Oregon made its own turbo tax competitor and it's great, and getting better every year. I was really looking forward to Direct File. (I used an accountant this year so I didn't get my chance.) Back to filing my own returns by hand next year.
Thank you, DOGE brainiacs who decided I had to keep doing it the inefficient way.
Just found, after seeing this thread, IL also has a great (seems that way) State tax filing website. Good thing - it can import your Federal Return information.
USA doesn't need a TurboTax competitor (of which there are many - I worked for one which struggled in the US market). It needs reform. TurboTax should be unnecessary.
I agree that TurboTax should be unnecessary. And if you want to make it unnecessary by simplifying the tax code, go for it. In the meantime, we should have a free and efficient direct-to-IRS method of paying taxes that doesn't rely on paying extra fees to a middleman.
Being able to file taxes is ideally a public good.
For private enterprise, the benefits are to encourage more complex tax laws, and to add MORE challenges that they can intermediate.
The incentives for governments are to get it done easily, cheaply and at scale, without differentiation between users.
Plus we know how this is done globally. We even know that tax filing is intentionally made as painful as possible to ensure American voters hate filing taxes even more.
I think you misunderstood my point, which was that abandoning direct file (which is good) because what the system really needs is reform, is allowing that desired reform (the "perfect") to be the enemy of that good solution.
These things are not mutually exclusive. I agree that simplifying the tax code would be a good thing. But I don't think it's any more likely in a world without Direct file than in a world with it.
They are all private businesses which have to make money somehow. Refusing to host a good free public system because it would be more perfect to simplify the system is literally perfect being the enemy of good.
And it's not even all of the government, plenty of counties and even their departments have random domains leaving you wondering if it's just an elaborate phishing attempt
I could do without it. At this point, the domains are for authenticity. I don't need hierarchies of Wikipedia domains for language and mobile view, for instance.
Use Free Tax USA. Federal is free. If you need to file state, it is $15. I’ve used it for years and it works great. For a number of years I prepared my taxes on both Turbo Tax (without actually paying for it) and Free Tax USA. They always came up with the same numbers.
I find that FreeTaxUSA has a much better interface than TurboTax. They don't play games with fake loading screens needlessly making you wait (when we both know that the math involved takes just a few CPU cycles) and make the whole experience much easier with fewer upsells, but the biggest deal for me is that they're far more transparent about how everything maps to the underlying documents.
TurboTax wants you to be scared of the tax forms, so they make it really hard to see what it is that you're actually doing and signing. FreeTaxUSA actively encourages you to look at and understand the forms you're filling out and signing at every step of the way. After a few years with them I actually feel that I could fill out my taxes by hand, but I don't want to because their interface is a genuine improvement on the tax forms, as opposed to TurboTax's which is very much not.
My understanding of the tax code has shot up dramatically since switching to them, and I feel much safer submitting taxes now than I ever did with TurboTax because I understand every single line I submitted.
I prefer Free Tax USA over Turbo Tax. Switched several years ago and haven't looked back.
The last 2 years, I paid the $8 for chat support to answer some questions I had and both times their answers saved me a lot more than the $8. Very knowledgeable and can see my numbers to give me specific guidance and answers.
Does anyone have recommendations to replace Credit Karma? I previously really liked the service, pretty straightforward, but it was recently bought by Intuit. Tried to login over web and it just redirected me to an app.
I can’t recommend Monarch strongly enough. It is a service that aggregates across bank accounts, brokerage, credit cards, etc.
The killer feature for me is that it provides overall money in/money out, with some good visualizations too. This is nontrivial for anyone using multiple credit cards or bank accounts, and is *critical* information for being a responsible adult IMO.
It also has budgeting, investment tracking tools, etc. But these stay out of your way if you just want to look at overall metrics like in/out over time, or net worth.
I showed my financial advisor and he was so impressed he picked up their advisor product (https://www.monarchmoney.com/for-professionals). So I don’t have to pay for a subscription anymore myself!
I strongly believe everyone should use a tool like Monarch for financial situational awareness.
If you mean the tax filing product, Credit Karma Taxes, that was bought by Block (Cash App) a few years ago and is now named Cash App Taxes.
I've used it for the past few years, but this year had a more slightly more complicated tax situation due to switching investment brokerages and making more trades than usual and I found it kind of annoying to deal with. I switched to FreeTaxUSA this year and it worked quite well, so I'll definitely be using it instead of Credit Karma/Cash App Taxes next year.
Wish I hadn't been funding Intuit after using FreeTaxUSA this year. Maybe the import isn't as great, but I found it overall a bit more intuitive than TurboTax
Another vote for Free Tax USA. I’m angry that free file is gone, but these folks seem like they care about the craft of building good software and good interfaces, and I’m happy to pay them for the state return even though it’s easy enough to just copy and paste into the state website.
100%. I've used them for the last few years, and it's as easy as it can be for normie taxes (things can break down if you get into Schedules, but maybe I should have hired an accountant).
I used to be a hardcore "the government should stop playing 'I'm thinking of a number' and just tell me what I owe", but the rise of these internet tax apps has kind of obviated the need. And with multiple competitors, you can even check the others work.
I've heard about this for a few years but never tried. Do they handle like if you have rental income, foreign bank accounts, and other complications? Thanks!
Just another vote here for Free Tax USA. Another point is that they iterate and improve every year. Last year my son had to file in two different states, and the process flow was a bit wonky (you had to create a space holder return for the second state before returning back to the first state form). They fixed it this year and it worked great.
Mr. Bessent (Treasury Secretary) was repeatedly asked during his confirmation hearing whether he would protect DirectFile and he said "Yes" :-)
A small snippet of that conversation. The video recording has much more details -
Do you agree with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report finding that the Direct File pilot was successful and should be expanded?
Answer: As noted during the hearing, I commit that for this tax season, Direct File will be operative to prevent any disruptions for taxpayers. And if confirmed, I will consult and study the program and understand it better, and evaluate whether it works to serve the best interests of taxpayers.
I also found that FreeTaxUSA helped me understand my taxes better. A few areas where TurboTax performed some calculation automatically, FreeTaxUSA made me aware that I had eg. maxed out a particular deduction, in a way that helped me change my behavior accordingly.
I was actually fairly impressed with CashApp taxes. It seemed to work fine, it handled my State and Federal taxes just fine. Granted, I don't think my taxes are terribly complicated, but I think they're comparable to a vast number of users.
CashApp taxes is free and had zero upsell. I don't know what information they are farming out of this and if I did it might end up disturbing me, but at least it's free and was easy to use.
Cash app is the best bar none. The only problem is part year state income taxes which I have to fill by hand.
I got the opportunity to learn about something like married, filing separately, on a single return or something because of course oomur tax policy is like a jury rigged bug fix on top of a bug fix.
Just so that you are aware, TaxHawk (which owns and operates FreeTaxUSA) may choose to sell your information in the event of a "business transition" (bankruptcy, merger, etc)
> In the event TaxHawk evaluates or conducts a business transition whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, such as a merger, being acquired by another company, or selling a portion of its assets, the personal information of users will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. Users will be notified, via email and/or through a prominent notice on the FreeTaxUSA.com website, 30 days prior to a change of ownership or control of their personal information.
> For mergers and acquisitions. If we are involved with a merger, asset sale, financing, liquidation, bankruptcy, or the acquisition of all or part of our business to another company, we may share your personal information with that company and its advisors before and after the transaction date.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you are incorrect. EULAs can be written such that there are irrevocable privacy rights even in the event of corporate actions. I think 23 & me is going through something like that now.
So the buyer is bound by the same terms but they absolutely do get the data ("be part of the assets transferred" as per FreeTaxUSA's terms that we are discussing).
Another +1 for FreeTaxUSA. This is my second year using it, and I think they do a great job. It’s more “hands on”, but I think they offer a strong value.
Yes, one might argue it's a little misleading, but it comes across as significantly more genuine and less scammy than TurboTax. The federal filing is completely free, no matter which forms you have, and you just pay $15 per state. They also have the standard support upsells, but they don't push them crazy hard (I think it's one prompt between the federal and state sections).
I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).
Federal (USA) taxes are always free with them no matter what complications you have. They only charge for state filing or for live support. Seems fine to me to call it that.
I'm really happy to use FreeTaxUsa and only pay $20 for my income tax though, because using TurboTax with contractor income it was $120 or more. I got multiple family members to switch to FreeTaxUsa.
Regardless of what happens to Direct File, I recommend people learn how to do their tax returns by hand. I do it by hand every year. Yes, it is tedious, but I am not beholden to anyone and I don't need a "product" (paid or otherwise) to solve it for me. It takes me between 10 to 15 hours per year for both my federal and state tax returns. That is all. Once you get a hang of it, it is not that bad.
(I recognize that not everyone can do this, but if you have the technical skill to handle the math, I do still recommend it.)
10-15 hours? Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 or so after discounts through my bank and I can nail out my taxes in under an hour with all it can auto-import in my situations. If it saves me 14 hours of labor its definitely worth $50 to me, and I'd say I'm massively overpaying compared to the free filing tools out there!
