I work at Code for America on the Tax Benefits team, and we're working on a different website to apply for the Child Tax Credit. (See https://www.getctc.org/ and https://www.getyourrefund.org/. )
From the original article:
> Alas, all [People's Policy Project's website] can do is funnel users into Intuit's terrible [child tax credit] site.
Today at work, I'm learning how to use the IRS's e-File SOAP API in the hopes that we can build a flow that is easier to use than Intuit's.
Feel free to subscribe to our newsletter. :) https://info.codeforamerica.org/newsletter
See also https://www.codeforamerica.org/news/meet-code-for-americas-n... for how we're thinking about this work.
How did you get access to the SOAP api? Doesn't it need a bunch of verification and special dev accounts with IRS ? Would be great for the docs to be public.
>To receive the distribution of schema packages, you must have an active e-services account and be listed on an e-File application with the provider option of Software Developer. Your role on the e-File Application must be Principal, Responsible Official, or a Delegated User with MeF authorities. If you are a registered user in e-services and are listed on a State e-File application, you will receive this distribution.
We followed the process with the IRS, doing a bunch of verification as you said, which gave us access to the API docs. We're only part-way through the full process of becoming an Online Provider per https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3112.pdf
I wish it were simpler. I get why the IRS wants to verify who is submitting tax data to them, though.
I've been transferring into rust consulting but i used to help companies get registered on various federal contracts, agreements, DUNS, SAM ETC.
I don't know too much about the specific program but after skimming the pub you posted i may be able to provide some value. I'd be willing to help you out for free as I really like what you guys are doing. Feel free to email me at lrhoades at gsacontractpros.com if you're interested.
Nice. Will you open source the code and docs at all?
I do get why the irs wants to vet submitters in production but you can't even get the detailed info for development without going through the long verification process.
I wanted to do this since I have extensive experience in implementing SOAP clients and interfacing with ancient legacy systems so I am very interested in any public way to contribute
I was just about to suggest that rather than contract out for an end-user application that the IRS create a webservice and let people build front-ends for it. Too bad it's SOAP, but its not the end of the world. If you make you're app open source I'd contribute.
Huge props to your team. Making this tax credit readily available is what, 20 questions of CRUD… So 2,000 lines of code that 10 million people could use to make $3,000 dollars, that’s so $30b of value.
Please make this happen. We need open source code driving this kind of value proposition. Frankly the gov’t should be funding you to make this happen.
Are you blogging your progress and documenting the pitfalls and roadblocks along the way?
Intuit is consistently one of the least ethical actors in tech. They have a monopoly position in many of their products and take advantage of some of the poorest people through misinformation and lobbying.
Facebook & Uber have received most of the heat over the past few years. Intuit has strangely avoided the same level of scrutiny.
For sure. The IRS needs to offer a tax preparation platform, the grift in this industry is astounding. I've always had decent experiences with TurboTax, but they've gotten extremely good at making your taxes hell if you want to avoid giving them $89.99.
“ProPublica has long detailed how Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and other companies have worked against making tax preparation easier and less costly. They have lobbied to ban the IRS from offering free, simple tax filing. And they have deceived customers who should qualify for the Free File product.”
I find this criticism somewhat weird. It is very common for companies or even individuals to promote and support policies that benefit themselves. Intuit is seeking self interest here. But why would IRS and our elected representatives cave in ? Are these people so clueless or unethical that they do not care about their constituents anymore ? And if that is the case I don't see how anyone can bell the intuit's cat.
By your logic, here, an independent actor doing something to terminate the employees and stakeholders of Intuit would be completely blameless, if not celebrated by the people of the United States.
It's not even a slippery slope to imply that acting in self-interest is always excusable: By the time you've gotten to that point, you're already at the bottom of any and every slippery slope. There are lines that we as a species have collectively are inexcusable to cross in self-interest, and without them life gets a lot worse for nearly everyone.
Generously interpreted, I think they are questioning why we're criticizing Intuit for doing it when we don't necessarily criticize other companies for it.
It is a simple bargain. US representatives are dependent on fundraising and endorsements for re-election which lobbyists are happy to offer in exchange for help with their agenda.
They're capitalizing on a generalized anti-government and anti-IRS sentiment. It's not difficult for them to convince representatives that the IRS would do it badly, and it should be left up to the free market.
They made, and basically broke, an agreement with the IRS. But it's really not easy for a government agency to say, "No, you broke the roles, so our agreement is void". It would basically take a lawsuit, which would be ugly, expensive, and time-consuming.
It's not so much a matter of simply "caving", as that Intuit has gotten itself entrenched and it's difficult to dig them out. In theory it's not impossible, but it would require a ton of work, time, and will. Such things are very hard to come by, especially when you're the IRS and everybody already is predisposed to hate you.
Hypothetical:
I make kerosene.... we made a bad batch that doesn't burn just right and could hinder products it's used in...
We're located in California.
We've paid politicians to look the other way while we drop it over forests, in fire zones. It's a lot easier than getting rid of it other ways.
We're enriching ourselves which is the American way, so there's definitely no problem with this, even though it may make fire season a major bitch for some people, luckily all our CEO's have homes in safer areas that won't be affected....
^ Are you saying you'd say to the above scenario: I have no problems with this.
If the answer to the above question is you would say that...
What's it like to be devoid of morality? Is there anything resembling a conscious at all?
This year we tried doing our taxes using both TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA.
TurboTax has a much worse interface, it took almost twice as long to complete the taxes despite having an identical return. TurboTax did find about $50 more return for us somehow despite having entered the same information into both sites, but that amount is less than the fee TurboTax would charge so we ended up submitting through FreeTaxUSA instead.
Next year I don't think I'm even going to bother with TurboTax.
It may be apocrypha, but supposedly Intuit years ago realized that people don't think the system "worked hard enough" if results returned immediately. (These kind of calculations are what computers do well and generally return immediately.) Supposedly Intuit has been A/B testing for decades how many artificial delays to give people the impression that the system is "working harder" for them. They intentionally want their interface to be worse and "slower" because of the idiot dark pattern that our dumb monkey brains think that "serious things" like taxes need lots of "calculation time".
It wasn't even the stupid "spinning numbers" thing that slowed us down. Mostly it was being locked into wizards asking us one question at a time.
Dialog:
Do you have foreign bank accounts? Y/N
Next dialog:
Do you have foreign investments? Y/N
Next dialog:
...
For every single damn thing. FreeTaxUSA put them all in a list so we just clicked on the applicable ones. It was much more efficient.
And if you have to go back and double check/change something TurboTax makes you go through the whole damn wizard again.
TurboTax is supposedly able to import my W2 automatically (I work for a large corporation that use a large professional third party company to do W2s), but this has never worked. I always have to enter the information by hand.
I always go to the forms and ignore the interview.
I haven't found any other software that is practical to use in this way and has all the forms I need.
I tried H&R Block's free software one year, I think, because I was mad at Intuit, but it was useless because there were big gaping holes in the functionality.
I'm curious what the big gaping holes are. I've used H&R and its predecessor, TaxCut, to do my returns for like 20 years (minus 1 or 2 years where I hired a CPA due to complicated investments and tax credits). I find it very straightforward and fast to use.
Well, I've never had employee stock options or RSUs; my needs probably differ from the typical HN commenter.
Using the word "big" may be misleading. The point is, if anything isn't quite right, it's "gaping" because what's the fallback?
And as I said, I go directly to the forms, and the free option I tried was only interview-style. I could've predicted it wouldn't work, but I did give it a try to make sure.
I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but I don't think your experience relates to mine, because I was using the free version.
I imagine there is a very hazy line between the free version being designed for typical users without sophisticated taxes and "dark patterns" designed to frustrate someone into paying.
The pay version may be better, but I wouldn't have any motivation to try it, assuming that the wizard/interview is required.
I got totally screwed last year job wise. 2 of my employers have not reported my tax contributions to the state. I never received a W2 from one of them. TurboTax was able to find all my W2 from the HR companies, but I was unable to access those HR websites for my W2s. Because my contributions weren’t reported to the state I have to get all my W2 (luckily it was in my federal return) and resend them to the state. I hate TurboTax, but I wouldn’t have been able to file my taxes this year without them.
The basic process is to:
1. Contact your employer and have them send you a W2
2. If your employer does not send you your W2 by the end of February, contact the IRS and they'll send you a Form 4852
3. If you still haven't received a W2 in time to file taxes, then you can file using the Form 4852 instead
4. If you receive the W2 after filing and the actual numbers differ from your estimates, then you have to file an amended return.
> I’m not doing that under any circumstances. I’d rather get audited
I’ve run into issues with the IRS over incorrect filings.
I am not a tax attorney or an accounting professional, but I strongly advise you to rethink your position.
Under no circumstances do you want to get audited by the IRS instead of complying with the Federal Tax Code.
Once the IRS begins its investigation, you will be obligated to pay the costs of complying with their requests, which costs may very well dwarf the costs of complying in the first place.
I don’t have any money. I literally lost everything I have accrued in my life in the last 18 months. That fact that I’m not at bankruptcy door is because of what little stimulus we got. So no, I’m too exhausted to deal with the IRS. If they care, they can serve me and drag me to court because I won’t comply at all.
This is the sort of critical thing. You do your taxes once a year but the impact could be hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. In your case it was only 50 but thematically this says that TT is better because it found you more credits/deductions. You don't know it's gonna "only" be 50 ahead of time. And the more complexity/money is at stake, the more important it is to get right. Once you are talking about potentially real money, the quality of the UI becomes quite secondary in my opinion.
Don't get me wrong, would love for the IRS to offer a standard free filing solution. But short of that, I want the thing that is most likely to get me the biggest legal return
It could also be that TurboTax gets $50 less on the next person. I was working with only a single datapoint. Also, from what I recall the extra $50 seemed to be coming from TurboTax counting a deduction for double what FreeTaxUSA did. I really didn't understand what it was doing there.
