 for a professional, assuming your time is worth something.
Exactly. Tax complexity drives the CPA / tax prep need.
That said, there is a huge swath of America that's being preyed on by strip-mall tax prep, who derive zero benefit from it. (And an industry whose profits ultimately trickle up to the tax prep software companies)
I was blown away when I learned one of my wife's friends, who has a single W2 and some bank interest, pays H&R Block every year to file her taxes! No stocks or rental income or IRAs or anything else that could complicate things. But still she, and millions of Americans, pay these companies to fill out what amounts to a single form. Eye opening.
Entering a 1099-B for stocks is dead simple, you enter in a few numbers (cumulative buys, sells, and wash sales) and you’re done. You transmit your trade history to the IRS digitally.
It takes me about 20-30 minutes to enter a W2, 1099-INT, 1099-B, 1099-B (futures) and a 1256 (straddles and index options) into FreeTaxUSA every spring.
Just like every other company, HR block sells emotions, not a product. The two emotions are: not getting in trouble with the IRS, and getting a good deal (with whatever advantage the HR block employee can find applies to you). Maybe also not having the stress of having to learn how to do your taxes. (WTF is an AMT?)
Congress created the PEPFAR program and allocated money to it, but the executive seems to have completely shut it down with no replacement. I'm not sure how to square this with your idea that if Congress starts a project, then the later administrations cannot shut it down without an act of congress. (I mean, obviously they legally cannot, but it seems like they can in practice)
You're clearly not paying attention. Which checks? The supreme Court OKed stopping people because they were brown ("Kavanaugh stops") and Congress has lost the power of the purse.
And what if the executive does not care to administrate and follow those laws, and Congress does not care or more truthfully cannot do anything even if it did?
The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
Yeah this needs to be the left wing "abortion" fight. Something we need to fight for 50 years before its finally overturned. Dont stop talking about it.
The problem is that Citizens United directly derives from a few straightforward concepts that are much more entrenched. The summary that "corporations are people" is kind of a misframing that makes you think the decision could have easily gone the other way, but that refrain is actually disempowering because there isn't much that could be changed at this level of abstraction.
I'm nothing close to a scholar on the topic, but that CAP article does not at all make it sound like Citizens United was inevitable. It does make it clear that the ruling builds on other old and bad rulings, but it's still quite a leap.
Meanwhile in pretty much all other nations you go online to the free website, see your employer contributions already filled in and acknowledge they are correct for the year, add any extra income, check boxes for relevant deductions and you’re done.
This is true even of some third world countries like Sri Lanka (where I live). There is a web-based system called RAMIS (Revenue Administration Management Information System). Any taxpayer can log in using their tax identification number and file their taxes.
Doesn't America have uniquely complicated tax that requires you to keep all your receipts to claim all sorts of confusing deductions? How can the IRS know what you spent your income on if you don't tell them?
I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice.
For most people, those deductions are less than the "standard" deduction you can take instead. For most of the people who do itemized deductions, it's mostly just your mortgage payment and state taxes, which the IRS already knows about, and maybe charitable donations.
And even if you do have a lot of things to report, why not just report those things directly and let the IRS calculate your taxes, rather than you having to do it, fill out a complicated form, then the IRS does the calculation anyways to make sure you did it right?
> Just look at the dense jargon ... There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that?
For every form I've ever had to file with the IRS, there's a corresponding set of instructions. Those instructions inevitably have a definitions section and/or define the terms in-line.
The instructions for form W8-BEN-E are at [0]. The definitions section starts at printed page 4 and continues through to printed page 7. Some terms you mentioned (like "Excepted territory NFFE") are not in the definitions section, but are described in their own sections.
I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes. I'm definitely going to object to your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
Just follow the instructions? From your linked PDF:
> The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: Recordkeeping, 12 hr., 40 min.; Learning about the law or the form, 4 hr., 17 min.; Preparing and sending the form, 8 hr., 16 min.
> [The] implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
Feel free to imagine that I was addressing something else. It's a free country and all.
You also might want to look at the estimated average time for a non-business taxpayer to complete a 1040. If the 1040 estimate methodology is typical, then those estimates are pretty pessimistic.
Yea I did look at the guide but it's a huge amount of work that I wasn't prepared to do just to make a couple of hundred dollars from one client. Imagine you start at the first option:
Nonparticipating FFI. A nonparticipating FFI means an FFI that is not a participating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, or exempt beneficial owner.
OK, then what's an FFI, a participating FFI, a deemed-compliant FFI, and an exempt beneficial owner? That's 4 other definitions to look up just to learn you should not choose option 1 of 32. If you keep track of this intermediate knowledge, it can help you skip some other options but you have to look ahead and see that possibility and find a way to store all these intermediate conclusions so that when you wake up the next day you haven't forgotten if you're an exempt beneficial owner or not - and by the way, before you even begin, you have to work out if you're a beneficial owner - exempt or not.
Once you've decided you're not an FFI, you look to see if you're a "Certified Deemed-Compliant Sponsored, Closely Held Investment Vehicle", which doesn't have a definition in the guide! What now? Try to find it in the Internal Revenue code?
By the way, the one you called out - "Excepted Territory NFFE" doesn't actually have a definition at all in the guide either and it refers you to "Regulations section 1.1472-1(c)(1)(iii)". Maybe if you're clever, you can set aside these difficult ones in case you discover an easy right answer first, but that gets back to designing a system to manage the intermediate knowledge and design your search strategy. Yes, you can do it, but also it's stupidly burdensome.
That's a lot of words to agree with my objection to
> ...your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
I never suggested that satisfying the requirements of complex parts of the tax code would -somehow- not be complex. I even indicated support for talking to a lawyer when confused:
> I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes.
If you'd slowed down and thought carefully about what I wrote, you probably would have spent less time overall than it took to write up your comment.
Speaking of reading too quickly:
> ...you look to see if you're a "Certified Deemed-Compliant Sponsored, Closely Held Investment Vehicle", which doesn't have a definition in the guide!
Did you read the part of the form to which those instructions apply? Those checkboxes are part of the FATCA Status section. Isn't it clear that you are to look at the FATCA regs for additional definitions?
The French tax system is pretty simple. Taxes are high, but simple. The website you use to file your taxes is also pretty simple, and every single field has a button that explains what it is about and in which cases you should write stuff inside.
The only annoying parts are if you have accounts outside of France, you have to declare them. And if you get dividends/capital gains in foreign currencies outside of the EU, you have to calculate yourself how much tax you owe using a bunch of tables per country and currency.
80% are just boilerplate text with one text box per page. It's shitty paperwork but it's not 644 pages of tons of input. There person you're replying to probably owns a business or works in multiple states or something goofy like that. They're on the upper end of complicated
I do not own a business. In 2024 I only worked in CA. However, a couple years back I worked in MI for a few days, which means for the following 4 years I have to file MI taxes as well due to RSU vesting. So my 2024 taxes were federal + CA + MI.
Yes, and? Nobody would fill all annexes. They are annexes because they're not part of the common path, and are only needed in specific scenarios. Their length is kind of irrelevant.
They make even the simple case more complicated than it needs to be. In these other countries, most people don't need to file anything, it just works with what the state already knows. You don't have to provide a load of supplementary info to get the correct outcome. I can only guess you think this way because you've not done taxes in another country.
While I fully agree that there are a lot of complicated rules for edge cases, for simple (non self employed) cases it is very straightforward. In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all in many cases and still won’t be screwed over as the German IRS will assume typical deductions. There is an official free filing software and if you spend 20-30 USD a year you’ll get access to super easy to use professional filing software. My situation is more complicated than most and I spend 2hrs a year for my entire family
Technically, America is neither a country nor a continent. But the USA is the only country on either of the continents of the Americas to have the word "America" in its official name. Give the Americans a break.
Maybe it started, when the USA became the global power in the half of the 20th century and it stopped when they lost being the free and aspiring country others countries think they should model after, which might be in 2001, or when they openly started extorting their (former) allies, which is under Trump.
Well, in the 90s there was almost total adoration of the US in Russia and America meant only one thing - the US.
Decade later the US lost most of its soft power due to the abuse of its dominant military and economic position in the world and then lost its dominant position too with the rise of the economies around the world.
People now see the US as a strong state on the lands of native Americans on the continent called North America.
I think this is a cultural difference around the world. In my county, people call it America. USA sounds a bit wanky or what Americans themselves call it. It doesn't matter because everyone knows what you mean.
Which is basically how it works here too. If you just have W-2 income from an employer it takes less than 10 minutes to fill out the form. Sure, the system you mention is more convenient, but the difference is minimal.
The IRS already has most of my tax information and knows the tax code. Why must I deal with a third party (and potentially have to pay them) to electronically file my own taxes?
As for "having most of your tax information", they don't. They know your reported income. You see that on your W2s/1099s/etc. What they don't know is whether or not you had a kid this year, or whether you lost a kid this year, whether you got married or divorced, if your spouse is claiming the kids this year or not, the number or amount of your charitable contributions, whether you have deductible mileage expenses, or a million other things.
The info that the IRS has from your employer is maybe 5 boxes on your return. Literally takes a few minutes to take the info from your w-2 and put it on a 1040.
The number and type of people living in your household is not an edge case. It applies to almost everyone, has huge tax impacts, and the IRS doesn’t know.
They can’t. Because IRS IT has been starved, beaten and abused for 20 years. If they had the resources and leadership, all of this could be possible via MOUs and better data access/normalization from the mainframes.
