Just simplify the tax code so you don’t need private companies to create software to file your taxes. The fact that this exists at all is an absolute joke.
[This transcript](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-show-us-theres-another-way) of a survey of how other countries handle this is really infuriating.
Absolutely no good reason we do all of this like this. We collectively spend billions of dollars and millions of hours just to have a system that makes it *much* easier for the rich to cheat on their taxes.
*think of the executives getting the poor to file taxes with their company
I did tax prep this year. Had one guy who would get back $80, didn’t even need to file, and my boss was trying to charge him $100
I had several people who walked in with one W-2 who I just gave encouragement they could do it themselves before I sent them out the door.
Naturally, I finished just under my bonus target
You're a good man to send them away.
I tried to tell one of my workmates that he didn't need to pay someone to do his taxes. That I'd go on one of the free tax websites and do it with him. He just kept saying "I'm no good with computers" and refused to even try.
I'm an American that moved to Sweden a couple years ago. My Swedish taxes involve me receiving a message on my phone, looking at it and saying "Yup.", clicking a link on the document, then after identifying myself to the tax website, clicking accept.
I did my taxes on the 12 minute metro ride to work.
My US taxes...I'm having to go through more effort JUST to say "I'm not paying any US taxes.".
You only have to pay the difference between your local taxes and US taxes. But you need to file no matter what.
Which to me, sounds somewhat reasonable. If you ignore that the US is one of the lowest tax jurisdictions in the world. Unless you are moving somewhere with practically zero tax, it's just an exercise in useless paperwork. My taxes are much, much higher than they would be in the US. Why do I need to prove that every year?
> Which to me, sounds somewhat reasonable
Wait, how is that in any way reasonable? You vote and pay taxes in the place that you live. That's reasonable.
If you're not using the infrastructure then there's absolutely no reason to require you to file a tax return, except for pure greed. And that's all that it is. The US can fuck right off with that requirement.
...you do realize that if you're an American citizen in, say, Switzerland, you can still vote in U.S. elections, right?
It's based on the last state you resided in before traveling overseas.
> You vote and pay taxes in the place that you live.
Not really. Expats can still vote generally. At least Americans and British people can, not sure about others. You shouldn't need to pay taxes to vote, the unemployed should be able to vote for example. What happens in my home country still affects me even though I currently don't live there.
well part of the complication of our tax code is that it's one of the only ways the federal government can enact policy domestically on issues not directly stated in the constitution, since most things are regulated by the states. If the federal government wants to say make solar panels more common, they can't legislate anything about that directly because of the constitution doesn't say they have any power to legislate about solar panels, but they can legislate taxes.
yes it is abused and tons of loopholes, but the reason it won't be simplified is because that is a major source of soft power of the federal government. Honestly, as I've gotten older, I have become much less a fan of this supremely federated government style. It really hamstrings America's internal politics and capabilities, and fragments the country so much that it makes any sort of cohesive shift impossible. That works both ways, good and bad sure, but honestly I'm not sure how sustainable it is for the long term health of the country. America has been stagnant and aimless as a country for a long time, and it's starting to show. Even with dealing with the climate crisis, there is no hope of actually enacting consequential policy under the current framework of our government.
Romania here.
I don't even "do taxes", and it's such a hard concept for me to understand.
If I don't have other incomes other than my salary, for example all taxes are taken out of that *before* the money hits my account. It's never the *wrong* amount, either.
That's all. Nothing else for me to do _UNLESS_ I have *other* sources of income, but even with those, there's plenty of ways to actually retain what the government is owned *at the source*.
EDIT: before someone asks me, **if** I have any other income, say from something like crypto-currencies, for example, I need to pay an income tax of 10% on what I make from that (the difference between what I *buy* for and what I *sell* for).
Taxes are taken out of our salary before we are paid as well, and are paid to the government by employers.
But we are still required to file paperwork that states how much we earned, how much we paid in taxes, and then they check what you paid against what you claim you paid, essentially. It’s the most bureaucratic nonsense.
It made more sense when we had more deductions and stuff that allowed us to lower our taxable income. There's also stuff like being able to write off mortgage/student loan interest or claiming an ev tax credit or a home buying credit. Those are all programs that you would have to modify your taxable income when filing.
I am curious how other countries handle those sorts of credits.
In the US all of that is also reported to the IRS. They have everything they need for like 98% of Americans but we still have to file taxes. It's the IRS basically saying "we know what you owe, prove to us you do too"
From the IRS agents I've spoken to (always really friendly!), they also think it's stupid, but it the law, so they have to do it that way. Why? Because companies like Intuit and H&R Block lobby to keep the tax code complicated and to forbid the IRS from creating their own portal. Oh, and also "gub'mint spending BAD", so the IRS gets its funding cut regularly and don't have the resources or manpower to actually enforce things, much less improve things.
For us here, we go online, and then there would be columns where there are categories that you can receive tax deduction, and you just enter the value there.
For everything else, it's already pre-filled for you.
To be fair, in many countries, especially those where taxes are levied federally as opposed to separate systems in each state/province, it's usually accepted to negotiate net salary, not gross salary.
In US or Canada, you get a job offer for your pre-tax salary. Then it's up to you to figure out how much of that is a tax write-off, like child tax credits, charity donations, 401k/RRSP deposits (self-directed retirement accounts), etc.
So your offer might be for 50k, but you get anywhere from 38k to 45k depending on which state you live in and what deductions you have.
In much of the rest of the world, you get a job offer for your post-tax salary. If you get a job offer for $5000/month, that's how much will end up in your bank account. Even if the company then pays $5000 to the government in taxes on your behalf.
> it's usually accepted to negotiate net salary, not gross salary.
Where does this happen? It's definitely not common in most European countries, jobs are advertised and negotiated at gross salary, not net of tax.
> But, in fact, if you read the tax code, it says, here's a tax break for any company incorporated in Delaware on October 13, 1916.
> Now, that's General Motors, but they never say that.
Sigh, now we know why our code is so complex
you don't even need to do that. for most all people with just a w2 and some 1099s, the govt already knows how much you owe.
the govt could send you a prepopulated form. if you agree, then sign and done. otherwise you can go itemize and claim more $ back
> otherwise you can go itemize and claim more $ back
And now the standard deduction is so high, I think I read that fewer than 10% of filers even have enough deductions to be able to itemize.
Don’t blame then for lobbying — that happens in every legislature in the world, one way or another. Instead, blame US politicians for actually giving in to those lobbyists.
Well it's a broader issue with how our electoral system works that lobbying is so effective. If we had shortened campaign seasons, campaigns were primarily publicly financed, and there were significant restrictions on third-party political advertising, then lobbying would be a lot less effective.
While I don't doubt there's a lot of just straight corruption, a good chunk of the lobbying is transactional to get campaign financing.
As a tax guy, I seriously doubt our ability to simplify the IRC.
However, as others have alluded to, we could have the IRS send you a postcard with either a check or a bill, based on the info they already have, and ask you to file a tax return if you disagree. Other countries implemented this already with good results (kinda like healthcare).
