There shouldn't be a stand-alone TurboTax-like tool to fill out analogs of paper forms; it should just be a part of the IRS web page.
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.
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.
Larrikin · 44m ago
You can't because the entire political point from one party is to make taxes as painful as possible, something you have to waste your time every year doing and thinking about, and then as a bonus get kick back donations from lobbyists who profit making tax software. Free file was s step in the right direction to the ideal but there are a lot of people trying to pull back the end goal.
AlecSchueler · 4h ago
> 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?
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.
blibble · 40m ago
the UK has actually gone backwards on this
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
duttish · 5h ago
This is kind of how it works here, Sweden.
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.
mistrial9 · 5h ago
Sweden outlawed cash? all income is discoverable in electronic records?
nevon · 4h ago
Obviously you can report additional income also on the website. For example, I report income from Github Sponsors every year so that I can pay my taxes on that. The same would apply if you got paid for something in cash, for whatever reason.
fastasucan · 1h ago
An employer should report qhen they pay their employees no matter how they do it.
piperswe · 5h ago
Most people don't have enough income outside their job to worry about
potato3732842 · 1h ago
>, appeal any inaccurate information
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.
fastasucan · 1h ago
Its like this in my country, and I agree that its how it should be. Not reason to shop around after a turbo tax program, just a well made overview over what financial data the government have of me and an ability to adjust if there are any errors.
seanhunter · 4h ago
That’s how it works in the UK. All the basic tax info in your return is already filled out and you only have to give a bit of additional info which is very easy to do. The website is a standard website and is built with accessibility in mind so it actually works on Firefox for example.
qhwudbebd · 42m ago
This is true for personal tax, but HMRC has been successfully bribed by Sage et al. not to support web-based returns for partnerships or companies.
vizzier · 59m ago
This is true with the caveat that some special cases (like filing UK tax from overseas) isn't supported, or wasn't last time I attempted to use HMRC's site directly. You can use things like gosimpletax.com for that though.
janeerie · 4h ago
That's the direction Direct File was aiming in. This year it was able to import W-2s and limited other data, but the vision was always to bring in as much info as possible.
I think people vastly underestimate the degree to which having a necessary 3rd party interpret the tax code down to plain-ish english serves as a liability transfer from the government to that 3rd party and the taxpayer.
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.
wredcoll · 30m ago
> 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.
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?
bediger4000 · 7h ago
This is a telling decision. Free tax filing should be the norm. The nearly mandatory, third-for-profit-party tax software is so obviously detrimental to both citizens and government. Block and Intuit making fortunes is prima facie waste, which DOGE putatively exists to eliminate.
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
kotaKat · 2h ago
I'm one of the genuinely very happy and very grateful users of IRS Free File, and I'm genuinely pained to know I'm going to be fucked moving forward trying to file my taxes because of these moves -- and for what, for me to have to go through more hoops and make sure some dickhead at Intuit can buy another yacht?
*(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.)
chopete3 · 3h ago
I have been filing taxes myself for the last 20 years, from $10k income to a bigger number with family.
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.
bko · 5h ago
Tax software isn't expensive and complicated just because. It's expensive and complicated because the tax code is expensive and complicated. Otherwise there would be a ton of free tools.
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
meisel · 4h ago
TurboTax and other tax companies don’t just lobby to prevent a free filing solution, they also lobby for more complicated tax laws to create a greater need for their product
bko · 4h ago
Literally every special interest group lobbies for more complicated tax laws.
"We need to incentivize [green tech|solar panels|electric cars|homeownership|child care|education|capital investments|...]" just translates to more complicated tax laws.
seanhunter · 3h ago
There is a material difference between all of those examples and Intuit though.
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.
mrtesthah · 3h ago
Your comment doesn’t refute the heart of the argument—it’s just “whataboutism”.
bko · 2h ago
What's the gps argument? That intuit lobbies? In 2024 that amount was ~$3.8m.
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.
The argument is that Intuit engages in corrupt practices to boost their profits at the expense of american taxpayers' time and money, by complicating tax code and limiting the development of government-funded solutions. Your comparison to other forms of lobbying doesn't change that, and neither does sowing doubt about the efficacy of said lobbying; these practices are unethical and wrong regardless of your ideologically-motivated justifications.
ryandrake · 3h ago
For the vast majority of taxpayers, who have only W2 income and take the standard deduction, the tax code is not complicated. Those taxes can be done with a pen and calculator, or an excel sheet if you want to get fancy. No complex tax law rules needed.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Lobbyists like the article said.
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?
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
*(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...