Filing a 1040 in the US is also very easy and takes a few minutes and can be done for free.
Another factor most people are ignoring is that state taxes are filed at the same time and each state has its own separate system. These third parties let you fill in and file both at the same time. It would be nice if the US gov did this too but it requires a total restructuring of the American system, and Intuit’s lobbying has nothing to do with why it hasn’t happened or for that matter why the tax codes looks like it does.
Not for most people. It’s a giant pain in the ass if you have bank accounts and want to file correctly.
If all you do is plug in your w-2 and pretend that’s your whole tax return and you don’t care about anything except the standard deduction, sure. That’s not correct for most people.
> state taxes are filed at the same time and each state has its own separate system
Can we stop pretending like this is a problem insurmountable for the federal government?
This idea that TurboTax can make this work but the government can’t is absurd.
25% of returns include the child tax credit and 16% include the earned income tax credit. These aren’t wealthy people filing with CPAs. These are lower income folks who specifically benefited from the IRS direct file program.
Again, you seem to simultaneously believe that nearly everyone has trivial taxes to file while believing that the government cannot reasonably support free direct filing for these people. I have to wonder how you reconcile these beliefs in your head. “I mean, this is so simple. Any moron can do it. But not the agency specifically responsible for handling trillions in tax revenue. Nah, too complex for them.”
Credits are applied after you take the standard deduction. You subtract the standard deduction, figure out your taxable income, then subtract credits and taxes already paid.
> These aren’t wealthy people filing with CPAs. These are lower income folks who specifically benefited from the IRS direct file program.
Lower income people were not using IRS direct file. That’s would be the economically rational thing to do, but this is exactly the market the strip mall CPA target. They also offer advances. I have tried and tried and tried to get lower income people to use free or direct file. Virtually none are interested. They have “their guy” who is getting them a great refund.
> Credits are applied after you take the standard deduction.
I did not state otherwise. The point is that you are misstating the complexity of the typical tax return. It is not in fact “enter your W-2, take the standard deduction, and done” for most people, even for those with relatively straightforward taxes.
> Lower income people were not using IRS direct file.
I don’t think the IRS has released this data. I do know that direct file was specifically limited to simple cases though.
Yes, in many European countries dependents and marital status changes are registered in a national civil registry, which the tax authority can query directly.
Countries like the U.S., Canada, the U.K. cannot easily do that without huge data-sharing reforms.
The federal government doesn't always know if you've had a child or if you've died. Not even specifically the IRS, but its possible for you to have a child and never involve any organization that reports to the federal government.
When I lived in the US(5 yrs), early 2000s, from my second year onwards, I used to receive a pre-filled 1040NR-EZ with my W2 info already printed/filled-in on it. Typically, I would just add a deduction, and mailed it back. Does that program not exist? Or was it only for NR?
That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is: "We did your tax return for you based on all the information reported to us. Please click 'OK' to complete your return for the year."
Remember, Americans have to file taxes separately to the State and Federal government. The Federal government has little authority to dictate State taxes. The paperwork is in part a coordination problem between the State and Federal governments.
Basic taxes are trivial in the US if you just work to live, it is essentially one page. However, there is an extremely long and fat tail where the government has no way of knowing the correct details to compute your taxes. There are myriad subsidies and offsets that have to be accounted for, many of which depend on what State you live in.
If you earn a lot of money, like the tech people that frequent this website, you are much more likely to find yourself in that fat tail. It can become esoteric quite quickly. The Federal tax code has to accommodate the completely independent tax codes of all 50 States in a reasonable way.
Yes, it's complicated because the tax code has been designed for special cases, where there is an opportunity cost to identify and use the special case, but that can be paid for with large enough savings. If hiring that tax preparer/accountant costs $1000 more, but reduces the tax by $1001, then it is economically worthwhile. But in reality, most people are not able to use these provisions and of those who technically can, only a few can use them efficiently.
If you mostly have income from wages, interest, and dividends, your tax is hard to reduce using special provisions and your return is easy to file. If you have a lot of income from business investments, property, minerals, esoteric securities, gambling, etc., then you have more places where you can use these things, and your taxes are accordingly complex.
All right, I guess I see your point. If you company doesn't handle the complexity, it can be a nightmare.
Where I've worked, they withhold the necessary number of shares from RSU's and it just gets taxed as W-2 income. Then, it shows up with the taxed cost basis in Fidelity so you don't get double taxed when selling shares. It doesn't appear like they have to factor in travel into that equation - that's only for your salary.
As far as options, it was similar where I was receiving them. The only issue I ever had exercising options was when the company whose stock I was trading changed names, and then the IRS suddenly believed all those options were 0 cost basis and wanted a bunch of money. That took two rounds of letters and a call to HR to get sorted out. Granted - laws have changed since then - that fiasco was 18 years ago.
>Where I've worked, they withhold the necessary number of shares from RSU's and it just gets taxed as W-2 income. Then, it shows up with the taxed cost basis in Fidelity so you don't get double taxed when selling shares.
The same as where I work (Schwab though for me, not Fidelity). However, they don't track wash sales for me. Do they track wash sales for you? From what I understand, federal law tells brokers to track wash sales for regular stock purchases and sales, but not for stock from vested RSUs, but still requires the stock holder to track wash sales for stock from vested RSUs.
>It doesn't appear like they have to factor in travel into that equation - that's only for your salary.
My employer also doesn't generally track travel for the purposes of taxes. But the state laws say I need to do it and file taxes based on my tracking.
Morgan Stanley at Work seems to track wash sales. Last year I had two vests in May, one week apart. I'd instructed the brokerage to sell some of those shares on vest. On the first date, I experienced a capital loss (less than $20), due to price movement between the RSU vesting and the broker selling the resulting stock. This was reported on the 1099B as a disallowed wash sale due to my acquisition of more stock with the second vest a week later.
There is actually a pretty massive tax evasion problem. Or at least the IRS is pretty sure there is, but they don’t have the resources to go after even a small fraction of them. The only thing that keeps people honest is the worry that if they lie, the IRS might already know (based on e.g. 1099 reports that go to the IRS), or they’ll get audited (which actually happens very infrequently).
There are already ways to file your taxes for free or very cheap, e.g. https://www.freetaxusa.com. It would be hard for anyone to compete with a free or very cheap competitor, even as a nonprofit.
Yes, but Direct File moved us closer to a future where the government could pre-fill data for (and/or potentially just send a bill to) tax filers. Even if other free tax filing software exists, the loss of Direct File is painful because it was advancing the precedent of first party tax software.
That’s valid, but my comment was about why a (non-governmental) third party or charity wouldn’t want to take the open source Direct File software and run with it. If they aren’t actually the government running it, it completely loses its primary advantage.
I’m currently making my way through a video series on Ancient Rome. Apparently, there were times when Rome contracted out the right to collect taxes from certain regions. So businessmen would bid on this, and the winner then had a limited time when they could go out and collect the taxes. If they managed to collect more than what they paid for the bid, that was their profit. It’s easy to see how this was heavily abused, and these “publicans” were hated by the people. They’re even referenced in the Bible; “sinners and publicans”. How long before the IRS considers this arrangement?
You know, the IRS is basically defunded, even not counting the whole shutdown thing. I wonder how many people need to file handwritten by mail before it becomes a significant problem
And they _will_ find them. For example, one year I forgot to add a line from one of 1040 forms to my return. I got a notification from the IRS about a year later that I have under-reported taxes.
And with the defunding of the IRS, they'll severely limit the complex audits.
> It started requiring phone numbers and things...
a) You're already trusting them with every piece of information in your tax return. It'd cost like five cents to use that information to discover your phone number... if they're malicious, you're already fucked.
b) When? At the end of the process where you're doing stuff like attesting that you're not lied on your tax return? I don't remember them demanding a phone number up front, and I also don't remember whether or not I refused to provide a phone number at the end.
Weird. The electronic filing has worked flawless for me every year for the past like four or five years. Was the "esoteric" complaint delivered as an email after you'd submitted your paperwork? If so, then in my experience, that's because you've fucked up the data you input into the form and the IRS's backend has a funny-but-useful way of spelling that.
> But phone # validation up front is too much, an overstep.
They definitely didn't do this to me any of the years I've used them to file taxes. When did you file yours? Did you file them long after the 2024 taxes were due?
Started asking about two or three years ago at registration, didn’t try last year. My return is complicated and it couldn’t handle some obscure form. But don’t remember which. On time.
> Started asking about two or three years ago at registration...
Very odd. I wonder (but not enough to investigate) what's so different between your situation and mine that I'd not be asked for a phone number during initial configuration.
The 1040 has a spot for both a phone number and an email address. The 1040 instructions make it completely clear that both are optional.
You have the option of entering your
phone number and email address in the
spaces provided. There will be no effect
on the processing of your return if you
choose not to enter this information.
Note that the IRS initiates most contacts
through regular mail delivered by the
United States Postal Service.
If anyone's interested, the CashApp tax prep section (kind of its own app, but its contained within the CashApp app) is a feature they have purchased from CreditKarma when CreditKarma got bought out by Intuit (turbotax pricks).
So I had filed taxes with CreditKarma one year, and then the next year the CreditKarma tax service had no information about my previous filing. So I tried out the CashApp app, since I was going to have to fill out all the info anyway, and it actually did have my information from the previous year and I only had to change the new information, rather than re-enter all of my address and employer info, etc.