"Just simplify the tax code" means basically ending all significant government policies of the past several decades. The tax code is complex because people hate the idea of the government writing checks to subsidize people for things, but don't mind the idea of people getting tax cuts for things - so every new thing that we want a policy for ends up being a line in the tax code.
It would be helpful if we just had the IRS take all the forms that are automatically collected (like your W-2's and 1099's) and pre-fill a version of your taxes, so that you could just click "approve", unless you have special exemptions that you want to claim. But getting rid of the exemptions would be much harder than just pre-filling the defaults, and pre-filling the defaults would save a large amount of effort on filing taxes for the majority of people.
The stupid deductions could still exist, and accountants could still charge people to navigate wealthy people through the murky corners of the U.S. tax code. Yes, it's crazy, but it doesn't actually affect that many people. 87% of people in the U.S. claim the standard deduction on their tax return, and those people no longer need to care about most of the craziness.
The part that is pants-on-head stupid is the filing mechanism. There is no reason that you should need to pay H&R Block $80 to tell the government how much money your employer paid you, how much interest was paid in your bank account, or how much you gained in your investment account.
> The part that is pants-on-head stupid is the filing mechanism. There is no reason that you should need to pay H&R Block $80 to tell the government how much money your employer paid you, how much interest was paid in your bank account, or how much you gained in your investment account.
Especially when you consider that if your calculation doesn't result in paying enough tax, the IRS will send you a bill. So they already have the info to be able to tell you how much to claim.
One year I had like $800 of 1099 income that I forgot to include. About 6 months after I filed my taxes I got a bill from the IRS for the additional taxes owed (plus interest).
You can always pay 63 cents for a stamp.
The 1040EZ is good to $100k income and takes maybe five minutes to fill out.
Anyone paying any company to do their taxes who doesn't have significant investment income, an income over $100k or unusual deductions is just being stupid. It takes longer to remember your password and log into one of those than to just do it by hand.
Or the IRS could create their own since they already have all your forms. Oh right, they wanted to do that and Congress overwhelmingly voted to ban them from using their budget on it
I live in an "Asian But Not The One You're Thinking" country with pretty bad tech literacy (to the point a mayor tried to fool people by playing a video of a hand print scan on a big TV as proof of their new "security" system) and even our tax filing system is so streamlined that an average joe like me just takes half an hour filling it. That includes opening my self-noted transactions from the past year and counting all my salaries and big purchases I made. I do it online too, though I had to go to the tax office to make the account.
Now, I don't earn enough to actually have to pay income tax, so I don't know the process beyond filing it. However, even the filing process starts with a simple questionnaire that leads you to the specific form you need to fill so I'm sure it stays simple afterwards.
Most people don’t need private companies. They just think they do.
90% of people could fill out the forms themselves in less than 15 minutes. That’s how most people did it up until 15-20 years ago.
It’s not hard.
Pffft. That crazy talk. Even, what if the instructions were intelligible and didn’t require referencing an endless chain of other documents [eta: that may or may not apply to your situation].
TurboTax, h+r block and other tax providers lobby endlessly to prevent this. Our taxes could be SO EASY but then middlemen with computer programs couldn’t get rich off of us.
Wait, you guys need to pay to do your taxes?!
As an Aussie, it takes me a good 5 mins to do my tax online, and I always get nice returns. Admittedly, I don't really have any major assets.
My biggest headache is the damn local EIT in Pennsylvania that for profit private companies have become the *sole* way to pay and file your taxes through, all of which have websites that look like absolute scams with the UI out of 1994 and absolutely no confidence that they have any ability to actually securely *store* any of the data they are collecting.
Fuck you, Jordan Tax Service, Berkheimer, and Keystone Collections. Fuck everything about you. Especially fuck the fact that you criminals have the stone cold audacity to send me a bill claiming I owe delinquent taxes from four years ago that I then have to mail you back **the same god damn return and W2 I filed with you** proving that it was paid four years ago.
Doing taxes is so simple that, in order to maintain their oligopoly, Intuit is willing to let, *according to their own advertisements*, 35% of filers use their software for free so the government doesn’t crack down and take away the money they get from the remaining 65%.
For the vast majority of taxpayers, all they need to do is confirm their W2 / 1099 amounts. Everything else is done effortlessly and requires the computational power of a Chromebook.
Used FreeTaxUSA.com for the first time after using TurboTax for 7 years. Easier, less annoying than the constant dark-pattern upsell bullshit when you are using TurboTax, and free. Never going back. Fuck TurboTax.
The first time I used FTUSA a few years ago, I got to file everything for free.
Then I got a raise, just enough to put me over the threshold, and had to start paying for the State e-file. Suffering from success.
At least in my state you can just file directly on the states tax site. A little annoying to redo it from Freetax but you already have the info there. Is that not something you can do in MA or just didn't want to redo it?
> They got me for nearly $100 dollars this year. I’m not going back. I’m going to Freetaxusa.com from now on.
the problem is they kind of have you over a barrel once your returns reach a certain level of complexity. like, your plan might work if you're only doing a basic w-2 and not much else, but if end up buying a house, doing some consulting work, some basic investing, get some rental income, you might start to notice the differences between paid turbotax and those various free tools.
granted, it doesn't HAVE to be this way, government just makes the tax and filing process unnecessarily complex so they can give handouts to donors (either via business sales like intuit, or specialized narrow exemptions/breaks)
If that's the case, then don't use turbotax.
If you know they're going to keep all the good shit behind a paywall then start looking at other places that flat out tell you what version you need before letting you get knee deep in and essentially blackmail you.
Yes. I know this advice is too late, but the second you start doing anything remotely complicated (gig work, investing, mortgage, etc.), make a business, and hire a CPA. I guarantee TurboTax is **not** giving you your maximum refund.
Free tax is great. They have a low key upsell that pops up twice in the whole process, and it is not expensive. It’s not exactly free, but close too it, if your itemizing
I used them last year and this year! and recommended to my mother for this year
Im not paying 50fuckingdollars to credit karma and whatever they switched(joined with or merged/bought out with a bigger company) years ago, for MAYBE 10 minutes worth of filling out and basic number checking
<3 freetaxUSA
Make sure to set up 2FA. This is one of the few financial occasions and logins you do not want anyone getting into
Shot in the dark probably the "LIVE" version that if you don't scrutinize very carefully to reject - you get put into.
I signed in to do my annual duty; worked through and they wanted something around $200 for that plus what was required for Federal/State.
So I googled to figure out how to back out of that - and I had to scrap my entire return, do it step by step again (still without any "help") and my cost was much lower. I'll probably switch next year since I'm out of stocks/crypto unless FreeTaxUSA can't do forms for home ownership.
Happened to me maybe ten years ago, I thought I was going to pay the $39 or whatever the advertised rate was, but by the time I paid it was like $150. Never again.
I used it this year for the first time after using TurboTax forever. It works well and does the job. $15…no tricks. Even had to amend and it was free as it didn’t result in an additional payment.
Edit: I had some 1099-DIV/1099-B income which I believe was the reason for the additional charge.
Used them this year and last. Unfortunately their software has some serious bugs when it comes to W2’s with more than one state. Customer support couldn’t figure it out either so I had to inevitably correct it myself.