The cost of Turbo Tax is not the just what you pay for the service. The real cost is that they now have a very detailed financial picture of you and your family and they will market that to any willing buyer (I will never be convinced that they don't do this).
But even then, assuming "they'll just sell it anyways", most of that information exists with other orgs anyways that could just as easily just sell it anyways. If I don't trust Intuit, why would I trust ADP or whoever my bank is to not sell my data either?
But sure, I agree, using any third party to file your taxes exposes you to that risk of yet another party potentially leaking/selling data. Once again though, to me that trade off of 14 more hours with my kids versus someone knowing what I paid in mortgage interest last year is pretty OK to me. Data brokers could just glean that same kind of useful information it means through the thousands of other things tracking me anyways.
I always wondered if “we won’t sell your data” means literally just that. They promise they won’t sell it but, what’s stopping them from giving it away for free? Moreover, they could establish another company, give them data for free, and that second company sells it.
Given that DOGE is currently "cleaning up" the IRS, I figure it's only a matter of time before America invites "trusted commercial partners" to "analyze citizen data" for a "more efficient" auditing process.
It's about reducing the burden on taxpaying Americans, or something like that.
> I figure it's only a matter of time before America invites "trusted commercial partners" to "analyze citizen data" for a "more efficient" auditing process
No need to partner with the IRS, the DOGE dudes have an external drives in a sock drawer at home, ready for their next Fintech startup. For reasons attributed to "world class algorithms" the Fintech will be preternaturally good at targeting financial services to individuals, and assessing credit-worthiness given nothing but a name and zip code...
I too would work for "free" to gain access to that valuable data. If I didn't have a half-decent moral compass.
I regret to inform you that your bank, credit card company and every other financial institution you use is already selling it off in real time... it's how they make credit reports :(
Also my bank only knows what goes on in my checking account. They have a lot less information than the IRS does (although what they do have is probably a lot more detailed).
I've been surprised at how many people will happily hand over their detailed financial data to Plaid. I can understand how many people might not know how sophisticated malicious actors can be with it, but everyone has heard of identity theft at this point and having someone taking out credit cards in your name is a huge pain.
I used to work in Intuit's Security R&D business unit and worked on the software that made it so that even if someone at Intuit/Turbo Tax wanted to do that it'd be impossible. Intuit spends a lot of money on cryptographers and very skilled programmers to ensure that. The definition of PII extends all the way to the HTTP logs of filers such that we couldn't even visualize filings on a map as they came in during tax season.
There's plenty of things that Intuit does that aren't good without alleging baseless claims.
And your bank, and your credit card company, and the company handling payroll, and your health insurance company, and credit bureaus, and and and and...
Yes, the people paying you and the ones handling your money has your financial data. You can always choose to go bank less and credit card less of you wish. I guess you can go off grid for salary?
If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic.
At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.
Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.
Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.
On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.
So, at least it’s not 100% bad.
Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
1040-EZ was discontinued in 2018. You just fill out 1040 now and leave lines blank. If you only have W2 income and don't make too much, it is really easy. You just fill out lines 1a, 12, 25a and the IRS will figure the rest (you can calculate the intermediate numbers if you want to, but they will do it for you).
However, knowing it's that easy requires reading a lot of instructions, and if you make enough money (depending on filing status), it suddenly gets much more complicated (forms 8959, 8960, 6251 have income triggers), and if you have 1099s (INT or DIV) you might need to file Schedule B and form 8995. And if you have a mortgage, you should do your taxes twice to see if itemizing with Schedule A is better. And god forbid you sold anything and have to do Schedule D and forms 8949.
I do not understand you guys, I do not care about my taxes. They are fairly complex by Swedish Standards because I deliberately loose money In some area that gives me tax cuts, but not overly so.
Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour.
I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them.
Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
I don’t care either. I’ve tried hiring people to do them for me, but it ended up being even more work.
The worst thing about our system is that the taxes are impossible to figure “correctly” (that’s not even a concept that makes sense, given how the tax code works) and there are massive legal penalties for getting them wrong.
The cost of giving money to Intuit is that they then give it to politicians to create a more convoluted tax return so that you are further locked into giving Intuit money every year.
I realize you're just repeating frequently reported information, and Intuit has indeed lobbied against the IRS creating a free competitor to their product. But Intuit has not lobbied to make taxes more complicated. Congress does that well enough on its own. If you reread the original ProPublica piece that kicked off all the Intuit-hate 6 years ago, you'll see they imply it but carefully don't actually say it or back it up; others quoting the article were less careful.
If paying for TurboTax works for you, that's great. If you find it worth the money, that's great. It's just not worth it for me and wanted to tell people there is another way.
I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.
This is equivalent to compiling every package from source for your Linux install. You don't end up learning too many useful things, all you've done is a very repetitive tedious task that doesn't give you much financial return.
I second this. Although I only hand filed for two years and then transitioned to FreeTaxUSA. The benefit is that after going through their wizard/interface, I can confidently check the generated IRS forms to make sure it’s filled to my intent.
My Australian tax return takes me about 20 minutes.
The system prefills 99% of the details that they've obtained from my employer, bank, health insurer, stock broker etc directly. All I need to do is fill out my deductions from a running spreadsheet I've maintained throughout the year.
My greatest pet peeve in life is when people make ME work to pay THEM money. I don’t understand why the gov can’t just tell me how much I owe and I pay.
It took me 58 minutes to do my not that simple taxes (both state and federal) using Turbo Tax. The cost was about $200. Based on your time estimate, it saved me 1-2 work days of time. That seems like a good bargain to me.
What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.
Mine took the same time and only cost $15 because my state charges. Freetaxusa. I could have done it for free if I mailed my state, but whatever. My taxes are also well above what's average(personal plus 2 biz).
TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form.
$200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.
Would love to read a blog post on this. 10 - 15 hours is probably too much but I bet if I learned how to do it I could figure out how to optimize it with all the tools that are available today. Would love if TurboTax just died because everyone figured out they could do taxes on their own with just a little supplemental help from local models or something similar.
10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)
If you just have W2 income and take the standard deduction, taxes are really quite simple to do on paper. It's a two page form, most of which you leave blank.
If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
> at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much
It does. I have most the things you have mentioned and it was automated, except for correcting a small situation their OCR messed up by reading an extra blank space from the form.
Well that's good to know I guess. I haven't used it since they could OCR forms. I had to key them in manually, and it really didn't do anything much more than a standard 1040 return and the most common additional schedules.
I don't think I'll make a blog post about this, but since you asked I will describe what you have to do briefly. 10 to 15 hours includes everything:
- Downloading all forms and instructions.
- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.
- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).
- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.
- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.
- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.
2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.
The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.
I used to use TurboTax but then compare the pdf it generated line-by-line to the pdf from the previous year, and caught things I'd missed fairly often. One year though I was having trouble finding where in the UI the field I needed to set was, and concluded that the whole process was stupid. I then switched to just filling out the forms directly using my previous year's as a guide, and found that it just didn't really take any longer. This year I spent about an hour on my taxes with W2 income, RSUs (with an incorrect cost basis), ESPP trades, dividend/interest income from four different brokerages, and some stock trades to report.
I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.
i did it by hand till 15 years ago. created a spreadsheet, with only the items I needed.
the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.
the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.
I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")
I do my (Canadian) taxes by hand also, but not exactly.
I calculate all the fields using my homebrew software. All calculations are done there.
The software produces a report which is organized by form and field. I can go through it and just put the indicated values into the right forms.
The forms are fillable PDFs. I copy and paste most of the values.
The last few years, I had perfect results; no correction came back from the Canada Revenue Agency.
This year, that d1ckhead Justin Trudeau left us with a surprise; complications to the Canada Pension Plan. Something like a 40% of all the line items in my tax calculation are from the new CPP schedule 5. It has multiple brackets now. I had to redo that section of my system (redefine the model). That is tedious. Anything same as last year is a breeze.
I had to model a whole new form this year since I worked for two employers and overpaid EI (employment insurance). The common forms handle CPP overpayment. For EI overpayment there is no "heads up" in the workflow at all. Since there is a deduction for EI payments, you have to do it right; you can easily screw up and naively calculate and claim the overpayment, while keeping the deduction calculated from the the overpaid amount.
Anyway, when I used to work with just pen and calculator, it took me about, oh, a bit over an hour or so. 10 to 15 hours seems crazy for personal tax. Is this for a moderately complicated corporation, where you're saving money by not hiring an accountant?
I have the technical skill to handle the math, but there is no way that I'm spending fifteen hours to do my taxes when there's a free-to-low-cost thing readily available that will do a similar or better job in like 45 minutes.
I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.
Maybe I'm just out of touch because I haven't done taxes by hand for years, but 10 to 15 hours? After I read your first sentence, I seriously expected you to say 2-3 hours.
I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.
Your mileage may vary. I did taxes by hand for a few years, probably 20+ hours each year, every hour stressful.