So I also recommend the CashApp app - it's free for basic taxes, it's not helping turbotax and their relentless lobbying, and it's really convenient if you already use CashApp. Of course, all of this is subject to change any specific year. Big companies gonna big company, after all.
What was wrong with using Free File Fillable Forms in the first place? It's the real deal forms just online and with nothing obscured or sugar coated.
I use it every year, and while I wouldn't exactly say I enjoy doing my taxes, I do enjoy being fully aware what I'm filing and not being forced to do it on paper just because others have obtuse opinions or are lazy.
I've used the fillable forms before; the problem is that to fill them out with confidence - to even know with confidence which ones you should be filling out - requires more knowledge of tax law than the average person can reasonably be expected to possess.
Now, the various self-filing software products also feel a lot like guessing, but at least they walk you through which guesses are mostly likely to be correct and can catch the most egregious errors.
Yes, obviously, everyone knows that. When all you have to file is a 1040, reading one of the instructions documents is fine. When you have to use several forms it start to add up.
I've filed my own taxes for years and have a complicated set up; real estate, stocks, rsus, espps, private shares, amt, etc ... It's extremely straightforward and takes less time than using turbotax if you've done it before. The instructions are obvious.
You can also call the IRS and be told for free what the rules are. People pay h&r block and Intuit when the irs is extremely responsive and will connect you with an actual American irs rep to answer your questions.
People pay for the software because they've been marketed to not because they need it. For the situations that are actually hard, then a software like TurboTax is useless.
Also if you get the numbers wrong the IRS just corrects it
It's pretty clear that daemonologist did not know that. Which is weird, given that all the tax law the average USian needs to know is "Read and follow the instructions for Form 1040.".
(RIP 1040-EZ. You were a good form.)
Also, I've had to file several forms in the past. It 'adds up', but it's all mechanically following instructions... not anything difficult.
> The hard part is knowing if you need to file a form.
In my experience, the form instructions tell you clearly when you should and should not file a form. They also clearly indicate which other forms are to be filed when you meet specific conditions (income limits, possession of specific other forms, etc.).
Granted, I don't run a business, nor do I have exceptionally complex finances, so there are a great many IRS form instructions that I have never seen. Because I've not see them all, I'd never say that every such form instruction is clear, but the ones I've encountered have been.
Unless you have a unreasonably complicated return, you need absolutely no knowledge of tax law. It's all just "take the number from box X on form A and write it in box Y of form B."
Yes. I've used Free filllable forms several times. For basic tax situations, and even mildly complex ones, the problem isn't so much that it is hard as that it is very tedious.
It involves reading a lot of instructions, with many references to other documents and other sections. It involves copying a lot of numbers from one place to another, and doing basic math on them to get a new one.
It could be improved a lot just by automatically calculating more fields, and adding more of the "worksheets" that are in the instructions into the forms so it can calculate those for you.
> It could be improved a lot just by automatically calculating more fields, and adding more of the "worksheets" that are in the instructions into the forms so it can calculate those for you.
It already does this. The form validation checks that you have filled in the required fields and on most forms about half of the field values are not user-editable and instead auto-calculated from the other half.
It also looks for the required related forms you should have attached. The worksheets are another matter and aren't required to be attached, so they aren't part of the validation. It's assumed that you have read the instructions and done the worksheets elsewhere, although you certainly can attach them anyway.
Direct File did have a lot of limitations, so I assume when they say “eligible taxpayers” that’s the total number of people that could have used Direct File, which is much less than 100% of taxpayers. Even then, I’d assume more than 10 million people in the U.S. have very simple tax returns.
Yes, and also, there's a difference between Free File and Direct File, and the article kind of switches between referring to the two.
Free file: government partners with private companies to offer free tax returns through their software for low income people. It's suspected a lot of people don't know about it, and just use the paid versions of filing software because you have to start the process on IRS.gov and dark patterns were employed by the snakes at Intuit et al. Hence "just 3%". Been around for decades.
Direct file: New program (since 2024) for eligible people to file directly for free with the IRS, no third party tax software middleman. Only half the states are eligible, income criteria, simple taxes only. 300,000 touted as a bigger number because it's a very new program.
I pay $500 a year for an accountant to do my taxes for me. And then tell me I owe nothing. Support the Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad group, they’re working on fixing this.
They do. The problem isn’t understanding the numbers, they gave me last year, it’s making sure I am doing things correctly for both my US taxes and Norwegian taxes, including following the specifics of the US/Norway tax treaty.
If your tax situation isn't too complicated, it actually isn't too hard to fill out the forms yourself[1]. But if you are living abroad, unfortunately your tax situation probably isn't that simple.
[1]: Although I find it incredibly frustrating the lengths they go to to avoid negative numbers on the forms.
Not only are Americans dumb, they're incredibly ego driven and stubborn. That means Americans always think they're right. Everyone else is doing it wrong.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
I'm American. If you don't buy into the insane status-symbol ego culture, it's daily insanity of excess consumption and selfishness.
The worst part is no one wants to hear this. There's a crazy culture of "Saying anything is mean". We shove our heads in the dirt all the time.
The entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
No tax software or expert will never produce a wrong answer, because too many questions have no guaranteed right answer, due to inconsistent interpretatios within the IRS.
Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.
People file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.
You need legal documents to be accurate and deterministic, not for some LLM to make shit up and have you inadvertently and incompetently lie to the IRS.
The only reason I care about companies having my data is that it means the government can get to it. In this case I am required to give my data to the government anyway, so why would I care if OpenAI / Google has it?
ISTM one ought to be able to use AI to translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format. No personal data needs to go anywhere near the AI.
Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.
> translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format
The instructions for each form published by the IRS every year are already written by professional technical writers to be unambiguous. Do you mean that someone ought to write a simplified english grammar transpiler? I think that would genuinely be interesting. What's missing are the guidelines the technical writers are using, but that can probably be derived.
Also, a good satire presents what the author believes is the right thing as well as ridiculing the wrong thing. "A Modest Proposal" is famous for the proposition that the Irish should eat their own babies - ridiculing the obviously wrong solution of blaming the Irish for their problems but it also explicitly lists things that would work in the guise of dismissing them as unworkable. Ideas like taxing the people who own everything in Ireland (many of whom were not Irish), and that's much less famous but it's right there in the text.
Turbo tax is free for federal filers with no business income, same thing as this service. Except now no taxpayer dollars were spent on maintaining this. This would have been useful if it also did state taxes, which turbo tax is not free for.
No business income (including no Uber/doordash/etc due to schedule SE?), no dividends over $1500, no itemized deductions, no capital gains, no nanny (like you hiring a nanny), no unemployment income, no gambling winnings, no alimony, etc etc
They were rolling out matching services state by state. Something like 12 last year. And Turbo tax is NOT "free for federal filers with no business income". Just look at the Costco Turbotax stands every year.
Wasn't part of the impetus for the free file program because TurboTax actively hid the free filing options?
I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any.
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file <- Direct File's web app source code is public-domain and published on GitHub!
Obviously the 2025 version will be out of date for the 2026 filing season, though public code means it can always be revived by anyone else.
(previous HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 )
Does the "Modernized eFile API" still exist?
afaik yes, its what the for-profit companies like turbotax use as well. While its "modernized" in comparison to older systems it was originally created in 2004 (and you can tell because it has XML galore).
Fascinating repo, thank you for sharing!
I just looked up https://directfile.irs.gov/. While it says closed, the testimonies on this site speak to how easy the filing was. Almost feels like it is intentional to keep rest of the site as is with a small banner on top announcing the closure, as a way to hint at this stupid move by the administration.
Update 2: The site is back without testimonials.
Update (11:30 ET, Nov 5): This link redirects to a service outage -- https://www.irs.gov/static/maintenance/RUP_Outage.html.
Money well spent
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trum...
Such a cheap bribe holy crap.
When you look at the donations politicians receive and the ROI they produce you quickly realize that they are way too cheap. Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
> Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
Except those corrupt politicians want lobbying to be profitable, so they can profit from it too. And if they ask for too much, they’ll just bribe the next guy or may even try to put their own in office. Can’t have that!
Especially since they so often land jobs for themselves and their kids with the people that lobby them.
Kirsten Sinema got a job as a senior lobbiest after her short congressional stint.
Synema is a particularly fun example because you can tell where her loyalties laid from her voting record.
Ah yes, the free market
Healthy competition, the free market has resolved the issues of overpriced bribes. /s
I'm surprised that politicians haven't established burdensome and expensive professional compliance and licensure requirements for their own trade to restrict upstart competition. Every other trade pays them to implement the same so it's not like they're not familiar with how to do it.
No need: campaign financing, low turnout, and incumbent bias are all substantial barriers to entry.
The individual bribes aren't the whole picture. The bribes are statements of loyalty. If I am reliably donating to your campaign every couple of years, then I am probably not donating to your opponents' campaigns.
And loyalty seems particularly important with the current administration, because they have an agenda full of things that are illegal or otherwise unsavory and un-American, so they need a nation run by loyal henchmen if the agenda is to succeed.
Compare https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in... and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on...
Maybe lobbyists should be punished by having their skin fully tattooed blue like smurfs.
This way, you’d have to really be into lobbying to suffer the tattoo pain and permanent branding.
Lobbyists aren't the problem. They are doing what they are paid to do.