The quality of the UI likely reflects the quality of the overall system. If the UI is flashy trash, you really want to trust the same programmers with actual math? Source: programmer for 30 years
The person paying the taxes is not always expected to understand exactly how the tax code applies to them. IANAL but I think that when you hire a human tax accountant, their saying that your return is legally sufficient for you to testify that you are entitled to your return as filed. I don't know how that would apply to tax software, but I imagine that for purposes that TurboTax is appropriate for, saying "well TurboTax, a widely used and generally respected accounting tool generated this return, so I believe that it is correct," would be sufficient. Of course if it turned out that you were not entitled to the full refund you filed for, you would still be liable to pay back the difference, but you wouldn't be assessed an additional fine.
Again IANAL, this is how I expect the law would work, not necessarily how it actually works.
I did the same this year, but found that FreeTaxUSA's support for crypto transactions was basically non-existent. Filing through TurboTax was way less work than what I would've had to do with FreeTaxUSA.
H&R Block wanted to upcharge me additional $$ just to fill out a Schedule D on top of the $$ tier fee (the past few years these forms were included in that tier price). They lost a long term (10yr?) customer by trying to grift me this year.
I used https://www.taxslayer.com/ instead this past year, a bit more DIY but if you've done your taxes for years and they're generally the same year after year it's not that hard to read your docs and type them in the boxes. You pay for Support level, not tax form access with this service.
I'll second TaxSlayer (2nd year) after being a online TurboTax user for 12+ years, desktop app user years before that, and afraid and skeptical of jumping ship and losing "history", tired of the fake delays and dialogs.
Relatively stripped down UI/UX and few "waiting" dialogs and I have to assume a good savings of clicks vs. TT. I have a relatively easy joint return with little audit risk and basically in the "generally the same year after year" boat as well.
the IRS has actually partnered with the "Free File Alliance" which is a group of companies that partner with the IRS (Free tax filing for incomes < X).. So Saddly I feel the hope of the IRS just sending you a bill is slim.
Its a little weird. One would hope they would just send you the bill.. I filed my taxes late with an extension. I could go to the IRS site and get all the documents they had filed by banks and my employeer, for me. They have that info...
This is so bizarre looking in from the outside. I’ve spent my working life in two European countries, one where if you’re just a regular employee and not doing anything special you just approve and submit your prefilled tax return, and one where you under the same circumstances literally have do to nothing.
> I could go to the IRS site and get all the documents they had filed by banks and my employeer, for me. They have that info...
As Robotbeat says, this is literally because Intuit lobbied to ban the IRS from being able to do it for you -- which is also literally what TFA is all about. YTF do people comment on stuff they obviously haven't even read?!?
This year is the first year I've worked at a company that has stocks, ESPP plans, etc. and I'm curious what's the most effective way to file my taxes by myself if I don't use TurboTax? I've read that Credit Karma Tax (which looks like it got sold again to Cash app?) doesn't do a good job covering these scenarios.
Why not ask the question why taxes are so complicated? Ted Cruz advocated for post card tax filing but everyone hated it because it would have eliminated the winners-and-losers picking that the tax code gives politicians.
According to Ted Cruz, 9 billion hours is spent on tax compliance each year.
Tax rates should be low, deductions minimal, and compliance easy. The Laffer Curve demonstrates this value to government revenues. But the economic literacy of most people is so lacking that it always revolves into some kind of class-warfare debate.
Tangential, but related would be the UBI debate vs. welfare program.
Whatever side of the aisle you’re in when it comes to spending priorities, one thing that should be obvious is that simplification is a win for everyone except those with robust lobbying resources to fight for carve-outs.
We could spend more money with simpler, lower taxes that are applied evenly. Have a high standard deduction to protect the very poor and for every dollar over that, the government gets 10%. Simple. But the compliance industry would lose their minds. This “progressive” tax system we have is ridiculous because it isn’t progressive at all — those making money from capital gains pay less than wage-earners. Everyone should pay the same percentage regardless of the origin of funds.
> Ted Cruz advocated for post card tax filing but everyone hated it because it would have eliminated the winners-and-losers picking that the tax code gives politicians.
No, it wouldn't. Like every tax proposal, it was winners-and-losers picking, not an elimination of it. People opposed it because they didn’t like the winners and losers Cruz picked.
> The Laffer Curve demonstrates this value to government revenues.
No. The Laffer Curve says that if humans were rational - which they aren't - and if tax enforcement is 100% effective - which it isn't - then the expected revenue is zero at both 0% taxation and 100% taxation.
That's all it says. Every other point on the "curve" is arbitrary, and in practice Laffer uses this worthless conjecture about a hypothetical world that doesn't exist to justify cutting taxes on the rich, saying it will result in higher revenues. It doesn't of course, but as someone who benefits why should he care?
Around 2009 my taxes grew complicated enough that I could no longer do them by hand and had to start using tax software for them. I've consistently refused to use TurboTax because the company is so evil. H&R Block is not necessarily a more ethical company, but at the very least, there's not more unethical. (And I'm vaguely aware of there being some open-source tax software of some sort out there, but when I looked it was kind of janky and didn't seem to give me much of an improvement over filling out the forms myself. I'd love to learn that things have changed.)
does H&R Block handle investments and cost basis year over year information? That's the only tripping point im finding with whatever product I look to in comparison to Turbotax. Once your tax situation starts down that path I'm noticing getting a product that can pull from multiple investment accounts and keep track of cost basis correctly really narrows it down to Turbotax so far for me.
At that point why not engage an accounting firm? Yes it would probably cost more, but you're supporting your local economy and have a human being to discuss any questions with (as well as be responsible for any mistakes).
The last time I got a quote from a local accounting firm it was for $3,000. My tax situation is more complex than most but the difference between $150 for some paid software and an accounting firm is a lot. And the people working at the budget firms are basically just using TurboTax-equivalent software anyway.
The value proposition of a tax accountant is not usually crunching numbers. It's instead helping you find the optimal choices to make when filing, helping you model your situation in terms of tax code, and giving you advice about how to arrange your affairs the rest of the year to give you the biggest benefit come tax time.
The one I've used has consistently saved me more money in taxes than he costs. That said, my tax situation is also nowhere near complicated enough that an accountant has ever asked the order of magnitude you were quoted, so YMMV of course.
There's still a big jump in cost between, for example TurboTax Premier tier ($90 federal + $50 state = $140) and a CPA (where I've been quoted $400-$600). I don't think the level of service justifies the cost. I tried a professional once in my life, and he basically just asked me all the same questions the software would have asked me, and typed them in to his system for me. 3X-4X the cost for the services of a typist doesn't seem like a good deal.
A CPA takes a risk doing your taxes. They are responsible if something goes wrong. That is probably $400 an hour. If you are paying less than that make sure it’s actually a CPA doing your taxes. There may be a CPA at the firm, but unless they sign and do your taxes you aren’t protected by their liability.
An accountant with a CPA could have ten or twenty seasonal temps working under them, but at the end of the day they will review and sign the outgoing product. They are liable and will be on top of your case if the IRS comes to bother you, but don't expect the personal attention of the CPA.
Also, personal accounting is an increasingly niche industry.
That’s only if the CPA is in that position. My mom has worked at places where they had a CPA on staff, but they were only doing here for consulting. They never reviewed or signed anything.
2. Taxable capital gains of various kinds, including stock, options, and 1256 contracts
3. Self employment business (consulting) with multiple clients and deductions for various business expenses.
All of this took less than 2 hours and most of the data was digitally imported from various portals.
I'm guessing it would cost me at least an order of magnitude more and take similar time to do it through an accounting firm.
So i'm kind of split, on the one hand intuit is an evil company and i hope our tax system is changed/irs no longer uses them/etc. On the other hand I really don't want to spend extra 1k+ on taxes OR spend tens of hours it would take me to assemble the 50+ page return on my own.
agreed. it's "more" money, but generally less headache, you can ask questions, and get answers specific to your situation, especially questions that may include state/local tax concerns as well.
I still do my taxes manually. I've looked for open-source software to assist. I've tried OpenTaxSolver, it is OK for what it does (basic 1040 and a few schedules like SE income and Schedule C). It does not come close to handling all possible scenarios.
It's possible that you could write your own modules to handle any mising forms, in fact I tweaked one calculation that wasn't handling some edge case properly. But that's more than most people would want to do, and would certainly be more work than just doing those forms manually with pen and calculator. But like any open-source project, it relies on individual efforts like that to build something that's useful to more people.
The UI itself is extremely minimalist and would not be regarded as "user friendly" by a user from the general public.
Edit: it also only attempts a few state returns. Mine is not one of them, but fortunately in my state the tax forms are pretty easy assuming the Federal return is done.
Is H&R block actually an independent code base? The last time I opened it, it looked like a page-for-page copy of TurboTax, which made me wonder whether it was just a white-label reskin of the same.
I've went through both H&R block and turbotax's flows this previous year, and although heavily inspired, it did not seem like a reskin. Certain info was organized differently, etc.
After being completely ready to spend $40 or whatever it was for the "Basic Premium" offering of each, BOTH H&R and turbotax silently upgraded me to "Self-employed" (I am not) and said I was free to pay the ~$100 or delete my account and make a new one.
"TaxSlayer" finally let me file for like $30 or something.
It's even worse - if you don't opt-out of the data sharing, they have an absolute field day with all your financial data.
They soak up a lot of the tech talent in San Diego, and every person I've met that works there on the TurboTax team has admitted to me that they feel ethically torn about what they do.
We compete with a business Intuit acquired, and the Quickbooks online API is blatantly hamstrung to make sure you can't get that kind of data in and out of their systems.