For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours.
Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack.
The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ.
Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.
I'm not OP, but if you are a reasonably high-earning professional common on this site, you trigger a ton of stuff. I used to take about that long to do mine, although I've gotten much faster. In a normal year, I typically file forms 1040, Schedule A, Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule 2, 6251, 8606, 8949, 8959, 8960, 8995 + state versions of some of those. I'm also married, so I calculate all permutations of joint/separate with itemized/non-itemized, which also requires you to actually figure your taxes instead of leaving it blank and letting the IRS do it.
It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
Yes, you are right. In hindsight, what I viewed as "complicated" is not what everyone else views as complicated. Because I do this manually, I am much more aware of all of the different forms and roughly when to use them than most other people, so I don't view my taxes as particular complicated because I can see situations where they can get insanely more complicated. I filed more than just form 1040 with the IRS this year if anyone is curious.
As to the permutations aspect, this does take a lot of time but it can net a lot of savings. One thing that I would add is that you do have the choice to round to the cent or the whole dollar (at least with the IRS), but generally I have never found that to make any substantial difference, so I just round to whole dollars at this point and don't waste my time trying to optimize that.
I don't have a particularly complicated return, to be honest. I just take my time and don't stress myself out about it. The time includes everything, not just the time I spent putting in numbers.
You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
Free tax programs are what allow taxes to become so complex that you need a program (or paid CPA) to help fill them out. I refuse to have to get a program to fill them out.
A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.
There is an old russian tv series called Kitchen where the mc starts his job by stripping the labels from bananas. On the question "what is the sense of that", he gets the answer "for balance in the universe - somewhere there, there is someone else putting the labels on the bananas".
Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.
I recommend this, as well, especially if you have repetitive taxes.
I spend just a few hours doing taxes by hand when it's are similar to the previous year. With an accountant, I have to spend a bunch of time getting things ready, anyway. I only pay them when something weird happens.
The average tax payer takes the standard deduction and doesn't require anything special. There is absolutely no reason for this process to be privatized for the typical American.
There’s also no reason for anyone not to make coffee at home with what affordable modern coffee machines can do but Starbucks remains in business, against all odds.
I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business. It isn't evil, it is rational. However, I believe evil companies are the ones that attempt to change laws to do business. Businesses should not have a voice in law. Intuit is an evil company and they are making the lives of every person in the US worse in order to make a profit.
This take is inconsistent. Lobbying is perfectly legal, so Intuit isn’t being evil, just being rational.
Companies, like people, can be evil while not committing any crimes. Intuit is not even that evil when compared to most larger companies in the US. We only remember it exists during tax season.
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business. It isn't evil, it is rational.
This is the exact argument Jeffrey Skilling presented to me to explain his actions at Enron. He further expanded saying, “You would have done the same thing in my position.”
It’s possible to be both evil and rational. Now regardless of the legality of Skilling’s actual actions—when considering whatever viewpoint he convinced himself of—one must consider ethics and whether or not they are intentionally misleading people in their actions. It can absolutely be evil. How many people lost their entire retirement savings when Enron went under?
I think companies should focus on being helpful to humanity instead of being profit maximizing machines, but that probably won't happen in my lifetime.
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business.
So dark patterns are good? It was good for cigarette companies to discover tobacco is addictive and take advantage of that by selling cigarettes to kids?
After all, this was legal until people fought a brutal grassroots war against tobacco companies to fix it.
I got into a discussion a while ago with a friend of mine that liked to think of themselves as libertarian. No beer was involved, but going to the absurd definitely came out. He tried to take the view that the government should get out of everything. My counter was that very quickly some company would take over enough of each market to effectively become the government and dictate terms to everyone else. My point to him was that -something- fills that void so at least if it is the government doing it there is a slim chance I can influence it. This is a bit indirect to your comments, but my big point is that I don't want companies ever trying to set the bar or come up with morals because their version of 'good' won't be one that is good for society. If we expect them to be 'good' they will define it and I want society to do that, not them. Dark patterns are bad, but we need to start holding our government accountable for not holding companies accountable. We also need to hold ourselves accountable for buying from those companies. I assume every company is adversarial because that is the nature of capitalism and I don't want to slip into the false security of 'they will eventually do the right thing because it is the right thing...'
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business.
No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.
And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.
But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.
Correct. Not saying the OP is, but many people conflate morality and law. They are completely separate, except for a few laws that might be inspired by moral concerns.
That's just 2025 Q1 lobbying money. They've been at this for quite a while and spent a lot more than just $240k. They just finally got an administration in office that's openly willing to make the government less efficient and less cost effective.
Because that's not why it happened. There's just an assumption in American politics that whenever anything bad happens it's because of "corporations" and not ideology.
Republicans are against easy tax filing because Grover Norquist makes them all sign pledges against it, not because of lobbying.
Corporations and ideology are not orthogonal concerns. The Republican small government ideology is about moving power out of democratically-accountable public institutions into accountable-only-to-their-owners private ones.
Private businesses are accountable to their customers, not only their shareholders. A business that loses all of its customers ceases to operate. A business that loses 10% of its customers will be held accountable by its shareholders.
Government is far less accountable than that. Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.
If this is to be true, then there needs to be stronger protections against collusion and monopolies, otherwise things will end up in a very bad place.
How do you escape a private business that is (a) big enough to buy up all the competitors, (b) uses IP law to prevent competition, (c) gives it's customers worse service and high prices?
unfortunately, founders never envisioned a congress of career politicians, who would shy away from their duty to actually draft complete laws and enforce them , because politicians want to be friends with everyone.
Lack of term limits, lack of randomness, lack of income caps in government (and post government!), have eroded a sense of duty in our congressional leaders , and have gotten us a congress that is solely in it for its enrichment at the expense of the voters
No there isn't. The first even slightly aggressive antitrust action in 25 years convinced silicon valley elites to sell out their friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
The vast majority of successful monopolies are because of government regulation and tax breaks that favor big incumbent businesses. If we massively simplified tax laws and regulations we'd simultaneously kill this specific Intuit problem and several other problems at the same time.
> Private businesses are accountable to their customers
Lol no, not at all. They actively try to deceive consumers through propaganda campaigns (marketing) and deception.
For example, did you know J&J knew about the asbestos problem in their baby powder in the mid 70s? They decided to just lie about it, because they knew cancer agents in their baby powder makes it unappealing to mothers and fathers. We didn't find out about this until 2020. That's 50 years of cancer baby powder.
You don't have any insight into how companies operate. You don't vote on anything. You have zero guarantee they have your interests at heart. How, then, are they accountable? They can do whatever they want, whenever they want.
> Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.
Yeah, until the next election.
I mean, how many people "approve" of the CEO of their company? Surely way fucking less than 50%. Most of the time these CEOs are blatantly evil and stupid. But they call all the shots and you don't get any vote at all.
They do. US Congress has very low approval rating in general. However each member of congress (house or senate) has a high approval rating in their district / state.
No; the Republicans argue that it is not in the IRS’s interest to do a good job, or offer the best tax strategies with their own tools. (Additionally, should the IRS tool contain a bug, does the IRS have the right to collect against their own mistake?)
This is a particular sore spot, as Republicans have still not forgiven the IRS in 2013 for admitting deliberately harassing conservative nonprofits without cause.
Call it a stupid argument, but at least it’s not a strawman like the above comment.
> the Republicans argue that it is not in the IRS’s interest to do a good job, or offer the best tax strategies with their own tools.
Yes, the rationalization offered to those who don't already subscribe to the ideology of privatization as an a priori goal to get them on board is usually that democratically-accountable public institutions lack a motivation to serve the interest of the public to whom they are accountable, while accountable-to-their-owners private interests do have an motivation to serve the public interest.
Well, to quote the Appellate Court Justice Learned Hand from the 1930s (at the time, he was often called the “10th Supreme Court justice”):
“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.” Gregory v. Helvering (2d Cir. 1934)
> Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right
'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.' ― Anatole France
I don't understand what this quote has to do with the comment you're responding to, other than both containing the words "rich and poor alike". Care to elaborate?
The letter of the law is the same for rich and poor people but the implications are very different. Neither rich nor poor people can steal or sleep under a bridge but rich people have money and homes so those laws essentially don't apply to them.
Likewise, tax laws are the same for rich and poor people but rich people can take advantage of more loopholes and ways to structure their income to make their effective tax rate much lower. Even just owning a house gives you access to a pretty big tax "loophole" in the ability to deduct interest on your mortgage.
The problem isn't that people are taking advantage of loopholes but rather that the loopholes were created and still exist.
The tax laws relating to carried interest, for example.
Everyone,
rich and poor,
gets to take advantage of the lower rates compared to ordinary income.
Sounds equitable on the surface,
but the reality is that poor people don't have investment yields that are taxed as carried interest,
they have ordinary income.
Rich people,
on the other hand,
can all but eliminate their ordinary income and the taxes on it,
and instead put their money in places where it's taxed as carried interest,
which is to say at a much lower rate.