If you donate to a large charity, there is a good chance some of that $ goes to lobbying, as it should. (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)
If you work at a large company, 100% chance it lobbies, for good reason. Large employers lobby for better mass transit (because parking garages are expensive), more housing (because it is cheaper to lobby than pay employees more so they can afford $$$$ houses), or friendlier business laws (no one likes paying more taxes).
Lobbying is everything from "help us use orphans as a source of cheap protein!" To "keep the national parks funded".
"Keep the national parks funded" sounds like a good use case for lobbying, until you realize it's only needed as a counterweight because lobbying diminishes the relative role of the democratic process itself in meeting needs.
We recently made a fairly large donation to a children’s hospital to support a specific research program. They directly told us that the highest-impact way to deploy the funds would be to pay lobbyists to try to get earmarks injected into federal bills. Like, >10x expected ROI.
Not all lobbying is straight-up mustache twirling. But it definitely left a bad taste in our mouths.
That kind of is mustache twirling. Instead of spending your donation on research, they would use it to divert money from some other cause to their own. Your donation may harm a different - and possibly more deserving - research program.
This would all be fine if the lobbying $ was only being paid to the lobbyists. The moment the $ flows to the politicians, it is what other countries would call a bribe.
This is a misleading characterization of the issue here. Let me pull up another very relevant analogy here. Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official? You are a responsible adult, after all. Bribes are needed for everything from housing permits to your kids' food assistance. How is it bad when it gets good things done?
Is this how you reason about corruption in government service? Unlike your argument about about lobbying, the problem is very conspicuous here - you're supposed to get those services without paying anything beyond the nominal service charges. They're your rights in an society where you already pay taxes to fund them. The government officials are already being paid with your tax money to do this job. What's even worse? If such loose and open-ended bargaining is permitted for basic essential services, then the only ones who will get those services will be the ones with money, not the ones who need it. Your housing permits and your kids' food assistance will become increasingly costlier and harder goals to achieve. That's why bribes are illegal.
If you look at this scenario carefully, it isn't much of an analogy. It's exactly the same situation, but with different players! When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests - because the public are the primary stakeholders in a democracy, and it's the utilization of their tax payments that these politicians are debating. Those politicians are supposed to be the people's 'representatives' who are elected and paid to listen to their constituents and lobby on their behalf. The public shouldn't have to 'lobby' with them too, especially for basic essentials like nutrition, national parks or tax filing!
What you call 'lobbying' in the US is known as 'political corruption' in most of the rest of the world. It's just a weasel word used to underplay the seriousness of such corruption. And as I pointed out earlier in my analogy, the rich ones outcompete the majority public here too. It's abundantly clear that even town councils favor big corpos even in the face of loud vocal opposition from the majority of their constituents. It's clear how much special treatment these professional grifters called 'lobbyists' get when they walk into the town hall just minutes before the discussion of a topic, while the town's people have to wait there for one and a half days without proper food, water or sleep in order to speak a few words in opposition. This is what happens when you legitimize corruption with cute terms like 'lobbying'.
> Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official?
We formalized it! It is called an application fee, and it is set high enough so they the government employee doesn't need to take bribes outside of their salary.
Other countries set application fees so low that government employees barely earn enough money to eat, so they take bribes.
NYC solves a huge part of their police corruption problem by just paying officers more.
> When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests
I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!
The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
> I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!
I touched this point in my previous reply. But let me reiterate it again. Those politicians are supposed to just talk to their constituents and represent their interests. That's their job description. If the voters who sent them to the legislatures have to lobby them afterwards, what is the purpose of these politicians anyway? Is their job to con the public into choosing them, so that they can leech the same public? Evidently so, and that's the fundamental problem with democracy in US these days.
> The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
While EFF and ACLU do a commendable job, their existence don't justify lobbying. It's the other way around. Lobbying make them a necessity to regain some semblance of balance and fairness. They wouldn't be needed if the politicians were doing their job in the first place.
> (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)
Is 'goy' a typo? I only know of its meaning as 'non-Jewish person'.
I'm sure they meant "you". שלום־עליכם
Or voters should take some civic responsibility and stop voting for corrupt politicians. Americans seem to be either unable to make their own decisions without paid advertising to direct them or they're afraid of "wasting" their vote on candidates that didn't spend enough on advertising.
Or “politics” are too much of their identity and they always vote for “their guy” regardless of the merits. Education does not matter when the vote has nothing to so with rationality and is only rooting for a team.
Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.
Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do. They're like fucking Eagles fans. They have this weird "team loyalty" that I just don't get.
> Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do.
This part makes enough sense.
> They're like fucking Eagles fans.
Now you've gone and implied 95% of sports fans aren't that way?? I don't understand your argument any more.
Haha every Eagles fan I know is ride or die.
this is just a more abstract "bootstraps" argument. schooling in this country has been systematically attacked and deconstructed, and as the burger reich's leader says, "i love the poorly educated". this is not "dum timmy votes for dum thing" it's "countless $ and effort and man hours have been devoted to making the american populace dumber" Why? look at any polling breakdown for how the educated vote vs the uneducated.
Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
It's more that voting third party in a first-past-the-post voting scheme is systemically pointless.
Parent poster said to stop voting for bad candidates. I said you would be mocked/judged/told off for doing so. And here we are.
What I said is factually true, neither mocking, judging nor telling you off. If you believe saying something like, don't look at the sun or you'll hurt your eyes (and then you look at the sun and say that your eyes are burnt) is telling you off, then we have different definitions of the phrase.
Well you should mostly do that in the primaries, when you are down to two, pick the least evil one.
It obviously isn't since the UK, for example, has fptp for general elections and far more than two parties.
Parliamentary systems are not comparable to presidential ones when it comes to voting systems.
This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.
It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)
> it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote
that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer). https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Restating my disclaimer of "It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems"...
> ranked voting methods ... can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
Can you clarify whether you're referring to some ranked methods (eg IRV), or all ranked methods (ie including ranked pairs) ?
> that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score) ? A quick skim of that VSE page has it talking about "utility", which I would imagine is a scalar per candidate representing "happiness" ?
The problem I have with Approval is that coming from our two-terrible-party system - do I Approve my latent terrible party or not? That choice seems purely down to strategy, compared to being able to rank them to say I completely prefer the new party/candidate over my latent terrible party, and my latent terrible party over the other latent terrible party. The dynamic also seems exacerbated knowing there will be a lot of people who continue to vote exactly as they did under plurality.
it's mathematically proven that all ranked methods can fail IIA. see arrow's theorem.
> Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score)
1. i did not define performance in a way that is congruent with approval/score. scores are not utilities. they are the modification of utilities via ignorance, normalization, and strategy.
2. that the correct social welfare function is just the sum of all voter utilities (the definition of "performance") is mathematically proven. https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
> do I Approve my latent terrible party or not?
this is not a "problem". it's well understood. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
approval voting obliterates IRV ("RCV") with any mixture of strategic or honest voters, so i'm not sure why you're bringing up strategy. https://www.rangevoting.org/StratHonMix
i had a chance to visit arrow at his palo alto condo circa 2014. his theorem is nice and all, but it only makes sense to apply it to social welfare functions, not voting methods. yes, the correct social welfare function is just the utilitarian sum of all voters' individual utilities.
https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.
https://www.rangevoting.org/PropDiatribe
I think that they should have to wear company logos on them full time if they ever take money from a lobbyist until the day they retire.
Every time they speak there should be a visual reminder of who they've taken money from.
I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing.
It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
> I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. > > It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
> It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!
However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
There's no guarantee this doesn't simply make the bribe more expensive for Intuit.
There are limits to corporate donations and lobbying, which is why the price of lobbying seems so low (see the linked blog post in the comments here!)
SuperPACs get around that, but there is a chance a large company like Inuit isn't agile enough to defend against a well organized political attack.
Ultimately career politicians care about being elected. Even corrupt ones need to stay in office and they'll happily sacrifice one small donor to keep the gravy train coming with all their other connections.
If an independently funded lobbying group walks into DC and tells a senator they just raised 30M dollars and 80k residents in their state donated as part of that, I bet people will start to listen.
The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation.
Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.)
The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant.
https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office...
There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.
> The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation.
The fact that TurboTax is cheaper than a local CPA does not change the fact that Intuit actively lobbies to prevent free tax filing.
In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or “your taxes are complex, please work with a tax specialist”. Also in a sane world this would be free and the government would be incentivized to simplify the tax code so that as many people as possible were in one of the first buckets. In our world the government is aggressively lobbied for complex tax codes and prevention of free tax filing.
> A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
Define “regular”. Per TurboTax, only 37% of people qualify for free filing.
I have never tried to go through the TurboTax free file route but based on my experience with the paid service, I imagine they aggressively upsell free filers with the exact same scare tactics you associate with CPAs.
I suspect that GP"s "everyone can file free" is talk about Free File Fillable Forms, not TurboTax
Which is free for nearly everyone, but is only marginally better than paper filing your own taxes.
I suspect GP is simply misinformed about the reality of the situation. They also explicitly state “you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party”.
They are missing the context that only a fraction of filers are eligible to use free filing and that TurboTax paid something like 140 million to settle claims that they are misleading filers. That suit is why they now admit only 37% of people are even eligible to file for free.
Free Fillable Forms is free for everyone. It is technically a third party. It’s very simple if you have the average tax filing situation.
There are also other services that provide free efiling regardless of income, it’s not just TurboTax.
At the end of the day, you can always do the paperwork if you really don’t want anyone seeing your taxes and mail it. Could it be better? Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.
> In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or
As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
An additional factor is state taxes really need to be packaged together with the actual solution.
> Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.
Just passionate enough to say that everyone unhappy with Intuit lobbying against free tax filing and simplified tax codes doesn’t understand?
> As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
This is misleading. The IRS does have this because for most people it does not change year to year. It would also be trivial for them to provide a way to input this data if/when it does change.
People want simplified tax codes only in principle. Everyone has a deduction or credit they will fight to defend.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is. You say you don’t care about this but seem very invested in defending Intuit’s lobbying.
You also seem to be simultaneously claiming that the US tax system is too complex for the government to feasibly automate and that filing taxes is trivial.
Either you hold contradictory viewpoints here or you have some undisclosed interest in this area.
I'd like to defend the notion of using a CPA a bit. I started using one when I became a partner in a passthrough LLC. I was now self-employed and was responsible for paying taxes on the businesses income as well as my own personal income. Filing that first year was incredibly stressful and time consuming, and I came to the conclusion that sometimes the right thing to do is to hire someone who knows what theyre doing.
Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial.
I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.
I think GP’s point was that the vast majority of individuals have taxes that look like “one W2, maybe a couple 1099s, and standard deduction.” Many of these people have been scared into using a CPA when they really just need to plug-and-chug a few numbers into tax software.
As soon as the words “passthrough LLC” (or “farm” or “S-corp” or “itemize”) are on the table, it’s usually worth it to pay $1,000 for a professional, assuming your time is worth something.
Exactly. Tax complexity drives the CPA / tax prep need.
That said, there is a huge swath of America that's being preyed on by strip-mall tax prep, who derive zero benefit from it. (And an industry whose profits ultimately trickle up to the tax prep software companies)
I was blown away when I learned one of my wife's friends, who has a single W2 and some bank interest, pays H&R Block every year to file her taxes! No stocks or rental income or IRAs or anything else that could complicate things. But still she, and millions of Americans, pay these companies to fill out what amounts to a single form. Eye opening.
Entering a 1099-B for stocks is dead simple, you enter in a few numbers (cumulative buys, sells, and wash sales) and you’re done. You transmit your trade history to the IRS digitally.
It takes me about 20-30 minutes to enter a W2, 1099-INT, 1099-B, 1099-B (futures) and a 1256 (straddles and index options) into FreeTaxUSA every spring.
Just like every other company, HR block sells emotions, not a product. The two emotions are: not getting in trouble with the IRS, and getting a good deal (with whatever advantage the HR block employee can find applies to you). Maybe also not having the stress of having to learn how to do your taxes. (WTF is an AMT?)
I’m talking about people with a couple W2s and maybe a 1099. In your situation hiring a CPA is likely a very reasonable choice.
Was it always possible to do it for free with third-parties, or did that come about in response to things like free-file?
Jon Oliver tried his best to bribe Clarence Thomas, but unfortunately, the prick turns out to only be for sale to one side.
You might run into similar problems.
economies of scale, he's just being a smart businessman.
Most bribes are
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> Don’t be an idiot. ... failed worse than the Obamacare rollout
This is a very rude and inappropriate way to deliver your misinformation. The program was hugely popular and successfull
I thought we were draining the swamp >:(
There's more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_q741QO_m0
People could do a gofundme to get the bribe together if they wanted to get something done. Power to the people /s
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Congress created the PEPFAR program and allocated money to it, but the executive seems to have completely shut it down with no replacement. I'm not sure how to square this with your idea that if Congress starts a project, then the later administrations cannot shut it down without an act of congress. (I mean, obviously they legally cannot, but it seems like they can in practice)
You're clearly not paying attention. Which checks? The supreme Court OKed stopping people because they were brown ("Kavanaugh stops") and Congress has lost the power of the purse.
> You're clearly not paying attention.
You clearly just want to have a convenient source for your frustration and show no interest in actually solving the problem permanently.
> Which checks?
Congress. They pass laws. The administration is bound, by the constitution, to follow those laws and to administrate them with "due care."
> The supreme Court OKed stopping people because they were brown ("Kavanaugh stops") and Congress has lost the power of the purse
What does this have to do with tax law?
You can't possibly be serious right now. This administration has done nothing but skirt every law at every level. Look around.
And what if the executive does not care to administrate and follow those laws, and Congress does not care or more truthfully cannot do anything even if it did?
> Congress. They pass laws. The administration is bound, by the constitution, to follow those laws and to administrate them with "due care."
About that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
Citizens United.
The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
Yeah this needs to be the left wing "abortion" fight. Something we need to fight for 50 years before its finally overturned. Dont stop talking about it.
The problem is that Citizens United directly derives from a few straightforward concepts that are much more entrenched. The summary that "corporations are people" is kind of a misframing that makes you think the decision could have easily gone the other way, but that refrain is actually disempowering because there isn't much that could be changed at this level of abstraction.
This is a better exploration of what needs to happen: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-corporate-power... ( I found this article via HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45317731 )
I'm nothing close to a scholar on the topic, but that CAP article does not at all make it sound like Citizens United was inevitable. It does make it clear that the ruling builds on other old and bad rulings, but it's still quite a leap.
1000%
Meanwhile in pretty much all other nations you go online to the free website, see your employer contributions already filled in and acknowledge they are correct for the year, add any extra income, check boxes for relevant deductions and you’re done.
This is true even of some third world countries like Sri Lanka (where I live). There is a web-based system called RAMIS (Revenue Administration Management Information System). Any taxpayer can log in using their tax identification number and file their taxes.
Hating taxes is an intentional regressive system to ensure its complex and is politically expedient to "cut".
Doesn't America have uniquely complicated tax that requires you to keep all your receipts to claim all sorts of confusing deductions? How can the IRS know what you spent your income on if you don't tell them?
I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8bene.pdf
For most people, those deductions are less than the "standard" deduction you can take instead. For most of the people who do itemized deductions, it's mostly just your mortgage payment and state taxes, which the IRS already knows about, and maybe charitable donations.
And even if you do have a lot of things to report, why not just report those things directly and let the IRS calculate your taxes, rather than you having to do it, fill out a complicated form, then the IRS does the calculation anyways to make sure you did it right?
The majority of Americans are W2 wage earners that take the standard deduction.
> Just look at the dense jargon ... There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that?
For every form I've ever had to file with the IRS, there's a corresponding set of instructions. Those instructions inevitably have a definitions section and/or define the terms in-line.
The instructions for form W8-BEN-E are at [0]. The definitions section starts at printed page 4 and continues through to printed page 7. Some terms you mentioned (like "Excepted territory NFFE") are not in the definitions section, but are described in their own sections.
I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes. I'm definitely going to object to your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
[0] <https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8bene.pdf>
Just follow the instructions? From your linked PDF:
> The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: Recordkeeping, 12 hr., 40 min.; Learning about the law or the form, 4 hr., 17 min.; Preparing and sending the form, 8 hr., 16 min.
> Just follow the instructions?
I spoke in objection to one very specific claim:
> [The] implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
Feel free to imagine that I was addressing something else. It's a free country and all.
You also might want to look at the estimated average time for a non-business taxpayer to complete a 1040. If the 1040 estimate methodology is typical, then those estimates are pretty pessimistic.
Yea I did look at the guide but it's a huge amount of work that I wasn't prepared to do just to make a couple of hundred dollars from one client. Imagine you start at the first option:
Nonparticipating FFI. A nonparticipating FFI means an FFI that is not a participating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, or exempt beneficial owner.
OK, then what's an FFI, a participating FFI, a deemed-compliant FFI, and an exempt beneficial owner? That's 4 other definitions to look up just to learn you should not choose option 1 of 32. If you keep track of this intermediate knowledge, it can help you skip some other options but you have to look ahead and see that possibility and find a way to store all these intermediate conclusions so that when you wake up the next day you haven't forgotten if you're an exempt beneficial owner or not - and by the way, before you even begin, you have to work out if you're a beneficial owner - exempt or not.
Once you've decided you're not an FFI, you look to see if you're a "Certified Deemed-Compliant Sponsored, Closely Held Investment Vehicle", which doesn't have a definition in the guide! What now? Try to find it in the Internal Revenue code?
By the way, the one you called out - "Excepted Territory NFFE" doesn't actually have a definition at all in the guide either and it refers you to "Regulations section 1.1472-1(c)(1)(iii)". Maybe if you're clever, you can set aside these difficult ones in case you discover an easy right answer first, but that gets back to designing a system to manage the intermediate knowledge and design your search strategy. Yes, you can do it, but also it's stupidly burdensome.
That's a lot of words to agree with my objection to
> ...your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
I never suggested that satisfying the requirements of complex parts of the tax code would -somehow- not be complex. I even indicated support for talking to a lawyer when confused:
> I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes.
If you'd slowed down and thought carefully about what I wrote, you probably would have spent less time overall than it took to write up your comment.
Speaking of reading too quickly:
> ...you look to see if you're a "Certified Deemed-Compliant Sponsored, Closely Held Investment Vehicle", which doesn't have a definition in the guide!
Did you read the part of the form to which those instructions apply? Those checkboxes are part of the FATCA Status section. Isn't it clear that you are to look at the FATCA regs for additional definitions?
I highly doubt that it's more complicated than the French or German tax system.
Based on what?
The French tax system is pretty simple. Taxes are high, but simple. The website you use to file your taxes is also pretty simple, and every single field has a button that explains what it is about and in which cases you should write stuff inside.