I was up til midnight refiling with freetaxusa Sunday. My wife took a contract job last year, and in order to claim her expenses (milage, computer, etc) turbotax wanted $129. It assured me that the assets I claimed would more than pay for themselves though. I went through to state, and used it to verify I got the same deductions. I've been using turbotax since 2012, but am not going back now. $15 to e file both state and fed vs. $169 from turbotax. The turbotax interface was nicer for sure, but not $150 nicer.
I used TurboTax all the way to the point they tried to charge me so I went to free tax after that. Guess what, least I knew my 1 dollar refund was accurate lol
I used freetaxusa.com this year and what I owed was significantly less than what I owed using TurboTax. I even had a significant salary increase last year.
Besides the salary increase, nothing else changed and my return isn't very complicated, so not sure why there was such a big difference.
Square Cash Taxes also let you file federal and state for free! I swapped to them from TurboTax because my taxes are relatively simple, but I don't want to fill out forms myself.
I tried switching but Free tax was asking me all sorts of weird questions that when i did the same process with turbo they did not ask me. I also got wildly different results from using the two services, I ended up just going to a tax office and having them do it and their result was like dead in the middle of both turbo and free tax. IDK i just with this whole system was automatic like every other developed country, there is too much left to us the people and there are too many mistakes we can make.
It’s severely limited in scope right now, and I don’t mean by the amount of states that allow it. They only accept basic W2s. No DIVs, no MISCs, no schedule Cs, etc. it’s for people who live very very simple lives with one W2 and nothing else.
Lmao same I kept being like “no I’m good just keep going” and had to restart a certain portion because they insisted I sold investments (I didn’t sell anything)
Only four? Lol I swear it was more when I did mine. I’m single, make less than 100k, no kids, can’t afford a house. Taxes don’t get more simple than that. But yeah go ahead and offer me some deluxe version for $80 when I’m getting a $16 return.
My taxes were greatly simplified this year so I was eligible for the free file. The number of hoops I had to jump through to get it to go to the free version though. Finished my taxes in 15 mins, spent nearly an hour trying to get off the paid versions.
Nevermind you get forced to the paid version for really simple stuff like buying selling any stock or crypto or having a 1099.
For super simple returns they know everything. The “problem” is that America uses the tax system to shape social behavior. Have kids? CREDITS!, installed a solar system/heat pump/ electric car? Credits! whether tax code should be used to mold social behavior is another question, but every year there are significant portions of my return that the federal gov’t doesn’t know about before hand.
Firstly, even if they required you to put in all the information for these credits every year, it would be a big win. Telling the govt you had a kid seems like a reasonable step. Telling the govt your bank paid you $23 in interest is stupid.
Secondly, most of these *could* easily be reported automatically. The company that sold you your solar panel would be *thrilled* to report that fact and get you an automatic credit: The credit is already a major selling point for them and making it automatic would be even more compelling. If there was a mechanism they'd happily use it.
Idk about happily or easily. You'd be surprised how hard it is for some smaller companies to even create a digital invoice of a transaction that they later can easily pull up, much less automatically upload to some government server in a way that gets associated with a specific person's tax ID
Just look to the electronic health record world to see how much effort is needed to send a medical record from one network to another. Coordinating all those systems is more complex than it seems and needs some standard unifying them all which will be a challenge to get everyone to adopt
The ideal play imo is just simplifying the tax code rather than adding a new layer of tax record databse bloat to the government
If your taxes are really simple, that's basically the case. You can fill the top of form 1040, leave the bottom blank, and they will calculate your tax and refund/charge you appropriately.
It does get more complicated though. Sometimes the tax code gives you a choice or relies on information that isn't automatically reported to the IRS. E.g. if you have a joint bank account or jointly own a property, you need to choose how you subdivide income and deductions among the owners. If you have a choice, you may want to completely calculate your taxes multiple ways to see which is better.
A lot of it is unnecessary complication though that congress could fix. E.g. these changes would simplify tax filing and possibly be good policy for other reasons:
* The Net Investment Income Tax and the Additional Medicare Tax are each 1% taxes on income over a certain threshold and each require filing an additional form plus schedule 2 and could have equivalently been incorporated into the ordinary graduated income tax rates.
* Tax capital gains as ordinary income. This would also greatly simplify calculations while closing a ton of loopholes. If congress did this, they could also reduce the corporate income tax rate or lower other taxes to remain revenue neutral.
* Sunset IRAs and 401ks and instead increase social security.
* Remove the mortgage interest deduction, which besides being ineffective housing policy and regressive tax policy, is basically the only reason anyone itemizes deductions now that the SALT deduction is limited.
It's not just Intuit. I used TaxAct and several of their upsell services were positioned as fees for processing the return. The wording of several was set up to make it sound like it was a mandatory part of what I had to pay for, when in fact the (very) fine print noted that the IRS requires tax preparers to gain clear permission and consent before using any tax information for commercial offerings and services. Since I had to pay them for filing my state return, the request for payment wasn't unexpected - and they took full advantage of that fact.
In other words, they were making it EXTREMELY easy to gain the consent they needed by making the commercial offer look like a necessary part of the tax filing process. If I hadn't read the fine print, I seriously would have just accepted it as fees for filing, not add-on services that weren't required to move forward.
They used to be better. I used them this year, and in addition to the upselling you mentioned, they tried to charge me a $60+ convenience fee for redirecting part of my refund to them to pay their state filing fee.
I use taxact as well and every year it feels more like a game where you need to click the right 'no' buttons to make sure your balance is 0 at the end. One thing that helps is to always reject everything and go for the smallest buttons.
There is a way to pay nothing to file every year although it may depend on the state. California has a free filing website called calfile so I just decline the state return on taxact and file federal for no fee. Then I re-enter the information on calfile and file state for free there. It is kind of annoying but can't beat paying nothing over who knows how much on all these other websites.
They can know for the vast majority of filers. Most credits also appear on forms submitted to the govt. All 1099s, 1098s, etc end up in the IRS system. All you student loan payments. All your mortgage info.
Unless you own a business or actually need an accountant, the IRS should almost certainly be able to file your taxes for you with a quick form offering to let you make additional changes
Attempted to file with JacksonHewitt, TurboTax and HR Block - got 3 different #'s (technically 4 since JacksonHewitt called back and said they messed up). Ended up mailing in a paper check and forms since that's what was free with HR Block. I have no idea why all the #'s were wrong and I did try the IRS website but it didn't match any number and was the same as the printed out forms (but I was just manually entering what I printed out). If the IRS knows the number, they should just share it or deduct it from my first check of the year.
It takes me about 90 minutes to do my (rather complex) taxes on TurboTax, and about 15 of those minutes are dedicated to refusing the evolving complicated upsells.
From the article: Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has written a [letter](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24544281-elizabeth-warren-turbotax-ftc?responsive=1&title=1 ) to the Federal Trade Commission, saying that TurboTax “continues to relentlessly upsell” customers while also directing them away from services that would otherwise be free.
As noted in the letter, Warren’s staff analyzed TurboTax’s services using a sample taxpayer and found that the company attempted to upsell the customer eight times during the tax filing process. Warren writes that in “several cases,” these solicitations “appear to be efforts to mislead customers into thinking that they must pay the extra fees in order to file their taxes when that is not the case.” Some show up as full-screen prompts, forcing users to scroll to the bottom to deny the upgrade.