I don't know what finance and investment regulations were in place when Learned Hand was alive,
but I do wonder if he'd take the same position in an economy and tax regime so heavily titled to favor the wealthiest.
I had to google this name and I found that he "makes" them sign a pledge to not raise taxes and to simplify tax laws, not to a pledge to oppose easier tax filing.
I've seen this cited on HN a bunch but haven't seen anyone link to a source and nor have I found one. Is there a source for this claim, or is it just inference from their behavior?
That’s what I was thinking… I would expect the lobbying to be way more of their budget, since their entire business model depends on keeping the status quo.
Most companies do lobby - they just prefer donating to industry coalitions, because it helps reduce the chances of negative press one way or the other.
That said, ime the RoI isn't that hot for the amount of time and effort spent, as relationships do matter more than money as some point political donations have diminishing returns.
Meanwhile where I live (Sri Lanka), we're all able to directly file our taxes with the Inland Revenue Department: https://eservices.ird.gov.lk . It's called RAMIS. It has it's warts and has had some outages in the past, but it gets the job done.
Note that Sri Lanka is a third world country that's currently recovering from a major economic crisis in 2022.
A slightly different angle. Every ceo is chomping at the bits for getting rid of all their employees because ... AI. What would it take to build a fully open source turbo tax alternative using AI? I suppose the hardest part would be keeping uptodate with rules etc but id assume that'd be the perfect use for LLMs?
It's amazing how little it costs to pay off lawmakers. I've seen this before in the first Trump admin where some private weather services paid a fairly small amount (tens of thousands) to get some NWS services shut down. Considering how much Intuit has to gain, they really didn't have to pay much. Great ROI.
"A glance at Intuit’s 2025 first-quarter lobbying disclosures gets at this continued, quarter-century saga. The company shelled out $240,000 to lobby members of Congress on tax-related issues."
This may be confusing as e-file is not the same as DirectFile and it should have little or no impact to most taxpayers since you can still always file your taxes for free. DirectFile is just an in-house “competitor” to software such as Turbotax and is only available if you made less than $250k jointly. BTW I’ve been using FreetaxUSA for about 10 years with no issues.
Did my taxes with taxes.cashapp.com this year. I recommend it. It's free to file both federal and state. It handled my complex tax return, including rental income with depreciation, RSUs, ESPP, section 1256 contracts, etc. And it can import last year's info from a TurboTax or other PDF.
Oh and it comes with 1-year of free audit defense as well.
I'm not sure what their long-term business stategy is, but I would rather pay them than TurboTax. I find Intuit's political lobbying distasteful.
As context size in LLMs grows I suspect getting taxes done in a very near future will be something trivial. For most people it is merely a form filling task moving a set of numbers from here to there.
I must be missing something.. why is nobody mentioning Free File Fillable Forms? I use it every year.. it's great! Super easy and seems like completely separate from both Direct File and Free File options.
It does bother me that if you watch your network requests, You find out it is an intuit product. I mean the IRS has one job, to receive taxes, why do I have to go through a third party company that I do not trust, to do this.
As backwards and stupid as it is in this internet enabled age, I still file paper forms. At least until the irs can get it's online act together, (Based on the information in the parent article, this may be never)
Interesting.. maybe the IRS contracted development and/or hosting from Intuit instead of doing it in-house. But it's completely free of charge, you don't need an Intuit account or sign their EULA/privacy policy or anything like that. And the official documentation for the tool itself is issued by the IRS [0].
I’ve been using Cash App to file for the past 2 years and it’s 100% fee and worked well, good interface etc. I have fairly complex taxes but it handled it all. State return too. Never going back to TurboTax or HRBlock.
When DOGE is shutting every contract down, as well as programs within the federal government, as well as firing everyone or getting appointed agency heads to do so
How much could any one program be attributed to lobbying?
I just pay an accountant. I never get a comparable return from turbo tax even after the 10x he charges me. To top it off, he gets to make a living without having to game our democracy.
Oregon made its own turbo tax competitor and it's great, and getting better every year. I was really looking forward to Direct File. (I used an accountant this year so I didn't get my chance.) Back to filing my own returns by hand next year.
Thank you, DOGE brainiacs who decided I had to keep doing it the inefficient way.
Massachusetts also has a really good website for online filing (unfortunately state taxes only).
Just found, after seeing this thread, IL also has a great (seems that way) State tax filing website. Good thing - it can import your Federal Return information.
https://tax.illinois.gov/programs/mytax/il-1040.html
USA doesn't need a TurboTax competitor (of which there are many - I worked for one which struggled in the US market). It needs reform. TurboTax should be unnecessary.
I agree that TurboTax should be unnecessary. And if you want to make it unnecessary by simplifying the tax code, go for it. In the meantime, we should have a free and efficient direct-to-IRS method of paying taxes that doesn't rely on paying extra fees to a middleman.
That reform needs to be a lot more substantial.
What I read in the article is an account of corruption on a staggering scale, permeating the democratic foundations of the US.
This is perfect being the enemy of good.
Being able to file taxes is ideally a public good.
For private enterprise, the benefits are to encourage more complex tax laws, and to add MORE challenges that they can intermediate.
The incentives for governments are to get it done easily, cheaply and at scale, without differentiation between users.
Plus we know how this is done globally. We even know that tax filing is intentionally made as painful as possible to ensure American voters hate filing taxes even more.
I think you misunderstood my point, which was that abandoning direct file (which is good) because what the system really needs is reform, is allowing that desired reform (the "perfect") to be the enemy of that good solution.
These things are not mutually exclusive. I agree that simplifying the tax code would be a good thing. But I don't think it's any more likely in a world without Direct file than in a world with it.
No it's not. We already have good alternatives to turbotax.
They are all private businesses which have to make money somehow. Refusing to host a good free public system because it would be more perfect to simplify the system is literally perfect being the enemy of good.
Cali too
What's the URL for California?
https://ftb.ca.gov
Easily searched, but I wanted to make an observation, why is it only the government who actually makes use of the hierarchical nature of DNS
And it's not even all of the government, plenty of counties and even their departments have random domains leaving you wondering if it's just an elaborate phishing attempt
I could do without it. At this point, the domains are for authenticity. I don't need hierarchies of Wikipedia domains for language and mobile view, for instance.
> why is it only the government who actually makes use of the hierarchical nature of DNS
Search engine rankings.
Use Free Tax USA. Federal is free. If you need to file state, it is $15. I’ve used it for years and it works great. For a number of years I prepared my taxes on both Turbo Tax (without actually paying for it) and Free Tax USA. They always came up with the same numbers.
I find that FreeTaxUSA has a much better interface than TurboTax. They don't play games with fake loading screens needlessly making you wait (when we both know that the math involved takes just a few CPU cycles) and make the whole experience much easier with fewer upsells, but the biggest deal for me is that they're far more transparent about how everything maps to the underlying documents.
TurboTax wants you to be scared of the tax forms, so they make it really hard to see what it is that you're actually doing and signing. FreeTaxUSA actively encourages you to look at and understand the forms you're filling out and signing at every step of the way. After a few years with them I actually feel that I could fill out my taxes by hand, but I don't want to because their interface is a genuine improvement on the tax forms, as opposed to TurboTax's which is very much not.
My understanding of the tax code has shot up dramatically since switching to them, and I feel much safer submitting taxes now than I ever did with TurboTax because I understand every single line I submitted.
Good to know, I've been doing it by hand (well, Free Fillable Forms) because I hate how opaque and shady TurboTax is. I'll try this one next year
I prefer Free Tax USA over Turbo Tax. Switched several years ago and haven't looked back.
The last 2 years, I paid the $8 for chat support to answer some questions I had and both times their answers saved me a lot more than the $8. Very knowledgeable and can see my numbers to give me specific guidance and answers.
Second this. Been using them for years. Took under an hour.
Never give money, business or data to Intuit
Does anyone have recommendations to replace Credit Karma? I previously really liked the service, pretty straightforward, but it was recently bought by Intuit. Tried to login over web and it just redirected me to an app.
I can’t recommend Monarch strongly enough. It is a service that aggregates across bank accounts, brokerage, credit cards, etc.
The killer feature for me is that it provides overall money in/money out, with some good visualizations too. This is nontrivial for anyone using multiple credit cards or bank accounts, and is *critical* information for being a responsible adult IMO.
It also has budgeting, investment tracking tools, etc. But these stay out of your way if you just want to look at overall metrics like in/out over time, or net worth.
I showed my financial advisor and he was so impressed he picked up their advisor product (https://www.monarchmoney.com/for-professionals). So I don’t have to pay for a subscription anymore myself!
I strongly believe everyone should use a tool like Monarch for financial situational awareness.
$15 discount via my referral link (but I don’t get anything because my account is paid for via my financial advisor): https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/b3q5nmkw2r
I do similar things with SoFi.
https://www.sofi.com/financial-insights/
It's pretty decent. I use it all the time.