The only annoying parts are if you have accounts outside of France, you have to declare them. And if you get dividends/capital gains in foreign currencies outside of the EU, you have to calculate yourself how much tax you owe using a bunch of tables per country and currency.
For basic taxes yes but you have annex forms which are 20 pages long in the french system.
20 pages? My 2024 full pdf from turbotax was 644 pages.
644 pages? WTF
80% are just boilerplate text with one text box per page. It's shitty paperwork but it's not 644 pages of tons of input. There person you're replying to probably owns a business or works in multiple states or something goofy like that. They're on the upper end of complicated
I do not own a business. In 2024 I only worked in CA. However, a couple years back I worked in MI for a few days, which means for the following 4 years I have to file MI taxes as well due to RSU vesting. So my 2024 taxes were federal + CA + MI.
For details about why RSU vesting requires 4 years of MI taxes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676698
Yes, and? Nobody would fill all annexes. They are annexes because they're not part of the common path, and are only needed in specific scenarios. Their length is kind of irrelevant.
This is exactly the way it works in the US. All the really complex parts are never even used by 99% of people.
They make even the simple case more complicated than it needs to be. In these other countries, most people don't need to file anything, it just works with what the state already knows. You don't have to provide a load of supplementary info to get the correct outcome. I can only guess you think this way because you've not done taxes in another country.
For a truly uniquely complicated tax system please move to Germany.
While I fully agree that there are a lot of complicated rules for edge cases, for simple (non self employed) cases it is very straightforward. In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all in many cases and still won’t be screwed over as the German IRS will assume typical deductions. There is an official free filing software and if you spend 20-30 USD a year you’ll get access to super easy to use professional filing software. My situation is more complicated than most and I spend 2hrs a year for my entire family
Why stop there? If you reside in multiple countries, then it really gets fun.
When you say America you certainly mean USA? Or is America a country now?
Technically, America is neither a country nor a continent. But the USA is the only country on either of the continents of the Americas to have the word "America" in its official name. Give the Americans a break.
It's the only country in Americas that US citizens think is important.
America is colloquially the USA. The Americas is something else. South America is something else. North America is something else.
That time has passed.
Now you have me really curious. When did "that time" start, and when did it end?
Maybe it started, when the USA became the global power in the half of the 20th century and it stopped when they lost being the free and aspiring country others countries think they should model after, which might be in 2001, or when they openly started extorting their (former) allies, which is under Trump.
Well, in the 90s there was almost total adoration of the US in Russia and America meant only one thing - the US.
Decade later the US lost most of its soft power due to the abuse of its dominant military and economic position in the world and then lost its dominant position too with the rise of the economies around the world.
People now see the US as a strong state on the lands of native Americans on the continent called North America.
I think this is a cultural difference around the world. In my county, people call it America. USA sounds a bit wanky or what Americans themselves call it. It doesn't matter because everyone knows what you mean.
Which is basically how it works here too. If you just have W-2 income from an employer it takes less than 10 minutes to fill out the form. Sure, the system you mention is more convenient, but the difference is minimal.
The IRS already has most of my tax information and knows the tax code. Why must I deal with a third party (and potentially have to pay them) to electronically file my own taxes?
The same reason you pay exorbitant sums for healthcare, education, transport and much more.
The US is not a county optimized to provide quality services inexpensively. It is a business optimized to maximize profits.
You don't have to pay.
https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
As for "having most of your tax information", they don't. They know your reported income. You see that on your W2s/1099s/etc. What they don't know is whether or not you had a kid this year, or whether you lost a kid this year, whether you got married or divorced, if your spouse is claiming the kids this year or not, the number or amount of your charitable contributions, whether you have deductible mileage expenses, or a million other things.
This argument could be put in a museum as a perfect illustration of the "Perfect is the enemy of good" maxim.
Would just relying on the information from your employers cover all possible edge-cases? No.
Would it dramatically simplify the process for (tens?) millions of people? Absolutely.
The info that the IRS has from your employer is maybe 5 boxes on your return. Literally takes a few minutes to take the info from your w-2 and put it on a 1040.
The number and type of people living in your household is not an edge case. It applies to almost everyone, has huge tax impacts, and the IRS doesn’t know.
The argument is that you don't need a third party like Intuit to get this information. The IRS could get it themselves - they choose not to.
They can’t. Because IRS IT has been starved, beaten and abused for 20 years. If they had the resources and leadership, all of this could be possible via MOUs and better data access/normalization from the mainframes.
I agree, but IMO this is a choice. Not a fact of life.
In France the web site asks you if your household details changed.
No? 2 more clicks and you are done.
Yes? 2 + nr of changes clicks and you are done. Took me an extra 5 seconds when my son left.
You can make your taxes as complcated as you want but for 95% of the population foling taxes takes a few minutes.
Filing a 1040 in the US is also very easy and takes a few minutes and can be done for free.
Another factor most people are ignoring is that state taxes are filed at the same time and each state has its own separate system. These third parties let you fill in and file both at the same time. It would be nice if the US gov did this too but it requires a total restructuring of the American system, and Intuit’s lobbying has nothing to do with why it hasn’t happened or for that matter why the tax codes looks like it does.
> Filing a 1040 in the US is also very easy
Not for most people. It’s a giant pain in the ass if you have bank accounts and want to file correctly.
If all you do is plug in your w-2 and pretend that’s your whole tax return and you don’t care about anything except the standard deduction, sure. That’s not correct for most people.
> state taxes are filed at the same time and each state has its own separate system
Can we stop pretending like this is a problem insurmountable for the federal government?
This idea that TurboTax can make this work but the government can’t is absurd.
That is correct for most people. 90% of people according to the IRS take the standard deduction.
Interest income from your bank account comes on a 1099 and it takes 30 seconds to add onto your 1040. I do it every year.
25% of returns include the child tax credit and 16% include the earned income tax credit. These aren’t wealthy people filing with CPAs. These are lower income folks who specifically benefited from the IRS direct file program.
Again, you seem to simultaneously believe that nearly everyone has trivial taxes to file while believing that the government cannot reasonably support free direct filing for these people. I have to wonder how you reconcile these beliefs in your head. “I mean, this is so simple. Any moron can do it. But not the agency specifically responsible for handling trillions in tax revenue. Nah, too complex for them.”
Credits are applied after you take the standard deduction. You subtract the standard deduction, figure out your taxable income, then subtract credits and taxes already paid.
> These aren’t wealthy people filing with CPAs. These are lower income folks who specifically benefited from the IRS direct file program.
Lower income people were not using IRS direct file. That’s would be the economically rational thing to do, but this is exactly the market the strip mall CPA target. They also offer advances. I have tried and tried and tried to get lower income people to use free or direct file. Virtually none are interested. They have “their guy” who is getting them a great refund.
> Credits are applied after you take the standard deduction.
I did not state otherwise. The point is that you are misstating the complexity of the typical tax return. It is not in fact “enter your W-2, take the standard deduction, and done” for most people, even for those with relatively straightforward taxes.
> Lower income people were not using IRS direct file.
I don’t think the IRS has released this data. I do know that direct file was specifically limited to simple cases though.
I use free fillable forms. There are zero people on the planet who insist they are remotely as easy as Direct File.
The error messages are also wonderful, as they come a day or two after you submit, and are basically the output of XML schema validation.
Do these other countries described above know whether you had a kid or got divorced?
Yes, in many European countries dependents and marital status changes are registered in a national civil registry, which the tax authority can query directly.
Countries like the U.S., Canada, the U.K. cannot easily do that without huge data-sharing reforms.
Even the US knows that you've had a qualifying event, they're just being stubborn.
The federal government doesn't always know if you've had a child or if you've died. Not even specifically the IRS, but its possible for you to have a child and never involve any organization that reports to the federal government.
When I lived in the US(5 yrs), early 2000s, from my second year onwards, I used to receive a pre-filled 1040NR-EZ with my W2 info already printed/filled-in on it. Typically, I would just add a deduction, and mailed it back. Does that program not exist? Or was it only for NR?
You don't have to do that. There is no such requirement. You can fill out the forms for free.
But that's a bad solution. (Otherwise why do TurboTax et al even exist in the first place?)
IRS should just have a public free filing solution for everyone. If you have complicated taxes or want to do your own filing, you can still do that.
They do. https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form.... And no it isn't a bad solution. I use it every year.
From their description: "You do the work"
That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is: "We did your tax return for you based on all the information reported to us. Please click 'OK' to complete your return for the year."
The system he mentioned is usually equally simple for self-employed.
When I have had 1099s from consulting work it has also been very easy to file. Not quite as easy as Direct File could make it, but pretty damn easy.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
Also, Americans have to file both fed and state taxes (with different rules)
> Also, Americans have to file both fed and state taxes (with different rules)
And if that weren't enough, you've go municipal taxes too, in a few places like New York and Detroit.
Lol not really in practice.
Remember, Americans have to file taxes separately to the State and Federal government. The Federal government has little authority to dictate State taxes. The paperwork is in part a coordination problem between the State and Federal governments.
Basic taxes are trivial in the US if you just work to live, it is essentially one page. However, there is an extremely long and fat tail where the government has no way of knowing the correct details to compute your taxes. There are myriad subsidies and offsets that have to be accounted for, many of which depend on what State you live in.
If you earn a lot of money, like the tech people that frequent this website, you are much more likely to find yourself in that fat tail. It can become esoteric quite quickly. The Federal tax code has to accommodate the completely independent tax codes of all 50 States in a reasonable way.