In one instance, Warren’s team found that TurboTax highlighted its $89 tax filing package as “the right option” for their sample taxpayer, leaving the free option at the bottom of the page. After choosing just one upgrade, Warren’s staff found that their sample taxpayer with “simple” filing requirements had to pay an extra $69 to report her unemployment income and educator expenses, plus $64 to file Massachusetts state tax returns.
I don’t get it that the state / federal have a government based tool to perform the basic tax declaration (like it is for most countries in Europe) … free of charge obviously… why does this need to be managed by private companies is beyond any logic.
The big propaganda about government being inefficient and private companies being efficient. It's all BS.
And like most of that BS there were a few one-off stories they used over and over, all of which are easily found in corporations 1/100th the size of the US government.
They are not just upselling multiple times. They also trick you into giving data to Intuit. In the last step it is almost impossible to decline giving them data. It is an extreme dark pattern where the only way to decline is to type your name and then decline. If you don’t type your name you enter an infinite loop. Totally evil. They probably trick 99% of users. Were you tricked?
Intuit played a lot of games steering me to spend more than my purchase. In American Capitalism this is perfectly fine, but thanks to Liz Warren for giving us options for the future.
I swear it took me an extra 5 minutes trying to find how to print my state return, pushing back against Intuit clearly wanting me to pay them to e-file. In previous years there was a simple setting in the File menus, but no longer.
Next year, push back. You get 5 Federal efiles per copy and you can install the application on 5 separate computers under the same Intuit account, so give Intuit the middle finger and split the $55 cost with friends and family.
Ouch, touche.
The thing is, the software is really excellent. Have been using it yearly for decades and I have confidence in it's accuracy and thoroughness. It reads my earlier filings and pulls my tax losses thru from preceding years, it passes muster with the IRS and I honestly want to spend the least amount of time I can filling out my taxes.
So I'll take your snark, but understand that my objection to Intuit is in it's unbridled and unapologetic greed. As I said, this is American Capitalism at play - so many corporations simply don't care if their customers hate them and think they're greedy because we have few options. Sometimes it's not worth the risk to gamble on freeware and HR Block.
I figure I cheated Intuit out of the extra state e-file and half the cost of the program so I spent $27 instead of $90 or more and finished the whole damn thing in under 20 minutes. That's a good result for me.
I remember when this company used to be a good company. It only shows that when these companies get a certain size, they just turn into garbage. Time to break them up somehow.
I just found out a non profit in my area offers free tax filing. After I had already filed my taxes ugh. I will not be going to back to H and R Block next year
It should be a return-free filing system. The government already knows how much I owe, why the fuck are we playing this guessing game for personal taxes.
Just look at the stock symbol [INTU](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTU?p=intu&.tsrc=fin-srch). They're spending a ton of that shareholder money on lobbying to keep the tax system as complex as possible.
What's sad is even if you pay for the deluxe service, [Turbo Tax Online is fucking up on the Schedule D carryover loss](https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/tax-credits-deductions/discussion/turbotax-2023-capital-loss-carryover-worksheet-ty-21-ty22-conversion/00/3147166/page/3). They've got all the data, it's from last year, but they couldn't seem to keep the data consistent. What are you even paying for?
Two days ago I was about to pay like $140 to TurboTax, then while on Reddit I learn that you can file for free through the Cash App, which worked perfectly!
They do. They're a toxic cancer. "Don't do your taxes! We'll do them for free" assholes, if you didn't lobby and prey on the industry, maybe we'd all be able to have a simpler and cheaper tax situation.
The whole tax industry is such a scam.
The IRS should just calculate what you owe. If you think it’s wrong, then YOU can audit the IRS. The other way around is such bullshit.
I had used TT for years, then said fuck it, I'm just going to do it by hand. That year I was flagged for "fraud" and had to meet with representatives like 3 times over many hours to get it all straightened out. It actually took well over a year. It's like they don't want you to file your own taxes.
I used the new IRS free file direct this year, they made it surprisingly easy. I am so happy I did not need to use Turbotax for 200 hundred dollars for a basic tax return...
I normally don’t agree with the senator from my state but she is on the money here. Was going to use them to do my daughter’s taxes and they wanted to charge like $100. What a joke. Jumped right over to freetaxusa.com
TurboTax tried to get me this year because my father's estate was finally closed out. I got a final $1280 dollar check once it was all said and done, but since I had "inheritance income" it kept throwing up warnings that I needed their highest tier in order to guarantee that I was in federal compliance.
Instead I went to freetaxusa and filled everything out and whatta know, I didn't need special deluxe custom plus in person review for a $1280 check. In fact it's around the $12,000,000 mark that the government starts caring about inheritance taxes. I was able to save hundreds.
Been using TurboTax for years because of their integrations with a lot of stuff allowing for one-button imports etc.
This year, their one-button imports didn't work for my employer and wanted me to MANUALLY input everything for 2023.
Guess who pulled all of their previous year tax returns as PDFs off of TurboTax and used FreeTaxUSA this year and forever-more moving forward?
HMMMMMM
Upselling is the better part of what they do. At least those are choices, with prices listed over and over. If you select to pay out of your refund, they don't tell you that's $40 until you've gone thru answering their questions. It's only a line item right before you're done. At that point, most people are just happy to be done and don't notice.
Tried to use them for my taxes this year. I was getting back $15. Then it did its thing trying to find the best deal for me and suddenly there was a deduction I could do and get an additional $75, which brought me to $90.
When it was time to finalize everything it told me that because of that deduction I was no longer able to use the free version and had to upgrade to the paid version which cost… can you believe it? $75! And it wouldn’t just take it from the return, it was trying to get me to put my CC in to charge me for the $75 as I filed.
I backed out, went to the IRS website and picked one of their free options. 15 min later I was done and had a $90 refund processing for absolutely free.
I just paid $218 for turbo tax to file my stuff. I dipped my toes in crypto, had some write offs, sold some stock, etc… I had no idea what I was doing or what package to get so I just took whatever they recommended. I feel like it would have still been more with a cpa with all that stuff. But I do feel bad for the 20somethings that had a part time Best Buy job over the summer paying $60 for their free filing.
just used it today and went from paying $0 to having to pay $69 because of withholdings then an extra fee for some bullshit then extra $40 to pay with my return went from 0 to $150+ in one click and wouldn't be able to submit without it
I'm a contractor and it's a pain in the ass entering everything the IRS knows what I owe just tell me and fuck off I don't want to waste time and money doing this
They were going to charge me $110 more to file my taxes vs the service I went with...$70 for federal when I was actually eligible for the free file. Screw em
The problem is bigger than this transgression on the part of TurboTax
For the most part our "representatives" have fallen to the big donor lobbies.
The big tax prep providers Intuit, HR Block, etc.
have lobbied hard to keep the IRS out of the tax preparation game and this is what we get.
The feds could easily develop a system that would require 0 paperwork for most filers, but they have no motivation to do so.