I know this sounds kinda promo-iy, but they'll do a mutual signup bonus so if you actually want to sign up, it's a $25 bonus for you with this link https://www.sofi.com/invite/money?gcp=b3f052b0-5031-473e-a90...
sorry if that seems spammy -- I've never shared anything like this. Check my history if you want.
I just genuinely like them
If you mean the tax filing product, Credit Karma Taxes, that was bought by Block (Cash App) a few years ago and is now named Cash App Taxes.
I've used it for the past few years, but this year had a more slightly more complicated tax situation due to switching investment brokerages and making more trades than usual and I found it kind of annoying to deal with. I switched to FreeTaxUSA this year and it worked quite well, so I'll definitely be using it instead of Credit Karma/Cash App Taxes next year.
Wish I hadn't been funding Intuit after using FreeTaxUSA this year. Maybe the import isn't as great, but I found it overall a bit more intuitive than TurboTax
Another vote for Free Tax USA. I’m angry that free file is gone, but these folks seem like they care about the craft of building good software and good interfaces, and I’m happy to pay them for the state return even though it’s easy enough to just copy and paste into the state website.
100%. I've used them for the last few years, and it's as easy as it can be for normie taxes (things can break down if you get into Schedules, but maybe I should have hired an accountant).
I used to be a hardcore "the government should stop playing 'I'm thinking of a number' and just tell me what I owe", but the rise of these internet tax apps has kind of obviated the need. And with multiple competitors, you can even check the others work.
There is also Open Tax Solver (https://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/), which has been available since 2003.
I've heard about this for a few years but never tried. Do they handle like if you have rental income, foreign bank accounts, and other complications? Thanks!
What is the security story, including confidentiality and their capability to secure your information?
Edit: A partial answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724779
Just another vote here for Free Tax USA. Another point is that they iterate and improve every year. Last year my son had to file in two different states, and the process flow was a bit wonky (you had to create a space holder return for the second state before returning back to the first state form). They fixed it this year and it worked great.
Does it handle RSUs?
It does. It'll also let you do cost basis adjustments just like TurboTax.
Yup! ESPP too.
Mr. Bessent (Treasury Secretary) was repeatedly asked during his confirmation hearing whether he would protect DirectFile and he said "Yes" :-)
A small snippet of that conversation. The video recording has much more details -
Do you agree with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report finding that the Direct File pilot was successful and should be expanded?
Answer: As noted during the hearing, I commit that for this tax season, Direct File will be operative to prevent any disruptions for taxpayers. And if confirmed, I will consult and study the program and understand it better, and evaluate whether it works to serve the best interests of taxpayers.
From page 36 at https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/responses_to_qu...
So he evaluated not to expand :-(
That's not a Yes, that's a pretty clear No. You just don't speak fluent Politician.
You are right! In his "politician" language, he committed only to this tax season.
How is that "politician" language? The speaker is clear and direct.
> I will consult and study the program and understand it better, and evaluate whether it works to serve the best interests of taxpayers
They were direct about this tax season but that looks like classic politician for "I'm killing it ASAP" to me.
Good point; I was focused only on the former.
We Too, remember only the gist of a question, and not its actual words.
FreeTaxUSA only cost me like… $20? in California this year and had very little upsells. Highly recommend!
I also found that FreeTaxUSA helped me understand my taxes better. A few areas where TurboTax performed some calculation automatically, FreeTaxUSA made me aware that I had eg. maxed out a particular deduction, in a way that helped me change my behavior accordingly.
I was actually fairly impressed with CashApp taxes. It seemed to work fine, it handled my State and Federal taxes just fine. Granted, I don't think my taxes are terribly complicated, but I think they're comparable to a vast number of users.
CashApp taxes is free and had zero upsell. I don't know what information they are farming out of this and if I did it might end up disturbing me, but at least it's free and was easy to use.
Cash app is the best bar none. The only problem is part year state income taxes which I have to fill by hand.
I got the opportunity to learn about something like married, filing separately, on a single return or something because of course oomur tax policy is like a jury rigged bug fix on top of a bug fix.
Just so that you are aware, TaxHawk (which owns and operates FreeTaxUSA) may choose to sell your information in the event of a "business transition" (bankruptcy, merger, etc)
From https://www.freetaxusa.com/privacy
>> Business transitions
> In the event TaxHawk evaluates or conducts a business transition whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, such as a merger, being acquired by another company, or selling a portion of its assets, the personal information of users will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. Users will be notified, via email and/or through a prominent notice on the FreeTaxUSA.com website, 30 days prior to a change of ownership or control of their personal information.
That sounds like a disclaimer for something that is true for every company, no?
But unlike every other company, this company has your most sensitive tax information. For some that's fine, but others might not like that.
Wouldn’t Intuit do the same?
Yes,
https://www.intuit.com/privacy/statement/
>> How we share your personal information
> For mergers and acquisitions. If we are involved with a merger, asset sale, financing, liquidation, bankruptcy, or the acquisition of all or part of our business to another company, we may share your personal information with that company and its advisors before and after the transaction date.
Yes, but the IRS wouldn't. Which is just one of the benefits of having a direct file program.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you are incorrect. EULAs can be written such that there are irrevocable privacy rights even in the event of corporate actions. I think 23 & me is going through something like that now.
From their open letter:
> Any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data.
https://blog.23andme.com/articles/open-letter
So the buyer is bound by the same terms but they absolutely do get the data ("be part of the assets transferred" as per FreeTaxUSA's terms that we are discussing).
Do you have another reference in mind?
I'm confident some of the privacy-protecting apps I use have irrevocable EULAs. But I've never seen one from a major corporation.
Another +1 for FreeTaxUSA. This is my second year using it, and I think they do a great job. It’s more “hands on”, but I think they offer a strong value.
They don't give you fake loading screens and that's all I want.
same. +1 here. 3 years happy customer. Tried paper, turbotax, and a few others. Staying with freetaxUSA
That's a strange name for something that cost money.
Yes, one might argue it's a little misleading, but it comes across as significantly more genuine and less scammy than TurboTax. The federal filing is completely free, no matter which forms you have, and you just pay $15 per state. They also have the standard support upsells, but they don't push them crazy hard (I think it's one prompt between the federal and state sections).
I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).
Federal (USA) taxes are always free with them no matter what complications you have. They only charge for state filing or for live support. Seems fine to me to call it that.
I paid nothing because I live in Nevada. They charge for state income taxes, but federal taxes are free.
You only pay if your state charges to e-file, which many do.
They have up selling services like a prepaid debit card and whatnot, but all that is optional.
I do not think they're operating "at-cost" -- making a profit off of state taxes is a reasonable business model. I also doubt that California charges to e-file: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/file/ways-to-file/online/calfile/inde...
I'm really happy to use FreeTaxUsa and only pay $20 for my income tax though, because using TurboTax with contractor income it was $120 or more. I got multiple family members to switch to FreeTaxUsa.
It works pretty well, but it took me a while to give it a go, because the name sounds like the scammiest thing ever.
This is what my wife and I used this year and it was a great experience!
I've used it the last couple years and I've been happy with it.
Same, been using it for years. $15 for state tax, free if your state has no income tax
Regardless of what happens to Direct File, I recommend people learn how to do their tax returns by hand. I do it by hand every year. Yes, it is tedious, but I am not beholden to anyone and I don't need a "product" (paid or otherwise) to solve it for me. It takes me between 10 to 15 hours per year for both my federal and state tax returns. That is all. Once you get a hang of it, it is not that bad.
(I recognize that not everyone can do this, but if you have the technical skill to handle the math, I do still recommend it.)
10-15 hours? Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 or so after discounts through my bank and I can nail out my taxes in under an hour with all it can auto-import in my situations. If it saves me 14 hours of labor its definitely worth $50 to me, and I'd say I'm massively overpaying compared to the free filing tools out there!
It shouldn't be this hard.
The cost of Turbo Tax is not the just what you pay for the service. The real cost is that they now have a very detailed financial picture of you and your family and they will market that to any willing buyer (I will never be convinced that they don't do this).
Their privacy policy directly states they don't sell user data.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/...
But even then, assuming "they'll just sell it anyways", most of that information exists with other orgs anyways that could just as easily just sell it anyways. If I don't trust Intuit, why would I trust ADP or whoever my bank is to not sell my data either?
But sure, I agree, using any third party to file your taxes exposes you to that risk of yet another party potentially leaking/selling data. Once again though, to me that trade off of 14 more hours with my kids versus someone knowing what I paid in mortgage interest last year is pretty OK to me. Data brokers could just glean that same kind of useful information it means through the thousands of other things tracking me anyways.
I always wondered if “we won’t sell your data” means literally just that. They promise they won’t sell it but, what’s stopping them from giving it away for free? Moreover, they could establish another company, give them data for free, and that second company sells it.
> Their privacy policy directly states they don't sell user data.
unless you happen to click "OK" on one of the deceptive prompts TurboTax will show you while preparing your taxes.