They had published spec'd out endpoints before the acquisition that just never happened. It's outright abuse, and harms their customers, but there's nothing we can do about it.
i reckon people hate filling out tax forms by hand more than turbotax… and within good reason, even if you’re educated it can be frustrating to simply read tax regulations (which turbotax translates to simple english), and there’s a lot of anxiety around messing it up
unfortunately turbotax is also one of the major players trying to prevent tax simplification… so they’ve got a great scheme going
anyway there are more and more free options every year so let’s hope that can start hurting them… I’ve used creditkarma for a couple simple years and it’s great
> even if you’re educated it can be frustrating to simply read tax regulations (which turbotax translates to simple english)
Not sure I agree with this statement. My experience with TurboTax is that the actual tax regulations are not that hard to read, and that TurboTax's translations do nothing to resolve the ambiguities of the tax code.
For example, the tax code might allow "deduction of reasonable expenses for blah blah blah" and the TurboTax "explanation" will be "You can deduct blah blah blah, but be sure the expenses are reasonable". Ok, what is "reasonable"? Oh, well, you know, reasonable.
It's like a high school student plagiarizing something they found on the internet by rearranging each sentence just enough that it isn't googleable.
Turbo tax is great if your income comes from one or more W-2 jobs (that pay cash) and a simple stock portfolio or investment properties. As soon as you start dealing with RSUs, stock options or (horror! ESPP), it starts becoming more trouble than its worth.
The ESPP thing is especially weird. Every office job I've ever had offered ESPP (so it's not some edge case). TurboTax will double tax your ESPP, unless you know the trick to enter your real cost basis[1]--and TT won't ever prompt you with "Hey, looks like you have some ESPP! Want a step-by-step guide to enter your cost actual basis so that you only pay as much tax as you actually owe?"
I really don't get the money side of US politics. How do these companies use money (presumably) do sway politicians? Just openly contribute to individual politicians/think tanks/PACs?
How do they launder the money Is that what the PACs do? Make sure Joe Politican can get the money, but isn't seen handed a bag of cash from a company?
Or is it simply that accepting campaign donations from corporations isn't seen as corruption by voters, so politicans can do it in the open?
It's utterly insane. It's insane how much influence money can have on politics, when it's basically entirely spent on election campaigns. (And some fancy fund-raising dinners, and stuff, but I think that is less important.)
It's insane that election campaigns are such an important and expensive part of politics. Accepting millions of dollars, and for what? To keep your job for another few years. Where the biggest part of your job is getting more money for the next campaign to keep it for another few years.
I'm not sure the money always even ends up in the hands of the politicians themselves. It's the unreasonable effectiveness of advertising. Honestly it probably mostly ends up in the hands of SV.
Here's one example: I've called my congressman to complain about his support for the Taxpayer First Act (which enables Intuit), his campaign received $16k from Intuit and H&R block. They spent a combined $6 million or so on lobbying to get it passed.
The act, among other things, removed the requirement for the IRS to report on their development of return-free tax filing.
Direct PAC donations are allowed up to $5k. Super PACs are meant to be independent, can't work directly with politicians or campaigns... and therefore have to such limits. They're very often used for "indirect" lobbying.
It's a scam and everyone knows it. The people empowered by the scam are the only ones who can change it.
What's telling is that TurboTax's UX is really, really, good, deceptive pricing aside. Like, so good I almost enjoy using it to do my taxes.
The very fact that Intuit has clearly invested money into making a beautiful interface for a tax program, a program that people use once a year, just goes to show how profitable the current arrangement is for them, and how determined they are to keep the average taxpayer from switching to any competing tax filing ecosystem.
It is well designed to hold you by the hand if you just go down the happy-path of what a user who has all their documents in hand when the right question pops up on the screen.
It's poorly designed for people who want to go back, people who just want to input their forms, and people who value their time. There is no reason each question needs to take up its own screen, instead of being a list. There is no reason it needs to pretend to calculate for 15 seconds after every few questions.
I disagree that their interface is good, even in the simplest tier.
I get absurd cosmetic delays and animations, text that's tweaked to be so pale and thin that it disappears in some browsers, and tedious wizard-style workflow that you have to traverse half a dozen times when the vague language doesn't match the data on your forms. And don't get me started on confusing between "activities" (that's the official term, not Intuit's fault) because there's no way to see where you are in the process or show an overview until the end, and the final result is in a different format that I can't reconcile with what I filled in.
It's really not. It's hard to keep track of where you are in your return and easy to get lost. You can't paste into any credential field for fetching information from your bank or other outside data source.
Have to disagree. It's overly optimized for getting every tax deduction over speed and the result is most users wasting tons of time.
Example: I know every year there is no way my itemized deductions will exceed the standard deduction. But there is no clear way to tell TurboTax to stop wasting my time on itemized deductions.
Their other big (maybe bigger?) cash cow for Intuit is Quickbooks. It's the system most small businesses use, because their accountants are integrated with it and push all their clients to use it.
And it's shocking how bad some of the QBO integrations are, especially for newish technologies. Intuit even screwed up PayPal in a way that some accountants don't want to use it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT5zKWBXtQU), forcing a labor intensive manual process.
It seems that if most accountants want to use Quickbooks, this would open a market opportunity for accountants willing to integrate with other accounting software.
Already said in this thread, but I think it's ridiculous that when people think about abusive big tech, they never think about Intuit.
Their business is literally the idea of creating friction in federal and local tax systems so they can extort people in exchange of removing some of those synthetic frictions (emphasis on "some").
The tax code is complex because people do not want to pay tax, and so anything that is ambiguous or underspecified becomes a loophole, the closing of which generally adds complexity to the code.
There exist countries with simple tax code, inhabited by people who do not want to pay tax. Therefore any valid explanation why US has a comparatively complex tax code must cite something specific about the US. A generic reference to human nature explains nothing.
Intiuit is medium-large tech, like a twitter, ebay, paypal, square, uber, etc. Also they pay crap and the work is uninteresting which is why nobody focuses on them.
They're actually fairly active in the Kubernetes world. I've watched some conference talks where they've presented on their ArgoCD platform. I could not imagine working for Intuit though. I don't know how they do it.
>I think it's ridiculous that when people think about abusive big tech, they never think about Intuit.
I don't know why you think people don't think that. I imagine that most people who have been informed will think along similar lines. Those who don't think it are likely not yet informed.
If you talk to people outside of tech circles and you bring up Turbotax into the conversation, you will notice that people have a relatively positive view of it.
Most people think of TurboTax as something that’s helping them to comply with their tax duties and navigate a complex tax system. They think of it as a helping hand when it comes to dealing with government bs.
Not surprisingly, most people think the complete opposite about the government.
So where Intuit is diabolically good, it’s at arbitraging those colloquial narratives and embedding itself in the middle as the savior. The good guy who is here to help.
They screw you, so they can later come and help you. As I said before, a sinister business model.
People need to stop calling companies “big tech” because every large cap company uses technology in a way that used to be exclusive to one tech industry.
Nintendo wasn’t a tech company for a long time but it made the switch. The same is true of Intuit, if most of your money comes from directly selling software/computer hardware ... your a tech company.
That’s still not true of most large companies like say Walmart or McDonalds which still invest a great deal in technology.
Obviously Microsoft or Apple is a tech company, they sell software and hardware. It's hard to say whether Intuit sells accounting services or whether they sell software.
Is Google a tech company? Probably, but technically they sell advertisements, not software. You could say that they make money by operating ad-selling software. Walmart is a company that makes money by operating purchasing, distribution, and retailing software. An old west General Store owner could, if his records were lost, make a good guess as to what he should by from which big city distributors, when and how much of it to stock, and how much to sell it for, conversely, zero people have a comprehensive understanding of Walmart's product lines, they're just cogs in the software-powered machine that makes the corporation work.
Every large company today is dependent on software. I agree that it's a bit absurd to suggest that this means they're all tech companies.
I'd suggest that being "tech company" is in large part cultural mindset.
Are they primarily dependant on off-the-shelf software? Possibly not a tech company. Is their software development team bigger than the whole of the rest of the company put together? Probably a tech company. Have the developers convinced everyone else to form squads and hold all the usual agile ceremonies? Don't @ me.
I think OP meant - people forget about the large company Intuit being a business built on an abusive business model enabled by technology. "Big tech" is a pejorative term in this case to trigger a reaction.
Intuit is not "big tech". It's not even "tech". If computers and internet were not a thing, Intuit would work mostly the same way - their business is scraping money between citizen and the sate, and lobbying politician into keeping a broken system. That's not tech in any way.
I was firmly on the side of "Intuit is a tech company", and then I read this comment, and then I had a hearty chuckle, and now I think I may be on the side of "Inuit is not a tech company."
Lobbying is a fact of life in a democracy. For any government regulation, law, program, etc. there are multitudes of lobby groups on all sides of each issue. Why in this case is this such a big unethical crime? Lots of government programs are inefficient and expensive due to interest groups - that will never ever change. Welcome to Democracy.
No it's not a fact of life, it's a known quantity but not a fact and not life-related. And you can definitely ban it as well. It's not a requirement, and it's not the best, only or 'current' way. It's just a weak side-effect of the status quo (yes, technically that means 'weak' and 'current' but that is besides the point).
Perhaps from a US-centric perspective. I don't know for a fact if a company or non-person is universally allowed to direct the facility that is the government to do something or not do something everywhere in the world.
Lobbying isn't directing the government. It's presenting your point of view to the government. What the government does with the information you give them is then up to them but sometimes they're obligated to show they've considered it. It's a super-basic part of democracy everywhere. It's usually a right and also actively encouraged through consultation periods while legislation is drafted.
I can't understand anyone suggesting that we should not be allowed to present our opinions to the government. What are you in favour of? Just voting once every four years or so and never saying anything else the rest of the time? Bizarre.
> I can't understand anyone suggesting that we should not be allowed to present our opinions to the government. What are you in favour of? Just voting once every four years or so and never saying anything else the rest of the time? Bizarre.