Even so, Direct File was possible.
Until it wasn’t.
It is not that complex. RSU's or options are pretty straightforward.
Deductions can get esoteric if you sold a bunch of stock. Even then, not that bad.
Congratulations on having simple taxes. It can definitely get more complex.
There is a reason Americans spend staggering amounts of time and money on tax preparation. It is simple until it isn’t.
Yes, it's complicated because the tax code has been designed for special cases, where there is an opportunity cost to identify and use the special case, but that can be paid for with large enough savings. If hiring that tax preparer/accountant costs $1000 more, but reduces the tax by $1001, then it is economically worthwhile. But in reality, most people are not able to use these provisions and of those who technically can, only a few can use them efficiently.
If you mostly have income from wages, interest, and dividends, your tax is hard to reduce using special provisions and your return is easy to file. If you have a lot of income from business investments, property, minerals, esoteric securities, gambling, etc., then you have more places where you can use these things, and your taxes are accordingly complex.
Yes, the reason is Intuit.
RSUs are not straightforward: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676698
And options are worse.
All right, I guess I see your point. If you company doesn't handle the complexity, it can be a nightmare.
Where I've worked, they withhold the necessary number of shares from RSU's and it just gets taxed as W-2 income. Then, it shows up with the taxed cost basis in Fidelity so you don't get double taxed when selling shares. It doesn't appear like they have to factor in travel into that equation - that's only for your salary.
As far as options, it was similar where I was receiving them. The only issue I ever had exercising options was when the company whose stock I was trading changed names, and then the IRS suddenly believed all those options were 0 cost basis and wanted a bunch of money. That took two rounds of letters and a call to HR to get sorted out. Granted - laws have changed since then - that fiasco was 18 years ago.
>Where I've worked, they withhold the necessary number of shares from RSU's and it just gets taxed as W-2 income. Then, it shows up with the taxed cost basis in Fidelity so you don't get double taxed when selling shares.
The same as where I work (Schwab though for me, not Fidelity). However, they don't track wash sales for me. Do they track wash sales for you? From what I understand, federal law tells brokers to track wash sales for regular stock purchases and sales, but not for stock from vested RSUs, but still requires the stock holder to track wash sales for stock from vested RSUs.
>It doesn't appear like they have to factor in travel into that equation - that's only for your salary.
My employer also doesn't generally track travel for the purposes of taxes. But the state laws say I need to do it and file taxes based on my tracking.
Morgan Stanley at Work seems to track wash sales. Last year I had two vests in May, one week apart. I'd instructed the brokerage to sell some of those shares on vest. On the first date, I experienced a capital loss (less than $20), due to price movement between the RSU vesting and the broker selling the resulting stock. This was reported on the 1099B as a disallowed wash sale due to my acquisition of more stock with the second vest a week later.
Huh, very interesting. I wonder why Schwab doesn't do that.
AMT
If they genuinely can't work out what you owe, why bother paying it at all? Shouldn't there be a massive tax evasion problem?
There is actually a pretty massive tax evasion problem. Or at least the IRS is pretty sure there is, but they don’t have the resources to go after even a small fraction of them. The only thing that keeps people honest is the worry that if they lie, the IRS might already know (based on e.g. 1099 reports that go to the IRS), or they’ll get audited (which actually happens very infrequently).
Paying a private company so you can pay the government.
You guys need to raise your expectations.
Why won't a non-profit pick up the open-source code they released and modify it for 2026?
Everybody seems to care about this issue so much, so this feels like an extremely high-impact thing to do.
There are already ways to file your taxes for free or very cheap, e.g. https://www.freetaxusa.com. It would be hard for anyone to compete with a free or very cheap competitor, even as a nonprofit.
Yes, but Direct File moved us closer to a future where the government could pre-fill data for (and/or potentially just send a bill to) tax filers. Even if other free tax filing software exists, the loss of Direct File is painful because it was advancing the precedent of first party tax software.
That’s valid, but my comment was about why a (non-governmental) third party or charity wouldn’t want to take the open source Direct File software and run with it. If they aren’t actually the government running it, it completely loses its primary advantage.
Just because an org is non-profit doesn't mean that it isn't out for itself.
I’m currently making my way through a video series on Ancient Rome. Apparently, there were times when Rome contracted out the right to collect taxes from certain regions. So businessmen would bid on this, and the winner then had a limited time when they could go out and collect the taxes. If they managed to collect more than what they paid for the bid, that was their profit. It’s easy to see how this was heavily abused, and these “publicans” were hated by the people. They’re even referenced in the Bible; “sinners and publicans”. How long before the IRS considers this arrangement?
Isn't it great to have a government that serves corporations and not its people!
no
But corporations are people
Corporations are people, my friend!
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310
As long as they don't kill FreeFillableForms...
If they do, I'm filing paper. Clowns.
You know, the IRS is basically defunded, even not counting the whole shutdown thing. I wonder how many people need to file handwritten by mail before it becomes a significant problem
Gut feel is if 10% of taxpayers did it the system would be pretty well DOS'd.
IRS will absolutely go after regular people who just have a W-2 and maybe a couple of 1040 forms. It's easy to verify automatically.
But if you're a rich person with dozens of companies and complicated trusts? Yep, nobody is going to be looking.
This is incorrect - the higher your income the higher percent chance you have of being audited. (Also higher for very low income <25k)
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12521#:~:text=The%20I...
Because it's technically not "audit". They just send you an automated letter if they find any discrepancies: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/understanding-your-cp2000-se...
And they _will_ find them. For example, one year I forgot to add a line from one of 1040 forms to my return. I got a notification from the IRS about a year later that I have under-reported taxes.
And with the defunding of the IRS, they'll severely limit the complex audits.
"The IRS unit that audits billionaires has lost 38% of its employees since January, new data shows" https://www.icij.org/news/2025/03/the-irs-unit-that-audits-b...
"After mass firings, the IRS is poised to close audits of wealthy taxpayers, agents say" https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2025/03/after-mass-firings-...
It started requiring phone numbers and things and I stopped using it in favor of my own spreadsheet.
> It started requiring phone numbers and things...
a) You're already trusting them with every piece of information in your tax return. It'd cost like five cents to use that information to discover your phone number... if they're malicious, you're already fucked.
b) When? At the end of the process where you're doing stuff like attesting that you're not lied on your tax return? I don't remember them demanding a phone number up front, and I also don't remember whether or not I refused to provide a phone number at the end.
No, I didn’t enter PII into it, just let it do math, downloaded, and printed. Wrote contact info by hand.
(The efiling never worked for me, always complained about something esoteric.)
They’re just values as far as it’s concerned. And it is dumped every October. But phone # validation up front is too much, an overstep.
Like I said, I just used it for the calc ability so a spreadsheet works as well. Bit of work the first year, then tweak.
Weird. The electronic filing has worked flawless for me every year for the past like four or five years. Was the "esoteric" complaint delivered as an email after you'd submitted your paperwork? If so, then in my experience, that's because you've fucked up the data you input into the form and the IRS's backend has a funny-but-useful way of spelling that.
> But phone # validation up front is too much, an overstep.
They definitely didn't do this to me any of the years I've used them to file taxes. When did you file yours? Did you file them long after the 2024 taxes were due?
Started asking about two or three years ago at registration, didn’t try last year. My return is complicated and it couldn’t handle some obscure form. But don’t remember which. On time.
> Started asking about two or three years ago at registration...
Very odd. I wonder (but not enough to investigate) what's so different between your situation and mine that I'd not be asked for a phone number during initial configuration.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-fillable-forms/free-fil...
"Email and phone verification
If you are not receiving the verification codes, from both sources, you will not be able to create an account:"
The 1040 has a spot for phone number too...
The 1040 has a spot for both a phone number and an email address. The 1040 instructions make it completely clear that both are optional.
[sorry](https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...)
That's about it being closed for the 2025 tax year (because the filing deadling has passed), not about the program being shut down.
Why innovate when you can be a perpetual rentier?
The Trump Administration is hell bent on doing everything it can to benefit large corporations at the expense of the American people.
Cash App offers free Fed and State filing and it's quite good (used it last year for the first time). Not many people know about it though.
If anyone's interested, the CashApp tax prep section (kind of its own app, but its contained within the CashApp app) is a feature they have purchased from CreditKarma when CreditKarma got bought out by Intuit (turbotax pricks).
So I had filed taxes with CreditKarma one year, and then the next year the CreditKarma tax service had no information about my previous filing. So I tried out the CashApp app, since I was going to have to fill out all the info anyway, and it actually did have my information from the previous year and I only had to change the new information, rather than re-enter all of my address and employer info, etc.
So I also recommend the CashApp app - it's free for basic taxes, it's not helping turbotax and their relentless lobbying, and it's really convenient if you already use CashApp. Of course, all of this is subject to change any specific year. Big companies gonna big company, after all.
> it's free for basic taxes,
Not just the basics. I found that it could do everything I needed including Schedules C, D and E.
IIRC, its limitations are if you're earning in multiple states, or are earning foreign income.
Oh, cool! I never used it past simple single-person filing, so it's good to know that it's still solid for more complicated situations.
FreeTaxUSA
https://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/
What was wrong with using Free File Fillable Forms in the first place? It's the real deal forms just online and with nothing obscured or sugar coated.
I use it every year, and while I wouldn't exactly say I enjoy doing my taxes, I do enjoy being fully aware what I'm filing and not being forced to do it on paper just because others have obtuse opinions or are lazy.