Given that DOGE is currently "cleaning up" the IRS, I figure it's only a matter of time before America invites "trusted commercial partners" to "analyze citizen data" for a "more efficient" auditing process.
It's about reducing the burden on taxpaying Americans, or something like that.
They did that last week.
Palantir got the contract and estimates it’ll take a month to index all the IRS data, rip out the access controls and slap a nice search gui on top.
Palantir has had a contract with the IRS since at least 2018 to help comb through IRS data to find audit targets: https://archive.is/9vnDa
What they probably get now is even more control over how that data is given to them and how much of it they can access.
> I figure it's only a matter of time before America invites "trusted commercial partners" to "analyze citizen data" for a "more efficient" auditing process
No need to partner with the IRS, the DOGE dudes have an external drives in a sock drawer at home, ready for their next Fintech startup. For reasons attributed to "world class algorithms" the Fintech will be preternaturally good at targeting financial services to individuals, and assessing credit-worthiness given nothing but a name and zip code...
I too would work for "free" to gain access to that valuable data. If I didn't have a half-decent moral compass.
I regret to inform you that your bank, credit card company and every other financial institution you use is already selling it off in real time... it's how they make credit reports :(
I know, but I still resist where I can.
Also my bank only knows what goes on in my checking account. They have a lot less information than the IRS does (although what they do have is probably a lot more detailed).
Not if you have ever signed up for a service that uses Plaid. Then it's your bank and Plaid.
I've been surprised at how many people will happily hand over their detailed financial data to Plaid. I can understand how many people might not know how sophisticated malicious actors can be with it, but everyone has heard of identity theft at this point and having someone taking out credit cards in your name is a huge pain.
I guess enough time has passed.
I used to work in Intuit's Security R&D business unit and worked on the software that made it so that even if someone at Intuit/Turbo Tax wanted to do that it'd be impossible. Intuit spends a lot of money on cryptographers and very skilled programmers to ensure that. The definition of PII extends all the way to the HTTP logs of filers such that we couldn't even visualize filings on a map as they came in during tax season.
There's plenty of things that Intuit does that aren't good without alleging baseless claims.
your bank, credit card, even local supermarket...etc. already have your info. its 2025. there's really nowhere to hide.
This is one of the big reasons I keep doing it manually. Only the IRS and my state gets my info.
And your bank, and your credit card company, and the company handling payroll, and your health insurance company, and credit bureaus, and and and and...
Yes, the people paying you and the ones handling your money has your financial data. You can always choose to go bank less and credit card less of you wish. I guess you can go off grid for salary?
You could always go live in the woods or a cave, eating berries. :)
and Elon musk, apparently
Unclear to me if satire or not; it seems entirely plausible that he and the team are exfiltrating data
What is the cost of that to me?
If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic.
At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.
Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.
Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.
On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.
So, at least it’s not 100% bad.
Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
1040-EZ was discontinued in 2018. You just fill out 1040 now and leave lines blank. If you only have W2 income and don't make too much, it is really easy. You just fill out lines 1a, 12, 25a and the IRS will figure the rest (you can calculate the intermediate numbers if you want to, but they will do it for you).
However, knowing it's that easy requires reading a lot of instructions, and if you make enough money (depending on filing status), it suddenly gets much more complicated (forms 8959, 8960, 6251 have income triggers), and if you have 1099s (INT or DIV) you might need to file Schedule B and form 8995. And if you have a mortgage, you should do your taxes twice to see if itemizing with Schedule A is better. And god forbid you sold anything and have to do Schedule D and forms 8949.
I do not understand you guys, I do not care about my taxes. They are fairly complex by Swedish Standards because I deliberately loose money In some area that gives me tax cuts, but not overly so.
Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour.
I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them.
Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
I don’t care either. I’ve tried hiring people to do them for me, but it ended up being even more work.
The worst thing about our system is that the taxes are impossible to figure “correctly” (that’s not even a concept that makes sense, given how the tax code works) and there are massive legal penalties for getting them wrong.
The cost of giving money to Intuit is that they then give it to politicians to create a more convoluted tax return so that you are further locked into giving Intuit money every year.
I realize you're just repeating frequently reported information, and Intuit has indeed lobbied against the IRS creating a free competitor to their product. But Intuit has not lobbied to make taxes more complicated. Congress does that well enough on its own. If you reread the original ProPublica piece that kicked off all the Intuit-hate 6 years ago, you'll see they imply it but carefully don't actually say it or back it up; others quoting the article were less careful.
> Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50
You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report
If paying for TurboTax works for you, that's great. If you find it worth the money, that's great. It's just not worth it for me and wanted to tell people there is another way.
I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.
This is equivalent to compiling every package from source for your Linux install. You don't end up learning too many useful things, all you've done is a very repetitive tedious task that doesn't give you much financial return.
Well, I've previously used Gentoo, so I don't view that as scary to be honest.
Gentoo automates the repetitive tedious task, you just have to wait a while.
The description above is Linux From Scratch, not Gentoo :-)
Yep. Might be worth doing once. But not twice.
I second this. Although I only hand filed for two years and then transitioned to FreeTaxUSA. The benefit is that after going through their wizard/interface, I can confidently check the generated IRS forms to make sure it’s filled to my intent.
big thumbs up to freetaxusa
It's easy if you just have W2 income.
If you have multiple brokerage accounts, RSUs from an employer or two, maybe some consulting income, etc, it's annoying and tedious.
And if you have a business, doing it by hand basically means you'll overpay by a good extent.
My Australian tax return takes me about 20 minutes.
The system prefills 99% of the details that they've obtained from my employer, bank, health insurer, stock broker etc directly. All I need to do is fill out my deductions from a running spreadsheet I've maintained throughout the year.
My greatest pet peeve in life is when people make ME work to pay THEM money. I don’t understand why the gov can’t just tell me how much I owe and I pay.
You'll first need to give them access to all your private financial transactions. I'm a fan of the 5th amendment.
They already have access to your employer, Bank, and brokerage accounts. I would guess that covers most of what they need for most people anyway.
It took me 58 minutes to do my not that simple taxes (both state and federal) using Turbo Tax. The cost was about $200. Based on your time estimate, it saved me 1-2 work days of time. That seems like a good bargain to me.
What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.
Mine took the same time and only cost $15 because my state charges. Freetaxusa. I could have done it for free if I mailed my state, but whatever. My taxes are also well above what's average(personal plus 2 biz).
TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form.
$200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.
What sounds better to me is spending 58 minutes and $0. Seems like a better bargain.
Would love to read a blog post on this. 10 - 15 hours is probably too much but I bet if I learned how to do it I could figure out how to optimize it with all the tools that are available today. Would love if TurboTax just died because everyone figured out they could do taxes on their own with just a little supplemental help from local models or something similar.
10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)
If you just have W2 income and take the standard deduction, taxes are really quite simple to do on paper. It's a two page form, most of which you leave blank.
If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
> at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much
It does. I have most the things you have mentioned and it was automated, except for correcting a small situation their OCR messed up by reading an extra blank space from the form.
Well that's good to know I guess. I haven't used it since they could OCR forms. I had to key them in manually, and it really didn't do anything much more than a standard 1040 return and the most common additional schedules.
I don't think I'll make a blog post about this, but since you asked I will describe what you have to do briefly. 10 to 15 hours includes everything:
- Downloading all forms and instructions.
- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.
- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).
- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.
- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.
- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.
2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.
The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.
You can do all this in an hour on a computer without mailing anything.
Freetaxusa is the simplest way but really there are a ton of options that're free.
How do you stay on top of the ever-changing deductions and exemptions? Some of the loopholes are really good if you know them.
I used to use TurboTax but then compare the pdf it generated line-by-line to the pdf from the previous year, and caught things I'd missed fairly often. One year though I was having trouble finding where in the UI the field I needed to set was, and concluded that the whole process was stupid. I then switched to just filling out the forms directly using my previous year's as a guide, and found that it just didn't really take any longer. This year I spent about an hour on my taxes with W2 income, RSUs (with an incorrect cost basis), ESPP trades, dividend/interest income from four different brokerages, and some stock trades to report.
I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.
i did it by hand till 15 years ago. created a spreadsheet, with only the items I needed.
the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.
the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.
I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")
I do my (Canadian) taxes by hand also, but not exactly.
I calculate all the fields using my homebrew software. All calculations are done there.
The software produces a report which is organized by form and field. I can go through it and just put the indicated values into the right forms.
The forms are fillable PDFs. I copy and paste most of the values.
The last few years, I had perfect results; no correction came back from the Canada Revenue Agency.
This year, that d1ckhead Justin Trudeau left us with a surprise; complications to the Canada Pension Plan. Something like a 40% of all the line items in my tax calculation are from the new CPP schedule 5. It has multiple brackets now. I had to redo that section of my system (redefine the model). That is tedious. Anything same as last year is a breeze.
I had to model a whole new form this year since I worked for two employers and overpaid EI (employment insurance). The common forms handle CPP overpayment. For EI overpayment there is no "heads up" in the workflow at all. Since there is a deduction for EI payments, you have to do it right; you can easily screw up and naively calculate and claim the overpayment, while keeping the deduction calculated from the the overpaid amount.