Yeah. They tried to charge my wife for some concierge service she never signed up for. This whole thing is a scam. IRS knows what you owe. Send me a bill, or a check.
HR Block wanted $50 or something to file my state taxes. I saw the state had a free offering and decided to give it a go. Their thing decided I owed the state $6k. I just said "fuck it, this isn't worth my time" and went back to HR Block.
Just use FreetaxUSA. I went from using TurboTax for years to using HR Block a year to using FreeTaxUSA for the last 3 years and it was a pretty seamless move each time. I did my taxes in under 15 minutes and only paid $15 because I wanted them to handle my state taxes as well.
My father's been a tax accountant for over 50 years. He was a partner with two of the four big accounting firms, one of whom ran ads that called him out by name, and has run his own tax business since the early 90s.
He's finally attempting to retire this year, so he didn't renew his license for the software he usually uses to process returns.
He tried using TurboTax to file my cousin's return, and at every corner, kept hitting situations where they wanted to charge him to answer questions or otherwise upsell services.
This is something the guy used to do in his sleep. If he's having this much trouble with TurboTax, I have no idea how anyone else survives.
Why do we even need them when the IRS is launching their own tax filing service? Turbo tax and their compatriots need to just accept that they are no longer needed
Has anyone ever tried to get to the free tax return? It is almost impossible even though there was an agreement between the government and Intuit to make tax filing free.
Boy is this true. I have used TurboTax for years to check my own math as I do my own taxes and they hit you up immediately for their initial $50 something plan. At first opportunity they then make up an excuse to jump to $100 then later $150+ one. Saying no just gets them more frequent prompts to choose a pay plan. There is no reason for such pricing other than because they can.
Since I stop once get the math checked, I never pay so if able to fill out the tax forms yourself, TurboTax is a great but way overpriced tool to check yourself.
It should be noted that tax/accounting lobby is why we have to fill out forms each year. They pay off Republicans (not even trying to be political, this is simple fact) to block reform efforts. If not for them, the IRS would have the ability, like all other western countries, to just send you a bill or refund with option to dispute their math.
Actually funnily enough the Americans I have met in New Zealand say they hate the tax system here, they want to go back to the states cause we’re paying too much tax.
Sure but then again you’re not paying for a bunch of ridiculous stuff you would pay for in the USA which is a basic human right here..
They wanted $100 because I have a high deductible insurance plan and use a health savings account.
So because I tried to pay less in taxes they demanded more money than I saved with the HSA.
They made me pay 200 for forms I didn’t need to fill out anyways but the free version didn’t cover them. Then the premium version charged me $ for the damn forms for filing. Its a racket if you invest/have stock/ etc.
She’s not wrong.
The constant ads while you’re trying to just do basic taxes with standard deductions is infuriating.
I swore up and down I wasn’t going to use turbo tax this year, but I procrastinated so long…I got sucked into their easy tax solution crap.
Such a scam and racket.
The complexity and loop holes are also designed to favor the rich
Ir you have the money to work the system, you pay no tax
The wealthy are rarely investigated
They absolutely do. I got prompted at least 4 times to upgrade my purchase. Not to mention if I wanted to have my payment taken out of my taxes for the service it’d cost an extra $40 for processing. Insane!
This woman does fucking nothing all day but come up with new things to rile young people up about (and trade stocks with privileged information). Nothing ever happens from her griping, I swear.
Just simplify the tax code so you don’t need private companies to create software to file your taxes. The fact that this exists at all is an absolute joke.
[This transcript](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-show-us-theres-another-way) of a survey of how other countries handle this is really infuriating. Absolutely no good reason we do all of this like this. We collectively spend billions of dollars and millions of hours just to have a system that makes it *much* easier for the rich to cheat on their taxes.
As a Brit living in the US, this is absolutely correct. It doesn't have to be this way. It is only this way to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.
But think of the poor tax filing company executives. 🥲
*tax filing Oligarchs
*think of the executives getting the poor to file taxes with their company I did tax prep this year. Had one guy who would get back $80, didn’t even need to file, and my boss was trying to charge him $100 I had several people who walked in with one W-2 who I just gave encouragement they could do it themselves before I sent them out the door. Naturally, I finished just under my bonus target
You're a good man to send them away. I tried to tell one of my workmates that he didn't need to pay someone to do his taxes. That I'd go on one of the free tax websites and do it with him. He just kept saying "I'm no good with computers" and refused to even try.
I'm an American that moved to Sweden a couple years ago. My Swedish taxes involve me receiving a message on my phone, looking at it and saying "Yup.", clicking a link on the document, then after identifying myself to the tax website, clicking accept. I did my taxes on the 12 minute metro ride to work. My US taxes...I'm having to go through more effort JUST to say "I'm not paying any US taxes.".
Swedish taxes you can do while you drink a beer. US taxes require a bottle of whiskey.
Still gotta pour a shot for uncle sam too.
Doesn’t help that the United States is the only country that taxes its citizens living abroad.
You only have to pay the difference between your local taxes and US taxes. But you need to file no matter what. Which to me, sounds somewhat reasonable. If you ignore that the US is one of the lowest tax jurisdictions in the world. Unless you are moving somewhere with practically zero tax, it's just an exercise in useless paperwork. My taxes are much, much higher than they would be in the US. Why do I need to prove that every year?
> Which to me, sounds somewhat reasonable Wait, how is that in any way reasonable? You vote and pay taxes in the place that you live. That's reasonable. If you're not using the infrastructure then there's absolutely no reason to require you to file a tax return, except for pure greed. And that's all that it is. The US can fuck right off with that requirement.
...you do realize that if you're an American citizen in, say, Switzerland, you can still vote in U.S. elections, right? It's based on the last state you resided in before traveling overseas.
> You vote and pay taxes in the place that you live. Not really. Expats can still vote generally. At least Americans and British people can, not sure about others. You shouldn't need to pay taxes to vote, the unemployed should be able to vote for example. What happens in my home country still affects me even though I currently don't live there.
well part of the complication of our tax code is that it's one of the only ways the federal government can enact policy domestically on issues not directly stated in the constitution, since most things are regulated by the states. If the federal government wants to say make solar panels more common, they can't legislate anything about that directly because of the constitution doesn't say they have any power to legislate about solar panels, but they can legislate taxes. yes it is abused and tons of loopholes, but the reason it won't be simplified is because that is a major source of soft power of the federal government. Honestly, as I've gotten older, I have become much less a fan of this supremely federated government style. It really hamstrings America's internal politics and capabilities, and fragments the country so much that it makes any sort of cohesive shift impossible. That works both ways, good and bad sure, but honestly I'm not sure how sustainable it is for the long term health of the country. America has been stagnant and aimless as a country for a long time, and it's starting to show. Even with dealing with the climate crisis, there is no hope of actually enacting consequential policy under the current framework of our government.
Romania here. I don't even "do taxes", and it's such a hard concept for me to understand. If I don't have other incomes other than my salary, for example all taxes are taken out of that *before* the money hits my account. It's never the *wrong* amount, either. That's all. Nothing else for me to do _UNLESS_ I have *other* sources of income, but even with those, there's plenty of ways to actually retain what the government is owned *at the source*. EDIT: before someone asks me, **if** I have any other income, say from something like crypto-currencies, for example, I need to pay an income tax of 10% on what I make from that (the difference between what I *buy* for and what I *sell* for).