I've used the fillable forms before; the problem is that to fill them out with confidence - to even know with confidence which ones you should be filling out - requires more knowledge of tax law than the average person can reasonably be expected to possess.
Now, the various self-filing software products also feel a lot like guessing, but at least they walk you through which guesses are mostly likely to be correct and can catch the most egregious errors.
The form that you fill out has a very tearse description of the field, but the actual instructions are in a separate document. For example, form 1040 is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf and the instructions document is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
The instructions make it very clear when a field in the form should be used and what should go in it.
Yes, obviously, everyone knows that. When all you have to file is a 1040, reading one of the instructions documents is fine. When you have to use several forms it start to add up.
I've filed my own taxes for years and have a complicated set up; real estate, stocks, rsus, espps, private shares, amt, etc ... It's extremely straightforward and takes less time than using turbotax if you've done it before. The instructions are obvious.
You can also call the IRS and be told for free what the rules are. People pay h&r block and Intuit when the irs is extremely responsive and will connect you with an actual American irs rep to answer your questions.
People pay for the software because they've been marketed to not because they need it. For the situations that are actually hard, then a software like TurboTax is useless.
Also if you get the numbers wrong the IRS just corrects it
> Yes, obviously, everyone knows that.
It's pretty clear that daemonologist did not know that. Which is weird, given that all the tax law the average USian needs to know is "Read and follow the instructions for Form 1040.".
(RIP 1040-EZ. You were a good form.)
Also, I've had to file several forms in the past. It 'adds up', but it's all mechanically following instructions... not anything difficult.
Following forms is easy. The hard part is knowing if you need to file a form.
> The hard part is knowing if you need to file a form.
In my experience, the form instructions tell you clearly when you should and should not file a form. They also clearly indicate which other forms are to be filed when you meet specific conditions (income limits, possession of specific other forms, etc.).
Granted, I don't run a business, nor do I have exceptionally complex finances, so there are a great many IRS form instructions that I have never seen. Because I've not see them all, I'd never say that every such form instruction is clear, but the ones I've encountered have been.
Unless you have a unreasonably complicated return, you need absolutely no knowledge of tax law. It's all just "take the number from box X on form A and write it in box Y of form B."
Yes. I've used Free filllable forms several times. For basic tax situations, and even mildly complex ones, the problem isn't so much that it is hard as that it is very tedious.
It involves reading a lot of instructions, with many references to other documents and other sections. It involves copying a lot of numbers from one place to another, and doing basic math on them to get a new one.
It could be improved a lot just by automatically calculating more fields, and adding more of the "worksheets" that are in the instructions into the forms so it can calculate those for you.
> It could be improved a lot just by automatically calculating more fields, and adding more of the "worksheets" that are in the instructions into the forms so it can calculate those for you.
It already does this. The form validation checks that you have filled in the required fields and on most forms about half of the field values are not user-editable and instead auto-calculated from the other half.
It also looks for the required related forms you should have attached. The worksheets are another matter and aren't required to be attached, so they aren't part of the validation. It's assumed that you have read the instructions and done the worksheets elsewhere, although you certainly can attach them anyway.
> It already does this
For some things. But there are also several fields that could be calculated, but aren't.
> It's assumed that you have read the instructions and done the worksheets elsewhere
Yes, but it would be helpful if it had something to do the worksheets as part of the site instead of you having to do the worksheet elsewhere.
yes, the worksheets especially are tedious when they could be automatically calculate with relatively little effort in most cases.
Why does anyone want a better option when a worse option is available…
The article touts the ~300k users of direct file as a big number, and the “just 3% of eligible tax payers” used free file as a small number.
Wouldn’t the 3% number come out yo millions of people?
Direct File did have a lot of limitations, so I assume when they say “eligible taxpayers” that’s the total number of people that could have used Direct File, which is much less than 100% of taxpayers. Even then, I’d assume more than 10 million people in the U.S. have very simple tax returns.
Yes, and also, there's a difference between Free File and Direct File, and the article kind of switches between referring to the two.
Free file: government partners with private companies to offer free tax returns through their software for low income people. It's suspected a lot of people don't know about it, and just use the paid versions of filing software because you have to start the process on IRS.gov and dark patterns were employed by the snakes at Intuit et al. Hence "just 3%". Been around for decades.
Direct file: New program (since 2024) for eligible people to file directly for free with the IRS, no third party tax software middleman. Only half the states are eligible, income criteria, simple taxes only. 300,000 touted as a bigger number because it's a very new program.
Ok, fine, I’ll use TurboTax.
I live and work abroad and Turbotax requires a US billing address to pay the fee of using Turbotax. :facepalm
All the other self-service options do not work and I’m not sure if the risk is worth it to file it myself.
To my fellow Expats, what are you doing?
I pay $500 a year for an accountant to do my taxes for me. And then tell me I owe nothing. Support the Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad group, they’re working on fixing this.
If your accountant doesn't give you the forms AND worksheets, change accountant.
They do. The problem isn’t understanding the numbers, they gave me last year, it’s making sure I am doing things correctly for both my US taxes and Norwegian taxes, including following the specifics of the US/Norway tax treaty.
If your tax situation isn't too complicated, it actually isn't too hard to fill out the forms yourself[1]. But if you are living abroad, unfortunately your tax situation probably isn't that simple.
[1]: Although I find it incredibly frustrating the lengths they go to to avoid negative numbers on the forms.
Does FreeTaxUSA work for you?
TurboTax is one of the products of Intuit, the company that's fucking us all over with this - its not fine, stop being ok with it.
As one of those ~300,000 that filed with Direct File these last two years I’m sad and disgusted.
Guess I get screwed so some asshole at Intuit can make an extra twenty bucks.
Direct File won’t happen in 2026, Intuit tells IRS
This is the correct headline
Very related discussion from 6 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267
This wont bode well.........
[flagged]
Not only are Americans dumb, they're incredibly ego driven and stubborn. That means Americans always think they're right. Everyone else is doing it wrong.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
I'm American. If you don't buy into the insane status-symbol ego culture, it's daily insanity of excess consumption and selfishness.
The worst part is no one wants to hear this. There's a crazy culture of "Saying anything is mean". We shove our heads in the dirt all the time.
Yeah, it's incredibly dumb to pay Turbo Tax when you could just fill in the forms yourself for free. But that has nothing to do with Direct File.
Direct File won’t happen in 2026, Intuit TurboTax tells states[1]
There, fixed that for you.
[1] Very related discussion six months ago posted by me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267
With the rise of AI there is no excuse on why tax software should be so hard to make.
The entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
No tax software or expert will never produce a wrong answer, because too many questions have no guaranteed right answer, due to inconsistent interpretatios within the IRS.
Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.
People file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.
>it can NEVER produce a wrong answer
As the government it should be possible to reduce the negative impact of making mistakes.
>Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
Then start simple. You don't have to cover all of tax law at the start.
1% of returns filed by tax software have errors, which is infinitely more than 0%
You’re going to give your tax data - some of the most sensitive data to some constituents - to OpenAI / Google / some other startup?
That seems like a nightmare of a product as far as privacy is concerned.
Fwiw they have already bought all you financial info from Experian
https://theworknumber.com/solutions/products/income-employme...
I was flabbergasted when I heard of this. Basically you are totally transparent for anybody who wants to spend some money.
Being an American with so much freedom is so refreshing
Oh shit, wait.
I think they meant that it should be a lot faster to develop software that implements the tax code with the assistance of AI coding tools.
You need legal documents to be accurate and deterministic, not for some LLM to make shit up and have you inadvertently and incompetently lie to the IRS.
The only reason I care about companies having my data is that it means the government can get to it. In this case I am required to give my data to the government anyway, so why would I care if OpenAI / Google has it?
ISTM one ought to be able to use AI to translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format. No personal data needs to go anywhere near the AI.
Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.
> translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format
The instructions for each form published by the IRS every year are already written by professional technical writers to be unambiguous. Do you mean that someone ought to write a simplified english grammar transpiler? I think that would genuinely be interesting. What's missing are the guidelines the technical writers are using, but that can probably be derived.
Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target, lest it be mistaken for, and contribute to, that which it intends to criticize.
Also, a good satire presents what the author believes is the right thing as well as ridiculing the wrong thing. "A Modest Proposal" is famous for the proposition that the Irish should eat their own babies - ridiculing the obviously wrong solution of blaming the Irish for their problems but it also explicitly lists things that would work in the guise of dismissing them as unworkable. Ideas like taxing the people who own everything in Ireland (many of whom were not Irish), and that's much less famous but it's right there in the text.
I'm surprised that there hasn't been an "this is good for bitcoin" comments yet.
Turbo tax is free for federal filers with no business income, same thing as this service. Except now no taxpayer dollars were spent on maintaining this. This would have been useful if it also did state taxes, which turbo tax is not free for.
No business income (including no Uber/doordash/etc due to schedule SE?), no dividends over $1500, no itemized deductions, no capital gains, no nanny (like you hiring a nanny), no unemployment income, no gambling winnings, no alimony, etc etc
They were rolling out matching services state by state. Something like 12 last year. And Turbo tax is NOT "free for federal filers with no business income". Just look at the Costco Turbotax stands every year.
The federal government doesn't do state taxes.
Luckily for me, my state rolled out its equivalent of Direct File a couple years ago, and it's fantastic. Just like Direct File was.
Wasn't part of the impetus for the free file program because TurboTax actively hid the free filing options?
I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...