Anyway, when I used to work with just pen and calculator, it took me about, oh, a bit over an hour or so. 10 to 15 hours seems crazy for personal tax. Is this for a moderately complicated corporation, where you're saving money by not hiring an accountant?
I have the technical skill to handle the math, but there is no way that I'm spending fifteen hours to do my taxes when there's a free-to-low-cost thing readily available that will do a similar or better job in like 45 minutes.
I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.
10-15 hours is insane. What are you doing?
I do my personal, my 2 LLCs in under 2 hours. I also do my roommates W2 which takes 10 minutes. The whole thing costs like $35.
Seriously, how does it take you 10+ hours? I do not understand at all. Lol
Maybe I'm just out of touch because I haven't done taxes by hand for years, but 10 to 15 hours? After I read your first sentence, I seriously expected you to say 2-3 hours.
I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.
Excellent advertisement for turbo tax. Luckily there's lots of more normal replies to this.
Your mileage may vary. I did taxes by hand for a few years, probably 20+ hours each year, every hour stressful.
For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours.
Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack.
The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ.
Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.
> TurboTax in airgapped VM
Just use their website, pick your battles.
The government is going to use software to process your stuff anyway, and whatever contractor makes that software will sell it to TurboTax.
Do you have a more complicated return eg other income, investments, etc or is this the average of how long it takes?
That’s insane.
I'm not OP, but if you are a reasonably high-earning professional common on this site, you trigger a ton of stuff. I used to take about that long to do mine, although I've gotten much faster. In a normal year, I typically file forms 1040, Schedule A, Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule 2, 6251, 8606, 8949, 8959, 8960, 8995 + state versions of some of those. I'm also married, so I calculate all permutations of joint/separate with itemized/non-itemized, which also requires you to actually figure your taxes instead of leaving it blank and letting the IRS do it.
It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
Yes, you are right. In hindsight, what I viewed as "complicated" is not what everyone else views as complicated. Because I do this manually, I am much more aware of all of the different forms and roughly when to use them than most other people, so I don't view my taxes as particular complicated because I can see situations where they can get insanely more complicated. I filed more than just form 1040 with the IRS this year if anyone is curious.
As to the permutations aspect, this does take a lot of time but it can net a lot of savings. One thing that I would add is that you do have the choice to round to the cent or the whole dollar (at least with the IRS), but generally I have never found that to make any substantial difference, so I just round to whole dollars at this point and don't waste my time trying to optimize that.
I don't have a particularly complicated return, to be honest. I just take my time and don't stress myself out about it. The time includes everything, not just the time I spent putting in numbers.
You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
Free tax programs are what allow taxes to become so complex that you need a program (or paid CPA) to help fill them out. I refuse to have to get a program to fill them out.
A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.
I do the same thing. There's a free spreadsheet that is a great help, you can search for it.
The government should just write its tax law as a spreadsheet.
Why? Why do you recommend it? What does one gain by doing it themselves?
I file my own too, but we live in 2025 though. We deserve some civility
There is an old russian tv series called Kitchen where the mc starts his job by stripping the labels from bananas. On the question "what is the sense of that", he gets the answer "for balance in the universe - somewhere there, there is someone else putting the labels on the bananas".
Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.
I recommend this, as well, especially if you have repetitive taxes.
I spend just a few hours doing taxes by hand when it's are similar to the previous year. With an accountant, I have to spend a bunch of time getting things ready, anyway. I only pay them when something weird happens.
Also, fuck Intuit.
The average tax payer takes the standard deduction and doesn't require anything special. There is absolutely no reason for this process to be privatized for the typical American.
It's INCREDIBLY infuriating to me that it is.
There’s also no reason for anyone not to make coffee at home with what affordable modern coffee machines can do but Starbucks remains in business, against all odds.
In this analogy Starbucks is attempting to making paper filters illegal.
Of course there is a reason- you don't spend your whole life at home near your coffee machine. Also it's not only about coffee
I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business. It isn't evil, it is rational. However, I believe evil companies are the ones that attempt to change laws to do business. Businesses should not have a voice in law. Intuit is an evil company and they are making the lives of every person in the US worse in order to make a profit.
This take is inconsistent. Lobbying is perfectly legal, so Intuit isn’t being evil, just being rational.
Companies, like people, can be evil while not committing any crimes. Intuit is not even that evil when compared to most larger companies in the US. We only remember it exists during tax season.
The really evil companies manipulate markets, evade labor laws, crush unions, exploit vulnerable users, enable authoritarian surveillance, trivialize wars.
All without breaking a single law.
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business. It isn't evil, it is rational.
This is the exact argument Jeffrey Skilling presented to me to explain his actions at Enron. He further expanded saying, “You would have done the same thing in my position.”
It’s possible to be both evil and rational. Now regardless of the legality of Skilling’s actual actions—when considering whatever viewpoint he convinced himself of—one must consider ethics and whether or not they are intentionally misleading people in their actions. It can absolutely be evil. How many people lost their entire retirement savings when Enron went under?
I think companies should focus on being helpful to humanity instead of being profit maximizing machines, but that probably won't happen in my lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business.
So dark patterns are good? It was good for cigarette companies to discover tobacco is addictive and take advantage of that by selling cigarettes to kids?
After all, this was legal until people fought a brutal grassroots war against tobacco companies to fix it.
I got into a discussion a while ago with a friend of mine that liked to think of themselves as libertarian. No beer was involved, but going to the absurd definitely came out. He tried to take the view that the government should get out of everything. My counter was that very quickly some company would take over enough of each market to effectively become the government and dictate terms to everyone else. My point to him was that -something- fills that void so at least if it is the government doing it there is a slim chance I can influence it. This is a bit indirect to your comments, but my big point is that I don't want companies ever trying to set the bar or come up with morals because their version of 'good' won't be one that is good for society. If we expect them to be 'good' they will define it and I want society to do that, not them. Dark patterns are bad, but we need to start holding our government accountable for not holding companies accountable. We also need to hold ourselves accountable for buying from those companies. I assume every company is adversarial because that is the nature of capitalism and I don't want to slip into the false security of 'they will eventually do the right thing because it is the right thing...'
Guess what, all medium to big sized companies bribe their way to changing laws (lobbying).
Corporations need to be redefined to serving society first, a sort of Prime Directive.
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business.
No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.
And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.
But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.
Correct. Not saying the OP is, but many people conflate morality and law. They are completely separate, except for a few laws that might be inspired by moral concerns.
$240,000 is really inexpensive in the end. Makes you wonder why most Companies aren’t; If not already are doing the same.
That's just 2025 Q1 lobbying money. They've been at this for quite a while and spent a lot more than just $240k. They just finally got an administration in office that's openly willing to make the government less efficient and less cost effective.
Because that's not why it happened. There's just an assumption in American politics that whenever anything bad happens it's because of "corporations" and not ideology.
Republicans are against easy tax filing because Grover Norquist makes them all sign pledges against it, not because of lobbying.
Corporations and ideology are not orthogonal concerns. The Republican small government ideology is about moving power out of democratically-accountable public institutions into accountable-only-to-their-owners private ones.
Private businesses are accountable to their customers, not only their shareholders. A business that loses all of its customers ceases to operate. A business that loses 10% of its customers will be held accountable by its shareholders.
Government is far less accountable than that. Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.
LOL good one. As if customers care about the ethics of the faceless mega megacorp behind the scenes.
I’m sure all the workers enslaved in company towns will be happy to know they are free from government meddling.
If this is to be true, then there needs to be stronger protections against collusion and monopolies, otherwise things will end up in a very bad place.
How do you escape a private business that is (a) big enough to buy up all the competitors, (b) uses IP law to prevent competition, (c) gives it's customers worse service and high prices?
theres antitrust for that .
unfortunately, founders never envisioned a congress of career politicians, who would shy away from their duty to actually draft complete laws and enforce them , because politicians want to be friends with everyone.
Lack of term limits, lack of randomness, lack of income caps in government (and post government!), have eroded a sense of duty in our congressional leaders , and have gotten us a congress that is solely in it for its enrichment at the expense of the voters
Antitrust is a bandaid fix and a last resort. By far the majority of monopolies are created by government regulation in the first place.
I dont disagree at all.
BUT parent was asking for a government solution to the problem of monopolies. I was merely pointing out that government solution already exists.
And as you rightly point out, persistent monopolies are a government-created problem.
No there isn't. The first even slightly aggressive antitrust action in 25 years convinced silicon valley elites to sell out their friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
The vast majority of successful monopolies are because of government regulation and tax breaks that favor big incumbent businesses. If we massively simplified tax laws and regulations we'd simultaneously kill this specific Intuit problem and several other problems at the same time.
I can imagine the tax laws and regulations being 90% simpler but my mostly-simple taxes being mostly the same amount of work.
We need the IRS to pre-fill tax forms.