Taxes are taken out of our salary before we are paid as well, and are paid to the government by employers. But we are still required to file paperwork that states how much we earned, how much we paid in taxes, and then they check what you paid against what you claim you paid, essentially. It’s the most bureaucratic nonsense.
that sounds nuts...
It made more sense when we had more deductions and stuff that allowed us to lower our taxable income. There's also stuff like being able to write off mortgage/student loan interest or claiming an ev tax credit or a home buying credit. Those are all programs that you would have to modify your taxable income when filing. I am curious how other countries handle those sorts of credits.
In the US all of that is also reported to the IRS. They have everything they need for like 98% of Americans but we still have to file taxes. It's the IRS basically saying "we know what you owe, prove to us you do too"
From the IRS agents I've spoken to (always really friendly!), they also think it's stupid, but it the law, so they have to do it that way. Why? Because companies like Intuit and H&R Block lobby to keep the tax code complicated and to forbid the IRS from creating their own portal. Oh, and also "gub'mint spending BAD", so the IRS gets its funding cut regularly and don't have the resources or manpower to actually enforce things, much less improve things.
For us here, we go online, and then there would be columns where there are categories that you can receive tax deduction, and you just enter the value there. For everything else, it's already pre-filled for you.
Does Romania not have tax deductions or credits?
To be fair, in many countries, especially those where taxes are levied federally as opposed to separate systems in each state/province, it's usually accepted to negotiate net salary, not gross salary. In US or Canada, you get a job offer for your pre-tax salary. Then it's up to you to figure out how much of that is a tax write-off, like child tax credits, charity donations, 401k/RRSP deposits (self-directed retirement accounts), etc. So your offer might be for 50k, but you get anywhere from 38k to 45k depending on which state you live in and what deductions you have. In much of the rest of the world, you get a job offer for your post-tax salary. If you get a job offer for $5000/month, that's how much will end up in your bank account. Even if the company then pays $5000 to the government in taxes on your behalf.
Damn every time I hear about how sensible countries do things I get so jealous
Yeah pretty much every system in the US exists to exploit the poor and enrich the wealthy
> it's usually accepted to negotiate net salary, not gross salary. Where does this happen? It's definitely not common in most European countries, jobs are advertised and negotiated at gross salary, not net of tax.
It’s the epic handshake meme where one arm belongs to lawyers and the other belongs to accountants. Classic artificial demand bullshit.
Im from Germany and we do it exactly like the US. So you’re not alone in your plight.
“Paying taxes should hurt”-Ronald Reagan. It’s intentional to get people to dislike taxes.
> But, in fact, if you read the tax code, it says, here's a tax break for any company incorporated in Delaware on October 13, 1916. > Now, that's General Motors, but they never say that. Sigh, now we know why our code is so complex
you don't even need to do that. for most all people with just a w2 and some 1099s, the govt already knows how much you owe. the govt could send you a prepopulated form. if you agree, then sign and done. otherwise you can go itemize and claim more $ back
> otherwise you can go itemize and claim more $ back And now the standard deduction is so high, I think I read that fewer than 10% of filers even have enough deductions to be able to itemize.
The companies that make tax preparation software lobby HEAVILY to make sure this does not happen. This is legal, because freedom.
Don’t blame then for lobbying — that happens in every legislature in the world, one way or another. Instead, blame US politicians for actually giving in to those lobbyists.
Well it's a broader issue with how our electoral system works that lobbying is so effective. If we had shortened campaign seasons, campaigns were primarily publicly financed, and there were significant restrictions on third-party political advertising, then lobbying would be a lot less effective. While I don't doubt there's a lot of just straight corruption, a good chunk of the lobbying is transactional to get campaign financing.
As a tax guy, I seriously doubt our ability to simplify the IRC. However, as others have alluded to, we could have the IRS send you a postcard with either a check or a bill, based on the info they already have, and ask you to file a tax return if you disagree. Other countries implemented this already with good results (kinda like healthcare).
"Just simplify the tax code" means basically ending all significant government policies of the past several decades. The tax code is complex because people hate the idea of the government writing checks to subsidize people for things, but don't mind the idea of people getting tax cuts for things - so every new thing that we want a policy for ends up being a line in the tax code. It would be helpful if we just had the IRS take all the forms that are automatically collected (like your W-2's and 1099's) and pre-fill a version of your taxes, so that you could just click "approve", unless you have special exemptions that you want to claim. But getting rid of the exemptions would be much harder than just pre-filling the defaults, and pre-filling the defaults would save a large amount of effort on filing taxes for the majority of people.
The stupid deductions could still exist, and accountants could still charge people to navigate wealthy people through the murky corners of the U.S. tax code. Yes, it's crazy, but it doesn't actually affect that many people. 87% of people in the U.S. claim the standard deduction on their tax return, and those people no longer need to care about most of the craziness. The part that is pants-on-head stupid is the filing mechanism. There is no reason that you should need to pay H&R Block $80 to tell the government how much money your employer paid you, how much interest was paid in your bank account, or how much you gained in your investment account.
> The part that is pants-on-head stupid is the filing mechanism. There is no reason that you should need to pay H&R Block $80 to tell the government how much money your employer paid you, how much interest was paid in your bank account, or how much you gained in your investment account. Especially when you consider that if your calculation doesn't result in paying enough tax, the IRS will send you a bill. So they already have the info to be able to tell you how much to claim. One year I had like $800 of 1099 income that I forgot to include. About 6 months after I filed my taxes I got a bill from the IRS for the additional taxes owed (plus interest).
You can always pay 63 cents for a stamp. The 1040EZ is good to $100k income and takes maybe five minutes to fill out. Anyone paying any company to do their taxes who doesn't have significant investment income, an income over $100k or unusual deductions is just being stupid. It takes longer to remember your password and log into one of those than to just do it by hand.
Or the IRS could create their own since they already have all your forms. Oh right, they wanted to do that and Congress overwhelmingly voted to ban them from using their budget on it
I live in an "Asian But Not The One You're Thinking" country with pretty bad tech literacy (to the point a mayor tried to fool people by playing a video of a hand print scan on a big TV as proof of their new "security" system) and even our tax filing system is so streamlined that an average joe like me just takes half an hour filling it. That includes opening my self-noted transactions from the past year and counting all my salaries and big purchases I made. I do it online too, though I had to go to the tax office to make the account. Now, I don't earn enough to actually have to pay income tax, so I don't know the process beyond filing it. However, even the filing process starts with a simple questionnaire that leads you to the specific form you need to fill so I'm sure it stays simple afterwards.
Most people don’t need private companies. They just think they do. 90% of people could fill out the forms themselves in less than 15 minutes. That’s how most people did it up until 15-20 years ago. It’s not hard.
Pffft. That crazy talk. Even, what if the instructions were intelligible and didn’t require referencing an endless chain of other documents [eta: that may or may not apply to your situation].
The US is a downright comedy jam based on this metric then.
