Why can't I log in, see what information employers and banks and whatnot have submitted about my income, add any pertinent information about deductions or additional income, appeal any inaccurate information, then click 'request refund' or 'pay dues', select which bank account to use from the information they already have, and be done?
Subsiding smaller companies to compete with the larger ones isn't going to fix the problem, it's just going to entrench the industry and empower more lobbyists.
Companies report my salary to our version of the IRS, banks report my loans etc. Before I started a company my yearly tax session took about 2 minutes.
The refunds are automatically sent to the registered account, you can pay outstanding money directly online after clicking submit.
Lobbyists like the article said.
I think they dropped that agreement in like 2019, but I haven't been following.
Intuit spends a lot of money lobbying here, I suspect because they make a lot of money off getting people who qualify for free tax filing to pay for it by either tricking them or making scary statements about getting audited and fined for screwing up a 1040EZ.
I guess it’s just corruption. business as usual for the US.
The private firms just got greedy because the IRS hasn’t reeled them in.
Maybe IRS execs still suffer under Reagan-era propaganda? (government is always bad. government should never compete with private industry)
It was, exactly, a handout to private tax firms.
This is exactly how it works here in The Netherlands.
Description below is from the podcast episode page:
> Back in 2005, a group in California decided we could make filing taxes dramatically simpler in the US as well. Lots of Americans could receive tax forms in the mail that were pre-filled out by the government. All they'd need to do is check for errors and send the forms back in.
> Joseph Bankman, a law professor at Stanford, thought this was such a no-brainer, that he offered to test out the idea with some California taxpayers. It turned out to be a huge success. Other states thought about using the plan. Even California's governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, supported it.
> Bankman thought getting ReadyReturn through the California legislature would be smooth sailing. He was wrong.
today for filling in your company or self assessment tax return there's a perfectly usable website on gov.uk (it's not perfect, but acceptable)
and for next year HMRC have just decided to... turn it off, offering no replacement whatsoever
you're supposed to pay a third party for to pay your tax, which is completely insane
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The entire government top to bottom from the most mundane and local stuff to the feds makes money hand over fist on the additional friction of appeals not being worth it. You will never get that feature. They will fight tooth and nail to prevent a situation where it's easy to add that feature.
People are focused too much on the tooling. Do you think having the government re-write TurboTax software and give it away for free is a good idea? Do you think they would do it cheaper? They literally employee hundreds or even thousands of people to support this software.
You'll pay one way or another, whether its tax payer funding of IRS or through TurboTax. I guess the question is whether you think some government agency can write tax software more efficiently than a private company.
Some people don't understand software and think it doesn't require maintenance, which is especially wrong when you're trying to work with ever changing federal and state tax codes. I'm surprised whenever I see this issue on HN, presumably an engineering heavy group, this idea of "free tax filing software" is so popular.
I'd prefer they simplify the tax code and this problem takes care of itself
"We need to incentivize [green tech|solar panels|electric cars|homeownership|child care|education|capital investments|...]" just translates to more complicated tax laws.
Even if 100% of that is to make taxes complicated. Is their lobby somehow driving the complicated tax code and if we just tell them "cut it out" or have the government spin up its own TurboTax, something that other private companies have not been able to do successfully at scale, it'll somehow stop?
I don't get the point other than people don't like paying for stuff they think should be free. But my point is there is a real cost to helping people fill out their taxes, and I'd prefer that's done on the private side as government isn't historically good running at running tech companies. Either way you pay, just one you have a choice and it's explicit how much it costs and the other is another murky inefficient government run agency.
https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/turbotaxs-intuit-spent-re...
It is normal for governments to use incentives to drive their policy objectives. If they want to incentivize home ownership for example, the resulting increase in complexity of the tax code may be a reasonable trade off.
Intuit is just trying to get a government guarantee that their business model will continue to exist, without their being any positive public policy angle to compensate for the negative externality. In other countries free tax filing is the norm, because although they have the same types of incentives to promote policy objectives, the government has not allowed themselves to become captive to someone like Intuit.
For example, I have filled my taxes in myself (for free) in the UK for about 20 years now. It used to be a (simple) paper form. Then around 15 years or so ago it changed to be web or paper (your choice) and now they strongly incentivise web over paper. For the last 2 or 3 years all the important details of my income and pension are already filled out automatically from the record they get from my employer and I only need to fill in the capital gains and charitable giving parts of my return.
To ease pain IRS should do one simple thing. Show the list of mandatory incomes the tax obligations based on those numbers.
The same for states too.
This simple thing can be done for businesses too.
It takes away the guess work and fear of miscalculation and prevents shady companies operating.
*(I know about the efforts to maintain Free File externally, but the question then becomes for people in states that need to file onwards, will they be able to continue onwards with their state in a similar way? I'm in NY, so this is a big one for me.)
Basically no taxpayers like the current situation. It persists because the government itself likes it hence why seemingly flimsy low effort lobbying is all it takes to persist the status quo.
If the government says "check this box if you X" and people are mislead and check the box and the government fucks them for it they will complain to politicians who will (pretend to) fix it, likely at the expense of the bureaucracy.
If the 3rd party "check this box if you X" and people are mislead and check the box and the government fucks them the government can say "well it's your responsibility" and the 3rd party can say "well you signed the liability waver" and the racket can basically go on to infinity as long as they keep tweaking it to prevent a class action.
We really don't need a conspiracy theory here. There are republican legislators and lobbyists who have said, in public, repeatedly, that one of their goals is to make paying taxes difficult and painful.
There's also a billion dollar indurstry who profits from the status quo.
What more do you want?
The congressional hearings over this are going to be excellent CSPAN viewing.
bediger4000•2d ago
From this one item, we can see that DOGE does NOT exist to reduce or eliminate waste, but rather has another motivation. Because it is secretive, unaccountable, and not elected, we can easily predict DOGE will diverge further and further from its putative purpose. Because its real purpose isn't known, we will have to infer that from its actions.
Less obvious, DOGE will become a huge problem. It's possible US citizens will dispose of it in just as undemocratic a fashion as it was created