They do... with IRS direct file. I used it this year, it was great.
> Private businesses are accountable to their customers
Lol no, not at all. They actively try to deceive consumers through propaganda campaigns (marketing) and deception.
For example, did you know J&J knew about the asbestos problem in their baby powder in the mid 70s? They decided to just lie about it, because they knew cancer agents in their baby powder makes it unappealing to mothers and fathers. We didn't find out about this until 2020. That's 50 years of cancer baby powder.
You don't have any insight into how companies operate. You don't vote on anything. You have zero guarantee they have your interests at heart. How, then, are they accountable? They can do whatever they want, whenever they want.
> Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.
Yeah, until the next election.
I mean, how many people "approve" of the CEO of their company? Surely way fucking less than 50%. Most of the time these CEOs are blatantly evil and stupid. But they call all the shots and you don't get any vote at all.
> Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.
Why don't citizens just move to a different city/state/country when they disapprove, like they do with businesses?
They do. US Congress has very low approval rating in general. However each member of congress (house or senate) has a high approval rating in their district / state.
The US still taxes you. There's also an expatriation tax.
No; the Republicans argue that it is not in the IRS’s interest to do a good job, or offer the best tax strategies with their own tools. (Additionally, should the IRS tool contain a bug, does the IRS have the right to collect against their own mistake?)
This is a particular sore spot, as Republicans have still not forgiven the IRS in 2013 for admitting deliberately harassing conservative nonprofits without cause.
Call it a stupid argument, but at least it’s not a strawman like the above comment.
> the Republicans argue that it is not in the IRS’s interest to do a good job, or offer the best tax strategies with their own tools.
Yes, the rationalization offered to those who don't already subscribe to the ideology of privatization as an a priori goal to get them on board is usually that democratically-accountable public institutions lack a motivation to serve the interest of the public to whom they are accountable, while accountable-to-their-owners private interests do have an motivation to serve the public interest.
Define "best strategies". Best for whom? The rich to further snowball their wealth at the expense of those they bowl over?
Well, to quote the Appellate Court Justice Learned Hand from the 1930s (at the time, he was often called the “10th Supreme Court justice”):
“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.” Gregory v. Helvering (2d Cir. 1934)
> Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right
'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.' ― Anatole France
I don't understand what this quote has to do with the comment you're responding to, other than both containing the words "rich and poor alike". Care to elaborate?
The letter of the law is the same for rich and poor people but the implications are very different. Neither rich nor poor people can steal or sleep under a bridge but rich people have money and homes so those laws essentially don't apply to them.
Likewise, tax laws are the same for rich and poor people but rich people can take advantage of more loopholes and ways to structure their income to make their effective tax rate much lower. Even just owning a house gives you access to a pretty big tax "loophole" in the ability to deduct interest on your mortgage.
The problem isn't that people are taking advantage of loopholes but rather that the loopholes were created and still exist.
The tax laws relating to carried interest, for example. Everyone, rich and poor, gets to take advantage of the lower rates compared to ordinary income. Sounds equitable on the surface, but the reality is that poor people don't have investment yields that are taxed as carried interest, they have ordinary income. Rich people, on the other hand, can all but eliminate their ordinary income and the taxes on it, and instead put their money in places where it's taxed as carried interest, which is to say at a much lower rate.
I don't know what finance and investment regulations were in place when Learned Hand was alive, but I do wonder if he'd take the same position in an economy and tax regime so heavily titled to favor the wealthiest.
I had to google this name and I found that he "makes" them sign a pledge to not raise taxes and to simplify tax laws, not to a pledge to oppose easier tax filing.
They're specifically against automatic tax calculation because they think making everyone do the work themselves encourages keeping it simple.
I've seen this cited on HN a bunch but haven't seen anyone link to a source and nor have I found one. Is there a source for this claim, or is it just inference from their behavior?
Well, there are two things going on here.
Norquist does oppose efforts by the IRS to (partially) obviate TurboTax by having the IRS do your taxes [1].
Separately, he has the anti-tax pledge you mention. The former is not entailed by the latter, at least in any obvious way.
So the parent is right about Norquist opposing filing simplification, but wrong about it being related to the infamous pledge.
[1] For those asking for a citation, here's a recent tweet: https://x.com/GroverNorquist/status/1912592196894630291
That’s what I was thinking… I would expect the lobbying to be way more of their budget, since their entire business model depends on keeping the status quo.
yes, so true! Even if they've been spending around that much every year, it's still an amazingly good ROI for Intuit to pay off lawmakers.
The article does also mention other bribes they've given recently, including $1 million to Trump
Most companies do lobby - they just prefer donating to industry coalitions, because it helps reduce the chances of negative press one way or the other.
That said, ime the RoI isn't that hot for the amount of time and effort spent, as relationships do matter more than money as some point political donations have diminishing returns.
Meanwhile where I live (Sri Lanka), we're all able to directly file our taxes with the Inland Revenue Department: https://eservices.ird.gov.lk . It's called RAMIS. It has it's warts and has had some outages in the past, but it gets the job done.
Note that Sri Lanka is a third world country that's currently recovering from a major economic crisis in 2022.
A slightly different angle. Every ceo is chomping at the bits for getting rid of all their employees because ... AI. What would it take to build a fully open source turbo tax alternative using AI? I suppose the hardest part would be keeping uptodate with rules etc but id assume that'd be the perfect use for LLMs?
It's amazing how little it costs to pay off lawmakers. I've seen this before in the first Trump admin where some private weather services paid a fairly small amount (tens of thousands) to get some NWS services shut down. Considering how much Intuit has to gain, they really didn't have to pay much. Great ROI.
"A glance at Intuit’s 2025 first-quarter lobbying disclosures gets at this continued, quarter-century saga. The company shelled out $240,000 to lobby members of Congress on tax-related issues."
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Your wealthy are now saying the quiet part out loud, and your poor are cheering.
This may be confusing as e-file is not the same as DirectFile and it should have little or no impact to most taxpayers since you can still always file your taxes for free. DirectFile is just an in-house “competitor” to software such as Turbotax and is only available if you made less than $250k jointly. BTW I’ve been using FreetaxUSA for about 10 years with no issues.
> since you can still always file your taxes for free
Are we talking about the free tax filing that the tax companies hid behind dark patterns?
https://cd2.justice.org/resources/research/taxes-and-forced-... > Intuit and H&R Block misled taxpayers into paying for a product that should have been free.
That is more than 85% of households being cheated by a non progressive tax.
Did my taxes with taxes.cashapp.com this year. I recommend it. It's free to file both federal and state. It handled my complex tax return, including rental income with depreciation, RSUs, ESPP, section 1256 contracts, etc. And it can import last year's info from a TurboTax or other PDF.
Oh and it comes with 1-year of free audit defense as well.
I'm not sure what their long-term business stategy is, but I would rather pay them than TurboTax. I find Intuit's political lobbying distasteful.
Regulatory capture and lobbyists win again. Corruption at its finest.
Other countries like Norway have much simpler tax systems that pre-compute the amount for taxpayers.
I used Direct File this year. Super fast and simple, no upsells or bullshit. Feels like every little thing just gets worse and worse lately.
Feels like every big thing just gets worse and worse too.
Sometimes things like this I am reminded in the discussions of AI, not everything problem can be solved with AGI or even ASI.
As context size in LLMs grows I suspect getting taxes done in a very near future will be something trivial. For most people it is merely a form filling task moving a set of numbers from here to there.
My dream is that the government puts Intuit out of business by massively simplifying tax laws, but I am most definitely not holding my breath
It is easier for them to do that after they put Intuit out of business with Direct File.
This is the way
I must be missing something.. why is nobody mentioning Free File Fillable Forms? I use it every year.. it's great! Super easy and seems like completely separate from both Direct File and Free File options.
FFF is... ok... I guess.
It does bother me that if you watch your network requests, You find out it is an intuit product. I mean the IRS has one job, to receive taxes, why do I have to go through a third party company that I do not trust, to do this.
As backwards and stupid as it is in this internet enabled age, I still file paper forms. At least until the irs can get it's online act together, (Based on the information in the parent article, this may be never)
Interesting.. maybe the IRS contracted development and/or hosting from Intuit instead of doing it in-house. But it's completely free of charge, you don't need an Intuit account or sign their EULA/privacy policy or anything like that. And the official documentation for the tool itself is issued by the IRS [0].
[0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5274.pdf
I’ve been using Cash App to file for the past 2 years and it’s 100% fee and worked well, good interface etc. I have fairly complex taxes but it handled it all. State return too. Never going back to TurboTax or HRBlock.
When DOGE is shutting every contract down, as well as programs within the federal government, as well as firing everyone or getting appointed agency heads to do so
How much could any one program be attributed to lobbying?
It’s crazy that it only costs $240k to buy control of tax filing policy and fuck over the entire nation.
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43709008
I just pay an accountant. I never get a comparable return from turbo tax even after the 10x he charges me. To top it off, he gets to make a living without having to game our democracy.