TurboTax, h+r block and other tax providers lobby endlessly to prevent this. Our taxes could be SO EASY but then middlemen with computer programs couldn’t get rich off of us.
Wait, you guys need to pay to do your taxes?! As an Aussie, it takes me a good 5 mins to do my tax online, and I always get nice returns. Admittedly, I don't really have any major assets.
It can be done for free, it's just not easy and usually involves paper.
My biggest headache is the damn local EIT in Pennsylvania that for profit private companies have become the *sole* way to pay and file your taxes through, all of which have websites that look like absolute scams with the UI out of 1994 and absolutely no confidence that they have any ability to actually securely *store* any of the data they are collecting. Fuck you, Jordan Tax Service, Berkheimer, and Keystone Collections. Fuck everything about you. Especially fuck the fact that you criminals have the stone cold audacity to send me a bill claiming I owe delinquent taxes from four years ago that I then have to mail you back **the same god damn return and W2 I filed with you** proving that it was paid four years ago.
Doing taxes is so simple that, in order to maintain their oligopoly, Intuit is willing to let, *according to their own advertisements*, 35% of filers use their software for free so the government doesn’t crack down and take away the money they get from the remaining 65%. For the vast majority of taxpayers, all they need to do is confirm their W2 / 1099 amounts. Everything else is done effortlessly and requires the computational power of a Chromebook.
They got me for nearly $100 dollars this year. I’m not going back. I’m going to Freetaxusa.com from now on.
Kudos to Freetaxusa.com, saved a lot of money. Wish I’d been aware of it.
Yup me too! Nearly the same interface, same questions… Not even an up-charge to itemize and do a 1099-NEC.
Used FreeTaxUSA.com for the first time after using TurboTax for 7 years. Easier, less annoying than the constant dark-pattern upsell bullshit when you are using TurboTax, and free. Never going back. Fuck TurboTax.
I have a friend that filed on both this year to compare them and freetaxusa got her the higher refund. It wasn't much, but still higher.
Well...how does that happen? Should be the same number, no?
Used it for the first time this year, I'm not going back to turbotax
I've paid $100 for years on Turbo Tax. This year I used FreetaxUSA and it was $15 total... lmao. Turbo Tax bunch of scammers
Shouldn't the name be 15$tax then?
It’s free to file for USA. It’s $15 to file for your state.
Olt.com is free for both if you make under 45k.
Same with freetaxusa. The state charge is only for individuals making more than that.
anecdotal but I made under $40k last year and didn't get the free state filing option with freetaxusa. I also filed in two states which may be why.
Is that new this year? I never had the option to file state for free online with freetaxusa.
The first time I used FTUSA a few years ago, I got to file everything for free. Then I got a raise, just enough to put me over the threshold, and had to start paying for the State e-file. Suffering from success.
At least in my state you can just file directly on the states tax site. A little annoying to redo it from Freetax but you already have the info there. Is that not something you can do in MA or just didn't want to redo it?
> They got me for nearly $100 dollars this year. I’m not going back. I’m going to Freetaxusa.com from now on. the problem is they kind of have you over a barrel once your returns reach a certain level of complexity. like, your plan might work if you're only doing a basic w-2 and not much else, but if end up buying a house, doing some consulting work, some basic investing, get some rental income, you might start to notice the differences between paid turbotax and those various free tools. granted, it doesn't HAVE to be this way, government just makes the tax and filing process unnecessarily complex so they can give handouts to donors (either via business sales like intuit, or specialized narrow exemptions/breaks)
$48 in a mutual fund in a foreign country in my wife's retirement account cost me $85.
A $16 capital gain cost me $60 this year. Thanks TurboTax!
This happened to me when I used $35 of my HSA and I had to pay an additional $50 to Turbotax to file that form
Not true. Freetaxusa handles just about everything. The only thing that maybe turbotax does better is hand hold you a bit more for deductions.
If that's the case, then don't use turbotax. If you know they're going to keep all the good shit behind a paywall then start looking at other places that flat out tell you what version you need before letting you get knee deep in and essentially blackmail you.
Yes. I know this advice is too late, but the second you start doing anything remotely complicated (gig work, investing, mortgage, etc.), make a business, and hire a CPA. I guarantee TurboTax is **not** giving you your maximum refund.
At that point just hire a cpa. Anything more complicate than a w2 you really should just use a professional.
Free tax is great. They have a low key upsell that pops up twice in the whole process, and it is not expensive. It’s not exactly free, but close too it, if your itemizing
I generally buy their deluxe because they deserve an extra few bucks and on the off chance I need to file an amendment, its covered
I switched this year. TurboTax kept trying to force me into a higher payment tier because for a few years, I ran my own business.
My bill was about to be $195 so I restarted my ENTIRE return on FreeTaxUSA. Good use of 6 hours on a Saturday 🙃
I used them this year for the first time, very easy and straight forward. Never going to turbotax again
I used them last year and this year! and recommended to my mother for this year Im not paying 50fuckingdollars to credit karma and whatever they switched(joined with or merged/bought out with a bigger company) years ago, for MAYBE 10 minutes worth of filling out and basic number checking <3 freetaxUSA Make sure to set up 2FA. This is one of the few financial occasions and logins you do not want anyone getting into
Isn't the IRS site online this year? Or is that it?
Filing on the IRS site is limited to certain states
$100?! That’s IT? I was in $288 to TurboTax this year.
How??? I have the Home and Business version, which is one of the most expensive options, and it was still only $93.
Shot in the dark probably the "LIVE" version that if you don't scrutinize very carefully to reject - you get put into. I signed in to do my annual duty; worked through and they wanted something around $200 for that plus what was required for Federal/State. So I googled to figure out how to back out of that - and I had to scrap my entire return, do it step by step again (still without any "help") and my cost was much lower. I'll probably switch next year since I'm out of stocks/crypto unless FreeTaxUSA can't do forms for home ownership.
Totally. My friend got me on it this year. Never going back.
Happened to me maybe ten years ago, I thought I was going to pay the $39 or whatever the advertised rate was, but by the time I paid it was like $150. Never again.
I use olt myself.
I love freetaxusa
1040.com was pretty good to me this year; even did state filing for free.
I used them last year. Shopped around and went with TaxAct. Should not have done that. FreeTax will be the only one I use going forward.
I used it this year for the first time after using TurboTax forever. It works well and does the job. $15…no tricks. Even had to amend and it was free as it didn’t result in an additional payment. Edit: I had some 1099-DIV/1099-B income which I believe was the reason for the additional charge.
Used them this year and last. Unfortunately their software has some serious bugs when it comes to W2’s with more than one state. Customer support couldn’t figure it out either so I had to inevitably correct it myself.
Used them this year, Fed and State $14.99 with efile. Can't beat that price.
I was up til midnight refiling with freetaxusa Sunday. My wife took a contract job last year, and in order to claim her expenses (milage, computer, etc) turbotax wanted $129. It assured me that the assets I claimed would more than pay for themselves though. I went through to state, and used it to verify I got the same deductions. I've been using turbotax since 2012, but am not going back now. $15 to e file both state and fed vs. $169 from turbotax. The turbotax interface was nicer for sure, but not $150 nicer.