It's not the "saying anything else", it's the listening: Sure, anyone has the right to say anything they want. The difference is that the government doesn't listen to most people -- how could they? Where would they take the time to listen to everyone; when would they get anything else done? It's not as if there's any constitutional right to be heard -- but some people and organisations, they do somehow magically find the time to listen to.
Pretending that this is just "a super-basic part of democracy everywhere" in stead of highly correlated with how much money the ones who get heard have contributed to the campaigns of the ones doing the sympathetic listening is disingenuous in the extreme.
I think you have missed the point so many times it's hard to come up with a number...
Intuit isn't a person, it didn't vote and it has no place telling the government what to do for the people. A company has no opinions, only a bottom line and in many lobbying cases a bunch a shareholders. A government isn't a company and doesn't need to have financial gain, it needs to support the collective people of the country it governs.
The difference is that Intuit also throws money in directions that make sure they get heard.
If the CEO of Intuit (or a representative of Intuit) just called the same phone line the rest of us get, sure there wouldn’t be a difference there. Even if the representatives were calling on Inuit from their side because they believed Intuit has relevant insights into the tax code, that would be fine. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s the way political donations buy access to representatives attention in ways that the non-rich don’t have access to that people take issue with.
It's not about what I "think" the difference is. The difference is, in fact, that a company is not a person. And a person doing something in the name of the company or as a representative of the company is not acting as a person either, but as an extension of the company.
A company is essentially a sociopath that does not have to follow a social contract, has no limited lifespan, doesn't need to eat, sleep, have shelter, and doesn't feel pain or joy. All it does is extract as much value as possible, at any cost, including joy, safely and general lives of others.
A government that panders to sociopathic wealth hoarders isn't a government, but just another company and the people in general are worse off for it.
Voters should be allowed to lobby. Ideally, sociopathic wealth hoarders should never be allowed to lobby or vote. But some of those are people, so those'd be the exception, sadly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27698751).
You said 'Voters should be allowed to lobby' - but a charity isn't a voter. Other things that aren't voters but most people think should be able to lobby in a healthy democracy include unions.
Exactly, I said 'Voters should be allowed to lobby'. Not 'exclusively'. I said that because you stated that I was say ing 'nobody should be allowed to lobby', which is also not what I was saying. It seems that you are constantly trying to make it fit your personal narrative.
And even then, does it matter? The point is that voters, which is what the government exists for, should be the ones to assess what they want, not the sociopathic wealth hoarder with the most wealth. If you want to define an ultra specific scope around that, you can do that.
If voters are allowed to lobby, then a voter who owns, is employed by, or is a customer of, or chooses to represent my company can lobby on my behalf... and that's actually what's happening anyway!
Obviously a company as an abstract entity does not lobby. An individual human being lobbies. A voter.
That's the problem, isn't it. Sociopathic wealth hoarders should not control the population, and any scheme in which they do it anyway is problematic. That includes delegation.
Lobbying is bad when it helps a single company at the expense of tens of millions of citizens. The situation is far more objective than you're pretending.
The whole "companies get political speech through untold millions $$" makes lobbying more like a quid pro quo bribery system. Its fine that companies have a vested interest in how the gov't runs and policies are put forward but the bastard child of "political speech" and capitalism is IMHO a lot like corruption. Obviously my opinion is not original and a lot of people talk about this... but lets not forget how this works.
Lobbying is a political act just like making a protest or making a news article. That is not monopoly power. But even if it were framed as monopoly power, the monopoly is from the government officials that sell their power.
>Already said in this thread, but I think it's ridiculous that when people think about abusive big tech, they never think about Intuit.
Because it isn't that big of a deal.
> Their business is literally the idea of creating friction in federal and local tax systems so they can extort people in exchange of removing some of those synthetic frictions (emphasis on "some").
That's a hyperbolic characterization. It's not that big of deal.
Lobbying is a fact of life in a democracy. There are always interest groups on every side of any issue that lobby for their selfish benefit, frequently to the detriment of the public (e.g. public sector union contracts). That tends to make most government programs less efficient and more expensive then they could be because politicians will balance needs of all kinds of interest groups. That will never change. Intuit has a right to lobby for their interests. Characterizing this as somehow nefarious, or even as an outlier is hyperbolic. Welcome to Democracy.
Lobbying is lobbying. There is a tendency by some purist to label democratic actions like lobbying, patronage or campaign donations as 'bribery' or 'corruption'. No no no no. Democracy is messy and involves horse-trading, negotiation and balancing of many interest groups to push political priorities.
I don’t mean campaign donations to support candidates who agree with your cause. I mean strait up bribery where you hand people cash to do stuff for you.
We are talking about inexpensive tax software as an alternative to free filing methods. It's not a big deal. Of course it could be more efficient and cheaper ... but so can many government programs. Are public sector unions evil when they negotiate outrageous contracts that the public has to pick up the tab for? This is what democracy looks like.
This very article explains how they're deliberately blocking millions of desperately impoverished people from receiving billions of dollars. How is that not a big deal?
The problem isn't that Intuit wants to charge something instead or nothing. The filing fee is not the harmful part. The problem is they can't directly ensure people use their service. But they can indirectly make it hard to file without using their service by lobbying against tax code simplications that would benefit most fillers.
Your argument makes it sound like you do not know what the issue in question actually is.
Recipients' other options are hire a CPA (obviously untenable), find the correct forms, calculate the credit themselves, do the rest of their returns by hand, and submit those (difficult for the target groups) or... pay to use TurboTax. That's the exact dilemma this new site would've helped solve if it hadn't been sabotaged.
I'm referring to people with incomes low enough to qualify for the CTC. About half of US adults are functionally illiterate and innumerate, even measured by the Department of Education's (low) standards, and this correlates highly with income. I'm happy your father was able to do his own taxes, but he's not representative.
> Do NOT use this online form if you're required to file a tax return. Use of this online form creates a simplified 2020 tax return. If you're required to file a tax return but file a simplified return instead, you won't be able to e-file your 2020 Form 1040 or 1040-SR tax return. This will delay the IRS processing your return and issuing any tax refund.
So... what?
Do not use this site if I'm required to do the thing that this site does? If I use this I won't be able to e-file Form xyz? No information what those are, or why it would matter?
My reading is that if you aren't required to file a tax return, this thing creating a dummy simplified one won't hurt you.
But if you are required to file one, you are likely to need a real one, and the dummy one will conflict with it. But it sounds like if you file a real one, you don't need this form, and this form is only for people who wouldn't otherwise file.
But the gist of the article - that the website is implausibly bad - seems correct.
That would require that a "simplified tax return" is not a "tax return". If that's the intention, it seems to fly directly in the face of the common use of the English language. Generally {ADJECTIVE} {NOUN} is a specific category of a {NOUN}. If they're using some domain-specific jargon that violates that, it strains credulity that they would expect anyone to understand it.
Even if you're not required to file a return (e.g. because you have no income), you are still allowed to file. I think the site helps you file (to claim a credit) even if you're not required to file.
Free fillable forms is hard to use for taxes in general, but this page is specifically for people who want the CTC without having filed taxes (presumably you otherwise would have gotten the CTC when you filed takes). You can see the screenshot says "non-filer sign up tool", where as the main page of the website (for people who want to actually use it to file taxes) has no such warning: https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/#/fd
I'd previously got about 3/4ths of the way through filing my taxes using TurboTax, only to find that I wasn't able to deduct student loan interest on the free product. Intuit also regularly deletes threads of people who go on to ask why an expected feature isn't in the free tier, advancing the dark pattern of needing to pay for the feature on both the federal and state level returns. This is likely a systemic problem- the self employed through platforms like GrubHub & freelancers have less simple tax structures and even if they're only making a modest wage; spending $80 just to fill out your own return definitely acts as a regressive tax that disproportionately affects lower-wage groups.
Given how much H&R Block and Intuit have unethically and corruptly leeched from the government and the taxpayers directly, I think the should literally be nationalized and have their tax software platforms absorbed into the IRS. Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country. There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen. At least the tax prep portions of the companies.
Political note: calls for nationalisation, in American politics, is a gift to the other side. It lets one paint the opposition as extremists without grounding in U.S. Constitutional law or the economic history of countries that regularly expropriate property.
I get the impulse. But literally any other phrasing—massive fines, criminal prosecution, open-licensing requirements, et cetera—is more productive for any aim other than blowing steam.
> Political note: calls for nationalisation, in American politics, is a gift to the other side.
Perhaps you should rephrase this as "calls for nationalization run counter to my own free-market ideology" rather than a) assuming you know what everybody else thinks, and b) suggesting that conventional wisdom should dictate the bounds of acceptable discourse.
Not to mention, plenty of countries — the US included — have successfully nationalized companies and entire industries.
A practical understanding of the country's political messaging isn't the same thing as free-market ideology. I'm not especially free-market, but I recognize that poor messaging gets picked up by Fox News (for example) who beat their drum over and over and over again such that the underlying ideas have a huge uphill battle to fight.
No, you’re entirely wrong. Any call to nationalize just firmly placed you in the most left of the left-wing side of the Democratic Party. The one with no power and the one moderate Democrats like to distance themselves from.
Unless you go back to FDR, the US has only "nationalized" (bailed out) companies when they were on the verge of collapse with catastrophic economic consequences, and because of 9/11. Nationalizing a functioning company, no matter how evil, would be unprecedented and immediately fail after being labeled communist. I'm not commenting on the merits of the idea here, only the political reality.
Its so crazy to me that some Americans label abstract ideas as evil. Communism == evil. Socialism == evil. Many welfare programs == evil. Immigrant labor == evil. High minimum wage == evil. Some languages, religions, cultures == evil. Stop subverting the English language because you're too lazy to check a thesaurus. None of those things are evil.
The comment you are replying to is not assuming that they know how everyone else thinks, _nor_ are they saying what is "acceptable discourse".
They are, rather, making a statement about strategy and messaging in American politics; a point which has borne out in countless political contests over the past decade alone. There is a reason why Republicans try to say "socialis(t/ism)" as often as possible. It works.
One example off the top of my head is Florida during the most recent presidential election. The Republicans beat the drums of socialism broadly and especially targeted at Cuban-Americans who immediately think of Castro. Voters who might otherwise skew towards Biden went Trump.
Again, that's one example, but the point is about _messaging_ and how the electorate in America broadly (not 100%, everywhere, etc.) responds to "socialism". (Nationalization being, of course, clearly tied to socialism.)
Because as we all know, privatization never leads to perverse incentives and anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. Just look at the American telecom industry, which is famous for high satisfaction and low prices with no price fixing, tying, market segmentation, or any other cartel-like behavior to be seen.
American telecom industry has done much better after US government ended government granted monopoly to bell labs. Plenty of literature on that topic actually. Same for aviation.
Whatever bad things you see with ATT and Comcast are actually a direct result of city granted monopolies which will likely be ended by Musk's Starlink sooner or later.
How have they done better? Prices have risen substantially as quality of service stagnates or deteriorates unless the companies are given grants and subsidies by governments to compel them to upgrade infrastructure at the taxpayer's expense. All the while they reap ever growing profits and lobby to get their employees onto regulatory boards to prevent any pro-consumer regulation.
"city-granted monopolies", are you kidding? The monopolies exist because of non-competition arrangements between companies. A city can't have anything but a monopoly when only one company willing to run cable because they've made everybody else agree to keep off their turf.
And starlink won't save anybody. For one thing, satellite internet already exists, you can buy it from providers like Viasat, DirecTV, and Hughesnet: it's expensive and the latency is outrageous because of the speed-of-light distance to satellites.
I get that you're just reciting the propaganda talking points that you've heard from news organizations and media properties (which are all now owned by telecom monopolies thanks to all the cash they have to spare from the extremely profitable telecom business, funny how that works), but a person can hope.
> And starlink won't save anybody. For one thing, satellite internet already exists, you can buy it from providers like Viasat, DirecTV, and Hughesnet: it's expensive and the latency is outrageous because of the speed-of-light distance to satellites.
Starlink latency is materially improved from traditional satellite internet providers. 20ms vs 500ms. Conflating them borders on equivocation.
This happens regardless of how extreme or radical the proposal is, so why start from a position of compromise? This is what happens when one party cries "wolf" for 40 years.
Allowing “nationalization” to remain a dirty word (and not “privatization”) is a much bigger gift.
Why should it be off the table? Does the average person even give a shit about the public/private status of Intuit? I get conservatives will complain but they will (and do) literally call ANY improvement to the IRS Communism. Is the hope that if you play language games they’ll see the light?
I guess it would be easier and better to just strangle them by simplifying the tax code, sending pre-filled returns to everyone and making a simple and accessible web app for people to file theit taxes with a few clicks.
Intuit aren't alone in this scheme. There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?
> I guess it would be easier and better to just strangle them by simplifying the tax code, sending pre-filled returns to everyone and making a simple and accessible web app for people to file theit taxes with a few clicks.
Yes, that solution is obvious, and has been for quite a while. The problem is that Intuit et al, through their lobbying, are blocking it. So the problem that needs solving now is how to block that lobbying.
> There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?
Most countries' politics are a lot more sane than the USA's, so such people aren't able to exert quite the same perverse amount of power through "lobbying" -- i.e. bribery, thinly disguised as "campaign contributions" -- as in the USA. (Oh sure, most countries have at least some of that shit, in various forms. But few, on the whole, as bad as the USA.)
No, restructuring the tax code, send out millions of physical mailers, and building multi-million dollar web apps would not be easier than Uncle Sam acquiring the assets and running Intuit like the USPS, i.e. Congress only sets pricing.
I agree wholeheartedly and I think health insurance companies should receive the same treatment, they act in the same way and cause the same problems. The incentives of these companies are at odds with the interests of society and they should be run by society, not for private profit.
Corporate death penalty. If corporations are people, and the USA insists on keeping the barbaric death penalty, at least they should use it on companies.
Corporations are legal fictions. If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component.
Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are proven. They are precedented and they work.
If you wantonly break the law, you should not be a going concern. But "nationalization" and "corporate death penalty" are political hot potatoes. (I'm entirely sidestepping the argument as to whether that's reasonable.) If you want these companies shut down, or fearful of being shut down, credibly threatening to break them up, fine them into bankruptcy or suspend their licenses (e.g. for Intuit, their tax preparation license) is more effective.
Then they shouldn't have the same rights as real people. If they're just fictions, then it stands to reason that at least when they behave so egregiously that their fictional life has to be ended, their worth and value also turns out to be fictional.
> If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component.
Exactly. And since the whole point of a limited-liability stock company is that a single entrepreneur shan't be liable with all he owns, but each shareholder only with the value of his investment, then it is precisely that investment that will turn out to have no value: After creditors are paid off, any remaining value goes to the state, which is the entity that hitherto, through the contract and other laws it maintains, has upheld the fiction that this kitty of money is a separate thing capable of exerting a legal will and intent; for this particular kitty, that fiction has now come to an end.
As for "wiping out" shareholders (not creditors, as per the above)... Yes and no, and above all: So what? As mentioned, their investment is exactly what they are willing to risk; that's the whole idea. Three points on this:
1) They could just as well lose it all if the company goes bankrupt some other way, so pretending that this is some new and unique possible outcome is disingenuous.
2) If they're "wiped out" because they've put all their life savings into any one company, the poor bastards should have looked up "diversifying". Again, not unique to this.
3) Wow, great -- finally some incentive for shareholder activism, to try and rein in old / appoint better new boards and CXOs and curb some of the evil shit corporations do, eh?
> Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are proven. They are precedented and they work.
Bullpucky. Two corporations, out of the myriad that had deserved it, that's ridiculously ineffective.
> If you wantonly break the law, you should not be a going concern.
Exactly. Then the fiction should end.
> But "nationalization" and "corporate death penalty" are political hot potatoes. (I'm entirely sidestepping the argument as to whether that's reasonable.)
Maybe they're such hot potatoes precisely because people, like you here now, keep sidestepping the argument.
> If you want these companies shut down, or fearful of being shut down, credibly threatening to break them up, fine them into bankruptcy or suspend their licenses (e.g. for Intuit, their tax preparation license) is more effective.
Sure, that too... But it seems imbalanced to limit yourself to only that, as long as you still have the death penalty for real people.
(And, hey, if you're fine with "fin[ing] them into bankruptcy" -- what happened, all of a sudden, to those poor shareholders and creditors; is wiping them out suddenly OK now?)
We’re talking past each other. I’m in favor of ending companies that wantonly break the law.
Corporate death penalties reinvent the wheel for zero benefit. It gets, at best, to the same place as fines or revocation. It adds the needless step of creating an unprecedented and politically-charged term with major constitutional flaws in respect of the taking of private property. If I’m a lobbyist trying to gut antitrust and the threat of those stronger measures I just mentioned, corporate death penalties are an almost all-too-perfect red herring. It severs the left from the centre-left so cleanly that I’m about 10% sure it came out of the right.
If you like the idea of ending companies for bad things, skip fabricated steps and push for specific crimes being punishable with fines equal to a substantial fraction of enterprise value and/or license revocations. You would have to do that anyway with any corporate death penalty rules. Go straight for the kill.
Unless, of course, the aim is rabble rousing. In that case, fight for corporate death penalties. It’s effective at turning out certain voting blocks.
> [corporations] shouldn't have the same rights as real people
Corporations don’t have the same rights as natural persons.
They have many of them, but those are mostly severable through legislation. Incorporation does have broad support. Taking the evil lobbyist from the previous example, if she sees a list of ten corporate reforms she doesn’t like, adding ending corporate personhood to the list guarantees opposition from small business to multinationals, NGOs and unions to trade associations.
> I think the should literally be nationalized and have their tax software platforms absorbed into the IRS.
This is an extremist view and basically advocating theft. I do not think IRS has competence to build and run a complex software system.
> Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country
That is debatable.
> There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen
They have not inserted themselves anywhere. You are free to use CPA or do all the paperwork yourself and save yourself $70 bucks.
I wish that our government (the people who allowed them to be the middle man) would take some accountability. But I guess that would be uncharacteristic.
The citizens without the ability to directly recall the elected are to blame? There is a serious power and attention imbalance here, and the laws to do not leave the power in the hands of the citizens outside of a single day every few years.
It's hard for me to believe they are the source of the problem, particularly with such a shabby fourth estate.
The citizens cannot police the federal electorate. At best, they can police local politicians and maybe a few big ticket federal items. They have too much going on in their own lives to police federal politicians passing hundred page bills every week.
I don’t know what to tell you. A small minority of politicians can prevent progress, and there is little recourse for the rest of us. The buck has to stop somewhere.
Unfortunately that seems to be the case. Outside of a few changing hot button topics they have basically free reign,and 99.99% of people will never hear about their actions.
You seem to be right, I understood that to mean the elected when it's the opposite. Though considering how heated politics is becoming I would say the sentence was still correct :)
They get elected on one thing and do another. They should be held liable for misleading their base at the very least. Also misinformation and propaganda is rampant so it's very difficult to make educated decisions, now more than ever.
I often help my friend who is also my accountant with his systems. He has to use various Intuit Pro Tax products. These are straight out of 90s boxed software land. Installing and using them in this day and age of polished software is like taking a step back into a timemachine especially when networking is involved. He pays thousands of dollars /year for these products and the technical issues with data sharing, networking, printing are just incredible.
Another thing that is jarring is the regard that Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit is held in the valley. He was apparently a mentor and coach to many founders Jobs? Page/Brin? and others. But the disconnect with his sterling image as a coach and leader and the general dark patterns/crappiness of Intuit products is something that is interesting.
This is not the free market, it’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with government. The fact that the IRS rules are set by politicians and bureaucrats, not accountable to market forces, are what allows this corrupt situation to persist in the first place.
You can’t say “the IRS makes this too complicated in order to funnel money into Intuit’s pocket so I am going to pay my taxes elsewhere.”
And it's a perfect example of why accepting broad government power provides an avenue for this sort of corruption to exist, especially in areas that people don't care enough about to spend time influencing government policy.
In a free market, it requires very little effort for you to make your opinion felt - you give your money to the people you think have the best product. Done. Those people see that they are making money - the people with lesser products see they are losing money. This requires very little effort on your part other than forming an opinion on what product you want to use.
In the government, what can you do if you think the IRS is doing a shitty job? Write a letter to your Congressmen? Vote for another Congressman in 2 years (what if you agree with their position on the IRS, but disagree on something more important, e.g. guns?) Run for office yourself?
The result is that relatively little attention is paid to public policy around tax preparation. There are no single-issue voters around IRS Free-file policy. There is too much else going on in national politics that is inarguably more important. And because no one really cares about this other than the tax preparation industry, the tax preparation industry is left largely unchallenged in pushing government to enact regulations that favor them.
In my country (Netherlands), the IRS itself provides the software. Once a year, you download and run it. Everything is prefilled: income from work, bank accounts, mortgages.
So if you're a boring, financially stable person, the entire process is literally next -> next -> next -> submit.
Filling out tax forms is not a value-add economic activity, so I have no idea why you'd insist on free market, nor do I understand the classic American anti-government stance.
If we have solved this a decade ago, why can't you?
Your question is, why isn't the federal government of the United States, a country of 330M people, as efficient and effective as the government of the Netherlands, a country of 17M people?
Large organizations are less efficient than small organizations. This is true even in private enterprise. Large bloated, centralized government bureaucracies are the most inefficient of all.
Part of the "classic American anti-government stance" comes from the realization that American society is too large and too diverse to be effectively governed by a centralized bureaucracy. This is why you hear people complaining about "state's rights".
However, for people who explicitly wish to control society and don't care about efficiency, centralized power is great. It means they only have to win one argument to impose their will on 330M people, not 50 separate arguments. This is why so much attention is paid to the federal government in the US, as opposed to state or local government.
You just made me roll my eyes back into my head. If the situations were reversed, you'd be saying "you're expecting a tiny country to compete with the vast resources of the United States?!".
Fact is, there's literally no reason we can't or shouldn't be doing this. My tax returns are super boring, and the IRS already knows what they are. Just send me a damn form that says "this is what we think you owe, if we're correct sign and return it".
The only way your argument has any merit is if we start talking about going back to no income tax. Which is an argument worth having, but your current argument is simply absurd.
> Your question is, why isn't the federal government of the United States, a country of 330M people, as efficient and effective as the government of the Netherlands, a country of 17M people?
Holy fuck, can't you Yanks just fucking stop pulling this idiotic non-argument out of your arses every time a comparison with any other country is made?!?
Sure, your pool of people to be taxed is X times bigger than some other country... But your pool of people who could be tax administrators IS ALSO exactly X times bigger than theirs! Holy fucking fuck, how stupid does one have to be not to see that?!?
No, I'm just countering your assumption, because that seemed to be your objection.
In actual fact, of course, you wouldn't need anywhere near that many: This is all done by software nowadays, not bespectacled men with green eyeshades, quill pens, and big ledgers. Sure, being so much bigger, you might have more weird edge cases and exceptions... But although your population is twenty times bigger than the Netherlands', your number of kinds of edge cases and exceptions will be far lower than that. And you only need exception code for each kind of edge case. So your larger population will actually allow you to use fewer resources, proportionally, to build an equivalent system; not more.
...which is why I'm against having an entire corporation like Intuit inserted between me and the government I'm trying to pay taxes to. Your opinion that administrators are suddenly fine when they're a corporation is absurd.
Sometimes large organizations are less efficient than small organizations due to bureaucracy, and sometimes they are more efficient due to economies of scale. In this case, a large country is more diverse than a small country, but it also has a better access to the necessary expertise.
Coming from a small European country, I'm familiar with a failure mode that does not exist in the federal government of the US (but can be seen in smaller states). Sometimes the government performs badly, because it would need expertise that is not available in the market. Everyone who is good at a specific thing already has a job and is not interested in getting a new one.
I believe the root issue here is that efficiency is not a fundamental value in the US in the same way it is in many European countries (I'm thinking Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and the Nordic countries). Meanwhile, decentralization is a fundamental value. Americans on the average do not want the government to be efficient, because it would require a level of centralization they would be uncomfortable with. For example, with centralized reporting, it would be reasonable to expect that 80-90% of people do not have to file taxes in any particular year, because the government already knows every relevant piece of information about them.
Another issue is that the US is already far more centralized than the EU. The federal government is a major actor, with an almost 20x bigger share of the GDP than the EU. There is an uneasy balance of power between the federal government and the states, with neither party clearly superior to the other. Nobody has an indisputable authority to change things, which I guess is another reason why American bureaucracy is so inefficient.
Population size doesn't matter for taxes, yet having many different types of rules (perhaps at state level?) could indeed be a complicating factor. If that's the case, I'll take your word for it.
But do hear me out once more. The dutch tax system is anything but simple. It has an extremely complex rule set.
And because it is so complex, leaving the understanding of it to citizens has led to an enormous burden of processing and correcting faulty entries, staffing massive support desks, and so on.
So they solved complexity, centrally. The rules are just as complex as before, but the process and UI make it a breeze for a good 75%.
With this I mean to say that complexity is in fact another reason to solve things centrally. Why would you want to spread complexity around?
I'm not talking about taxes in particular, I'm just talking about government in general.
The US federal government is 20x larger than that of the Netherlands. The US is also more economically, socially, and ethnically diverse than the Netherlands. Larger systems are harder to manage.
> This is not the free market, it’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with government. The fact that the IRS rules are set by politicians and bureaucrats, not accountable to market forces, are what allows this corrupt situation to persist in the first place.
This is the sort of thing you get when you start from the conclusion, "Free market good, government bad", ignore the article, and just slavishly repeat the tired free market hypothesis.
The power is in the hands of the free market here, not in the hands of the IRS. You're blaming the IRS when clearly Intuit and Equifax are to blame. Don't comment on articles you didn't read.
That's a weird thing to say considering how lobbying is justified: As the free expression of speech by companies towards their elected representatives. So is limiting corporate speech necessary for a free market? Most free-market backers I've heard would say otherwise.
Lobbying consists of influencing either elected officials or bureaucrats to take actions on the lobbyists' behalf which no actor in a free market would be permitted to take. What needs to be limited here is not corporate speech but rather government power.
This kind of lobbying is just paid free speech driven by market incentives.
So, yes, having a society-critical service provided by a for-profit market actor, that then uses that money to pay for speech that results in a worse situation for everyone is a market failure.
>The Child Tax Credit is a seriously good piece of policy...
Maybe in intent, but certainly not in implementation. Fine if you want to give money to the poor / people with no income, but enacting that through our tax system (designed to collect tax dollars) seems like a particularly poor proscription to achieve the ends. Here's another take (that I'm sure will be unpopular)...
'In 2021, progressives cloaked an expansion to our entitlement programs through a tax cut to get the bill through Congress. This has been hard to implement, and company's like Inuit aren't helping as much as they could.'
Just like Obamacare... income taxation is the foot in the door to basically allow the government to arbitrarily meddle in the personal finances of every single citizen.
4. squirrels away some percentage of profits each year to a big "F U" fund, half of which goes to lobbying for permanent income tax simplification, half of which goes to directly paying out the shareholders in the company on dissolution.
Sounds like a good project for Intuit. Create a new competitor to TurboTax for the low-end market. Upsell into TurboTax. And for #4, they could become the defacto IRS tool with perfect regulatory capture funded by government subsidies.
This year I paid TurboTax extra to get their "professional advice". I didn't get any. Had to find a real accountant to solve the problem. This was my last year of using TT.
The "professional" they connected me with turned out too not actually be a CPA, and was an IRS "Enrolled Agent" instead, and did all of my taxes wrong. I don't mean "the math was a little off", I mean "used all of the wrong forms" because he was was unaware of the criteria to be considered a Resident Alien for tax purposes.
Further, when I tried to contact this individual again (through Turbo Tax), Turbo Tax had shut down the program and was blackhole-ing all of the email without notice.
It cost me thousands of dollars after-the-fact to get fixed.
We had the completely free "click here for a default tax return" situation here in Canada, at least in Ontario.
As of last year (in my case) finally the tax authority had all the information slips you need to file already in their database.
The freely usable tax software (Studio Tax) was able to download and autofill them to generate a valid (as far as the government knows) tax return that could then be e-filed.
The only thing that changed was that the donation-based model of Studio Tax wasn't enough, so now you have to pay CAD $15 per installation (not per return) in order to actually file - but you can still try it out and see what your refund will be before you pay.
It would still be better if the government had all this on a website, but $15 per household is not the end of the world and won't ever fund consumer hostile political lobbying.
Canada also has SimpleTax which is enough for the majority of young and poor Canadians filing taxes and is completely free (donation-based). Literally took me 30-45 minutes and I did most of it on my phone. I'm not sure if it's enough for people with homes/children/foreign income, but I do know you can make it work.
I was a bit sad that they were bought out by Wealthsimple, but Wealthsimple has been a largely ethical and transparent company with all the services they provide, be it their investing platform during the GME debacle or their SimpleTax buyout. Hopefully it stays that way.
You still need to do the cost basis calculation yourself, because a single financial institution can't calculate that for you (you may have the same securities with another institution).
A different institution from what? If all banks, employers and other institutions are required to send the info to the tax authority, the only "other" things you need to fill in is basically income made abroad. But most people obviously don't have foreign income or assets, so a tax calculation should be 100% correct and simply a matter of accepting?
The Tax authority should also have a very good guess of all possible deductions/credits, so that can be filled automatically too.
I used freefillableforms (mentioned in the article) this year to file an extension. I submitted it and got the error
"Issue : Business Rule FPYMT-051-01 - If IRS Payment Record is present and Form 4868 Line 8 checkbox or Line 9 checkbox is checked, then 'RequestedPaymentDt' in the IRS Payment Record must be on or before the extended due date but not more than 5 days prior to the received date."
When you search this error in the IRS error search tool linked in the email I got from the IRS, nothing comes up.
I carefully combed through my form until I saw the error - my "Date to make withdrawal" for my payment was a date in the past. Absolutely no mention of the "RequestedPaymentDt" mentioned in the error was present on the form. Googling was not helpful but perhaps I didn't Google the right thing.
Why didn't the freefillableforms website catch this error, it can't be hard to validate the form to make sure the withdrawal date is not in the past? Why is the IRS description of the error nearly undecipherable (now that I know the error it makes sense - before I did I didn't know what it was talking about)? Why does the error not show up on the IRS search tool? I know when file my taxes I will definitely use a paid piece of software because the free stuff has shown itself to be useless (probably deliberately so).
> When I say "sabotaged," I'm not speaking hyperbolically. The tax-prep industry, led by Intuit, led the fight for 20 years, with their cultlike leader Brad Smith at the forefront of a bribery and intimidation campaign.
I just finished reading the Snowden article about conspiracy practice, and this is a stark example of it. A group of people acting against the democratic interest, subverting the legal and political system to their interests, and leaving the public feeling powerless.
Stupid question: Why would Intuit sabotage the CTC? What do they get out of all that effort?
I can understand the massive profit interest in blocking simplifications to the tax system: if people have an easier time filing their taxes, they might not need to pay Turbotax for the privilege. But what's the profit interest in blocking the IRS from sending poor-people-who-dont-file-taxes-anyway free money?
I am an American ex-pat living in Australia. I had been using TurboTax for the last decade and this year it kept messing up the forms for my foreign tax credit so they were getting rejected by the IRS. I tried heaps of things, phoned their support, etc. for a total of 5 rejected returns. Finally, in desperation, I went and tried H&R Block's online offering and put in the same numbers and it not only was less expensive AND had me paying less tax but the forms it created were actually accepted by the IRS when I e-filed. To add insult to injury I paid TurboTax for the bad return (I tried for awhile to get them to refund it with this anecdote but it proved impossible and not worth more time trying) AND they sent me a nagging email every week for months telling me my return has been rejected and I need to refile it.
I know Intuit has legislators at the federal level in their pockets, but I would think that in a place like California it would be harder. Has there been any progress to have simple automatic filing for state taxes?
California has its own tax website fairly similar to TurboTax called CalFile. One of the devs is even here on HN.
Unfortunately CalFile seems to be intentionally gimped e.g. only usable if you're under a certain income threshold and technically you're not supposed to use it if you have capital gains or loses (but since cap gains are treated as regular income in CA it works fine if you still use it)
I've had great luck with freetaxusa.com, personally. I've been using them to file taxes for like, 10 years now.
E-filing the federal tax form is free, and state tax form is only like $14 I think, really cheap, and the website does a good job taking you through it step by step in an easy to understand way.
I used them this year after getting screwed by Intuit again last year and swore it would be the last time. Their UI isn’t quite as shiny but still very straightforward and easy to use for someone like me who knows almost nothing about taxes besides ‘I need to do them’.
I’ll use them again next year too, was very happy with the service.
Yeah, I use FreeTaxUSA also. It doesn’t have all the integrations that Turbo Tax et al. have, so you have to spend a bit more time manually entering your figures, but I had no issues.
You can also double check the numbers if you want by going through another service like Turbo Tax but stopping before the payment step.
Every year, I go ahead and self-prepare my taxes, and then type all the data into Turbotax to see if they find something I missed, and every year they do, and it's in my favor (and always worth more than the Turbotax fee). OTOH, I've seen suggestions that Intuit themselves have had a hand in making the tax preparation process so complex that humans can't possibly get it right without them.
A local, independent, tax preparer. There's plenty of individuals who are partially retired that help file simple tax returns for ~$50 during tax season.
Same here, if you have a simple setup it's honestly more straightforward to just do it on paper. Especially after form 1040 got simplified from 2019 onwards.
Still ridiculous I have to file them at all, but that's another thing to get into.
They put the company who wants the built the bypass in charge of storing the building plans, and nobody is surprised they put a “beware the leopard” sign up in front of it.
There's a very good Patriot Act episode [1] regarding devious patterns in the US tax industry. In fact the whole show is well worth watching. It's cancelled now, presumably because Netflix felt some heat since every episode stirred/kicked another wasp's nest.
Not really relevant to the Child Tax Credit, but I found a great free Canadian tax software https://www.genutax.ca has a pay what you want model. Great piece of software.
I use olt.com to file online taxes and they are much better than intuit and cost like $15 (compare to $100+ turbotax crap).
they also provide free file
>Many of the people eligible for CTC don't file tax returns
There is a level of pragmatism that calls for better communication of programs and help with tax filings ... but ... as a citizen, you do have a responsibility to file tax returns. Why is it always hard to make the argument from both sides, namely: we should make tax filing as easy as possible AND the citizen has a responsibility to file their taxes regardless. It seems we, as a society, have a hard time with the latter part.
The UK is a good example of this -- if you're a regular employee and earn under the higher earnings threshold then you're very unlikely to be required to fill in any kind of tax return, as all your income will have been taxed at source and we don't tend to _do_ deductions. You'll get a P60 from your employer and you've got until October to notice if you either want to or need to fill in a self-assessment (hint: you don't). If you earn more, it may well be worthwhile filling one in because schemes like gift-aid assume basic rate tax and you can claim back the difference between basic and higher rate. But even then, as an employee you can often ask for any pension contributions or charitable donations to be given directly from salary pre-tax which means less paperwork later.
Having to fill out self-assessment -- or at least complaining about doing so -- is a bit of a humble-brag as it's an indication that the person complaining earns enough (or has sufficiently complicated tax arrangements) to need to.
Well yeah, if you're trying to prove it wasn't a simple mistake from ignorance, you want to prove they have a pattern of making this mistake. That's when it turns from accidental to intentional malfeasance.
except it reads more like "I could have made that website, grrr I didn't apply for the government contract (or I lost the bid)!"
It could read that and say "by the way Intuit has a history of poor performance"
it doesn't really say they sabotaged it. when I read that headline, I think that their flagship software is miscalculating it. But thats not what this article is about at all.
The article is about how a tax credit has always failed to address the needs of those eligible for the tax credit, and Intuit has only made a small dent in that in a contract that hoped it would make a bigger dent.
People can still have gotten that tax credit for free before, can get it for free after, can use Intuit's poorly crafted free system, or not. They can also use Intuit's paid systems the whole time. The article then points out that Intuit always crafts circumstances to make their paid system the desired path.
The Child Tax Credit is fine, its the people you are worried about.
Intuit is a perfect example to me of the flawed reality in a libertarian ideology. We know they’re terrible, we know their products aren’t great… yet where are all the meaningful competitors? People who are at least meeting their bar if not substantially exceeding it? It’s not like this is a new industry that takes time to bake. Where are the YC startups trying to take them on? Meanwhile they continue to make live expensive and complicated for the rest of us just so they have a guaranteed revenue stream!
If you looks around other comments, people are suggesting alternatives. freetaxusa has my vote. Also I would bet that every town in the country with more than a couple thousand people has an office downtown where someone will file for you and probably charge less than H&R Block would. That doesn't cover all of their products, but certainly in the filing space they are not the only option.
Aside from the fact you are wrong about there being no competition, In the libertarian ideology income based taxation is unethical theft, thus under libertarian ideology Intuit tax software would not be needed at all, thus no reason for them to lobby congress, etc
I think their software is good and I usually have a very easy time filing taxes. In comparison, I remember filling out my FAFSA application and that being long ordeal. I don’t think government has the willingness to create a seamless tax-filing experience.
Who is stopping the IRS from making a competing easy to use tax filing website? Are people suggesting Intuit is stopping a good product team from operating within the IRS?
> Who is stopping the IRS from making a competing easy to use tax filing website? Are people suggesting Intuit is stopping a good product team from operating within the IRS?
Yes. The IRS signed an agreement with a coalition of companies called the Free File Alliance (including Intuit) stipulating that if the latter would provide free filing, the IRS wouldn't create a competing product. [1] Intuit then delisted the TurboTax Free File page from search engines [2] so taxpayers would only be able to find the version that directs users to pay. Only 3% of taxpayers took advantage of Free File products — remember, these are products made by tax prep companies like Intuit — even though over 70% are eligible. [3]
But listen to my argument, I’m willing to pay to have an easier time filing my taxes. I’m not going to use IRS’s tool if it doesn’t make it a painless process like TurboTax.
So I ask again, will the IRS make a painless tool? If the answer is yes, but Intuit is lobbying them not to, then I understand your point.
If it’s just about free vs non-free, I could care less. Filing taxes or filling out anything for the government is usually an awful experience and I’m willing to pay to not have to deal with it.
In any case, thanks to the folks in this thread suggesting alternatives. I was going to switch to Credit Karma last year, but literally the day after I created an account I woke up to the news that Intuit had bought them.
Edit: I see down-thread someone says they had to spin out the tax-filing portion of the business?
The problem isn't that the IRS won't make a painless tool. The issue is that Intuit actively works to make sure the tax code stays as complicated as possible. Ideally the tax code is so simple that complicated tools aren't necessary for your average filer.
It’s more than that: they stopped the potential practice of the IRS sending you a pre-filled out tax form with what they know that you could then just sign and accept, as is done is many other countries.
Their software is not very good and a legit accountant costs about $200 if your taxes are relatively simple. Said acccountant will save you more than $200 over TurboTax because TurboTax is not very good — this goes double if you’re in a more complex tax situation. And the accountant is even more seamless since all you do is hand over your paperwork and let them do everything else.
And the great irony is that said accountant is likely using an Intuit product anyway. So it’s not like they don’t have the ability to make good products for the consumer market, they choose not to.
> Who is stopping the IRS from making a competing easy to use tax filing website? Are people suggesting Intuit is stopping a good product team from operating within the IRS?
How about reading TFA before commenting on it? This is literally exactly what it's about.
Consider using credit karma tax (run by good guy Jack Dorsey); it was forced to be split out from CK when they were bought by intuit. It’s free, it supports nearly everything you would need these days.
This was the first year I used Credit Karma Tax. I found it easier than Turbo Tax in some ways. Turbo Tax has these wizards that ask various questions. In some edge cases, I needed to research how a question applies to my scenario. Credit Karma basically just wants raw data. Searching about a form number is much easier than an obscure Inuit question.
Both systems output the same result, so I used CK.
At least for me, it is a huge pain in the add to have to manually type numbers instead of automatically importing from my 1098s, 1099s, etc. Until the competitors can do that, I'm sticking with TurboTax (even if their software was broken last year for anyone who refinanced a home worth more than >$350k)
I know you're getting downvoted but I was hoping to get more context around the ownership situation of specifically Credit Karma Tax? Are there articles anywhere discussing how it will be spun off from CK or will it stay within their services just run by a different company?
It has already spun off. Square currently operates it under the "Credit Karma Tax" brand but it's probably going to move under the Cash App branding eventually.
It's not just a technical issue, but also the tax law itself has changed. For example, you used to be able to fill out a 1090-EZ for your taxes if all you had was W-2 income and bank interest. Anyone who meets that criteria could complete it in an hour. But that "EZ" form has been completely removed and replaced with a vastly more complicated one. If your tax situation is just ever so slightly unusual, things get real complicated, real fast.
How do we know that this is actually Intuit itself & not the IRS trying to reduce CTC payouts. After all, their enforcement budget keeps getting squeezed & they keep struggling to prosecute high dollar issues. Reducing their tax credits is a good way to improve the balance of the federal government.
I didn't mean to imply it would somehow help the IRS budget directly. I was saying it helps the Federal Government's overall deficit. The IRS isn't some body immune from political pressure. The leadership is appointed by POTUS & confirmed by the Senate.
Regardless of which political party is responsible, the Federal government has a lot of benefits programs that have a lot of roadblocks to actually take advantage of. That isn't an accident. You could look at it as the GOP tending to send up roadblocks (e.g. they famously forced the IRS to strike a deal with Intuit) OR you can look at it as a class divide where the GOP are just the "baddies" everyone can scream about without actually needing to hold the government accountable.
If the article is right the people most affected by this don't read Hacker News or pluralistic.net for that matter.
The readers on Hacker News are also less likely to follow up the issue with their representatives.
So why don't the authors find a way to directly target the most affected people and get them to complain to their representatives?
PS. Why do some people tend to blame corporations for the corrupt behaviour of their congressmen and senators? If lawmakers are corrupt they should be the ones who should be targeted.
Companies are simply doing what they can do within the law to gain an advantage. They deal in "legality" not "morality".
All of the people supercritical of Intuit in this thread make me wonder, do they think the government would truly be providing a service on par with TurboTax? When has the government ever done Internet right…looking at you, Healthcare.gov.
$90 bucks a year to ensure your taxes are right, with a streamlined interface that almost anyone can follow, that returns you back significant value in time and tax return…
Intuit legally cannot sell your information like other companies can, because they are in the business of taxes.
People here LOVE to tell founders, “oh, you should be charging for your product! Otherwise it isn’t sustainable!”
I’m sorry, would you rather TT be free and them be slanging your data like Facebook and Amazon? Or alternatively, the government just in charge of replacing it with a congruent service? I didn’t think so.
In Canada (Alberta) but recently used their health link portal and was very impressed with almost all of it. I don't want the government competing with private organizations in what are clearaly market-driven domains, but income tax preparation against a few oligopolistic predators? Absolutely!
>> $90 bucks a year to ensure your taxes are right
Did you read the article? This is about how Intuit defeated an effort to provide credits to very poor people who might not even file a return by saying "we'll take care of this for you" then creating an obivously sub-par product. This market doesn't have $90 for this specific service, or likely a computer beyond their phone.
The government literally already computes the number they expect you to owe. It's how they send you a letter if your own calculations come up short (or long, in which case they will in fact contact you to issue you a refund). If the government simply sends you their calculations (which they are already computing anyway) and you disagree, you would still be able to file an amended return with a company like TurboTax.
Why do you think it is—specifically—that a multitude of other governments can manage to accomplish this feat, but the United States government shouldn't be able to?
If they disagree with me, they send me a bill for the difference anyway. The only way that's changing is if I provide them with additional information they didn't already have. If after that we still disagree, "whether or not I trust them" is philosophically moot: there's a resolution process for disagreements.
And if you don't trust them to get the number right, nothing stops you from filing your own return with the information you believe is correct.
Every other government in the world doesn't have corrupt leadership, corrupt and unfair tax codes. If taxes were straightforward, then why would anyone have to compute them manually except for edge-cases, which a government representative could assist with?
I have a hardtime taking an article seriously that makes wild claims such as "But the IRS has been starved for decades by anti-tax extremists". Show me the evidence.
President Donald Trump's 2018 budget blueprint is out, and it wisely cuts IRS funding by $239 million.
Compared to pretty much any metric where increasing their budget will increase tax collection. Mainly because most tax fraud happens where no one is looking.
The number of IRS revenue agents — the auditors qualified to examine complex returns — has plummeted 43 percent over the past decade, according to a report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Audit rates of those filing these complex returns have also sharply declined.
For example, the number of millionaires who were audited in fiscal 2020 was about a quarter of the number from fiscal 2012. Accordingly, these IRS audits turned up unreported tax bills of $1.2 billion last year, about a quarter of the $4.8 billion found in fiscal 2012.
I wish people in the US would stop blaming specific bad actors in a system for acting in their own best interest and start blaming the system that empowers them. ExxonMobil and Intuit lobby the government in their own best interest just like FAANG companies and basically everyone else that has the size to do it. That is how our system is designed. It isn't Intuit's fault this works, but since it does work, they would be stupid not to do it. Blame the legal and political system for allowing what they do to work and/or go unpunished. Don't blame individual actors for responding to systemic incentives.
How do you propose to garner support to fix the system without drawing attention to the bad actors? "A multi-billion dollar company has been lobbying the IRS so it can steal money from the most vulnerable taxpayers" is far more compelling than "poor people pay more taxes than they have to".
>How do you propose to garner support to fix the system without drawing attention to the bad actors?
Is there any evidence that drawing attention to bad actors actually garners political support to fix this? Look at the comments here, almost everyone is talking about the problems with Intuit and not how to fix this systemically.
What we need is grassroots political change. This specific issue regarding tax prep is a symptom of larger systemic problems caused by two main issues. First-past-the-post voting means that people generally only have two viable choices when voting. Anyone who is a single issue voter and their single issue is the tax prep industry is extremely rare and frankly in my opinion crazy. This means that no one has any incentive to change the status quo. The second problem is how US's free speech laws (or perhaps more accurately the current interpretation of these laws) basically create a near free-for-all in terms of campaign financing. Since there is almost no strong motivation for change, the only people involved in the discussion about tax prep are the people who are already invested in the industry. They obvious have a huge incentive to lobby against the death of their industry. So you have an issue in which we have little public motivation for change versus an entire industry that would be willing to dedicate all their profit to fighting change. It isn't surprising we see the results we see.
>A multi-billion dollar company has been lobbying the IRS so it can steal money from the most vulnerable taxpayers" is far more compelling than "poor people pay more taxes than they have to".
I am not making the second argument. I am generalizing the first argument to "multi-billion dollar companies have been lobbying the government to steal money from everyone, let's adjust our system to stop that".
I'd argue that someone drawing attention to specific bad actors is implicitly saying "stop these people from doing this" which is far more actionable than your generic "What we need is wide-spread, bipartisan support for change". What am I supposed to do with that?
So just.. leave the bad actors out of the narrative?
It feels like if one does that, then you come back and say "but who is doing [bad thing]? where is the evidence?". You can't just leave the people causing the problem out, as if it were some how rude to name the people pissing in the pool.
I never said we need to leave the bad actors out of the narrative. I am simply talking about not placing the blame on them.
It is the equivalent of a blameless postmortem. We are in a constant cycle of firing interns for pushing costly bugs into production without ever wondering why we are allowing interns to push to production without supervision. We just fire the intern and think the problem is fixed. We have learned that isn't a good way to run a company, but we haven't learned that isn't a good way to run a society.
Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production because for whatever reason it was in their best interest? We fire bad actors all the time.
> Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production
Probably not faster than I’d fire whoever let an intern repeatedly push broken code to production, without taking responsibility for fixing the deployment process problem they were responsible for, were I at the level where my responsibility wasn't merely to fix the deployment process problem but to address the problem that allowed the deployment process to persist, and presuming that there wasn't a systemic reason rather than simple nonfeasance behind permitting that problem to go unfixed.
Especially as establishing the “intentional” part of the hypothetical would probably take longer than establishing a serious and inexcusable failure even in the absence of any intent in the person responsible for allowing the push to be possible in the first place.
That's, I think, the upthread posters point. If you have an intern posting broken code to production repeatedly (intentionally or not), you have another problem that is a deeper and broader impact problem, whether individual or systemic or both, than the intern.
My main goal would be to understand how an intern could intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production. Fixing that is more important than punishing the individual. A broken/corrupt system will do more damage over the long term than an rogue individual because a well designed system won't give a single individual with little experience that much control.