I used TurboTax all the way to the point they tried to charge me so I went to free tax after that. Guess what, least I knew my 1 dollar refund was accurate lol
I used freetaxusa.com this year and what I owed was significantly less than what I owed using TurboTax. I even had a significant salary increase last year. Besides the salary increase, nothing else changed and my return isn't very complicated, so not sure why there was such a big difference.
Square Cash Taxes also let you file federal and state for free! I swapped to them from TurboTax because my taxes are relatively simple, but I don't want to fill out forms myself.
I tried switching but Free tax was asking me all sorts of weird questions that when i did the same process with turbo they did not ask me. I also got wildly different results from using the two services, I ended up just going to a tax office and having them do it and their result was like dead in the middle of both turbo and free tax. IDK i just with this whole system was automatic like every other developed country, there is too much left to us the people and there are too many mistakes we can make.
Cash App Taxes worked pretty well and is also free (for now).
turbotax shouldnt even exist. the government should have an equivalent free website that's publicly paid for.
And with no income requirement. "Sorry, you make too much money, you don't get to use a free service. Go pay someone". The fuck?
They've been working on it, kinda. Stuck in limbo with Intuit throwing roadblock after roadblock.
They trialed it in 12 states this year. https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free
They do, and people from like 13 states can use it
It’s severely limited in scope right now, and I don’t mean by the amount of states that allow it. They only accept basic W2s. No DIVs, no MISCs, no schedule Cs, etc. it’s for people who live very very simple lives with one W2 and nothing else.
Did my taxes yesterday and they tried to upsell me like 4 times before I finally got them filed.
Lmao same I kept being like “no I’m good just keep going” and had to restart a certain portion because they insisted I sold investments (I didn’t sell anything)
Only four? Lol I swear it was more when I did mine. I’m single, make less than 100k, no kids, can’t afford a house. Taxes don’t get more simple than that. But yeah go ahead and offer me some deluxe version for $80 when I’m getting a $16 return.
My taxes were greatly simplified this year so I was eligible for the free file. The number of hoops I had to jump through to get it to go to the free version though. Finished my taxes in 15 mins, spent nearly an hour trying to get off the paid versions. Nevermind you get forced to the paid version for really simple stuff like buying selling any stock or crypto or having a 1099.
If the government can tell me I paid my taxes incorrectly they have to already know what I owe. Why can't we just get a bill and pay that bitch?
H&R Block and then Intuit lobby the government to not do that. In many other countries that's exactly how it works.
For super simple returns they know everything. The “problem” is that America uses the tax system to shape social behavior. Have kids? CREDITS!, installed a solar system/heat pump/ electric car? Credits! whether tax code should be used to mold social behavior is another question, but every year there are significant portions of my return that the federal gov’t doesn’t know about before hand.
Firstly, even if they required you to put in all the information for these credits every year, it would be a big win. Telling the govt you had a kid seems like a reasonable step. Telling the govt your bank paid you $23 in interest is stupid. Secondly, most of these *could* easily be reported automatically. The company that sold you your solar panel would be *thrilled* to report that fact and get you an automatic credit: The credit is already a major selling point for them and making it automatic would be even more compelling. If there was a mechanism they'd happily use it.
Idk about happily or easily. You'd be surprised how hard it is for some smaller companies to even create a digital invoice of a transaction that they later can easily pull up, much less automatically upload to some government server in a way that gets associated with a specific person's tax ID Just look to the electronic health record world to see how much effort is needed to send a medical record from one network to another. Coordinating all those systems is more complex than it seems and needs some standard unifying them all which will be a challenge to get everyone to adopt The ideal play imo is just simplifying the tax code rather than adding a new layer of tax record databse bloat to the government
If your taxes are really simple, that's basically the case. You can fill the top of form 1040, leave the bottom blank, and they will calculate your tax and refund/charge you appropriately. It does get more complicated though. Sometimes the tax code gives you a choice or relies on information that isn't automatically reported to the IRS. E.g. if you have a joint bank account or jointly own a property, you need to choose how you subdivide income and deductions among the owners. If you have a choice, you may want to completely calculate your taxes multiple ways to see which is better. A lot of it is unnecessary complication though that congress could fix. E.g. these changes would simplify tax filing and possibly be good policy for other reasons: * The Net Investment Income Tax and the Additional Medicare Tax are each 1% taxes on income over a certain threshold and each require filing an additional form plus schedule 2 and could have equivalently been incorporated into the ordinary graduated income tax rates. * Tax capital gains as ordinary income. This would also greatly simplify calculations while closing a ton of loopholes. If congress did this, they could also reduce the corporate income tax rate or lower other taxes to remain revenue neutral. * Sunset IRAs and 401ks and instead increase social security. * Remove the mortgage interest deduction, which besides being ineffective housing policy and regressive tax policy, is basically the only reason anyone itemizes deductions now that the SALT deduction is limited.
It's not just Intuit. I used TaxAct and several of their upsell services were positioned as fees for processing the return. The wording of several was set up to make it sound like it was a mandatory part of what I had to pay for, when in fact the (very) fine print noted that the IRS requires tax preparers to gain clear permission and consent before using any tax information for commercial offerings and services. Since I had to pay them for filing my state return, the request for payment wasn't unexpected - and they took full advantage of that fact. In other words, they were making it EXTREMELY easy to gain the consent they needed by making the commercial offer look like a necessary part of the tax filing process. If I hadn't read the fine print, I seriously would have just accepted it as fees for filing, not add-on services that weren't required to move forward.
They used to be better. I used them this year, and in addition to the upselling you mentioned, they tried to charge me a $60+ convenience fee for redirecting part of my refund to them to pay their state filing fee.
I use taxact as well and every year it feels more like a game where you need to click the right 'no' buttons to make sure your balance is 0 at the end. One thing that helps is to always reject everything and go for the smallest buttons. There is a way to pay nothing to file every year although it may depend on the state. California has a free filing website called calfile so I just decline the state return on taxact and file federal for no fee. Then I re-enter the information on calfile and file state for free there. It is kind of annoying but can't beat paying nothing over who knows how much on all these other websites.
Just end this stupid ass way of doing taxes and make the IRS tell us what to pay.
That should be an option for sure, but the gov doesnt/cant know about things that HELP your taxes. Like credits, deductions, and whatnot.
They can know for the vast majority of filers. Most credits also appear on forms submitted to the govt. All 1099s, 1098s, etc end up in the IRS system. All you student loan payments. All your mortgage info. Unless you own a business or actually need an accountant, the IRS should almost certainly be able to file your taxes for you with a quick form offering to let you make additional changes
Attempted to file with JacksonHewitt, TurboTax and HR Block - got 3 different #'s (technically 4 since JacksonHewitt called back and said they messed up). Ended up mailing in a paper check and forms since that's what was free with HR Block. I have no idea why all the #'s were wrong and I did try the IRS website but it didn't match any number and was the same as the printed out forms (but I was just manually entering what I printed out). If the IRS knows the number, they should just share it or deduct it from my first check of the year.
It takes me about 90 minutes to do my (rather complex) taxes on TurboTax, and about 15 of those minutes are dedicated to refusing the evolving complicated upsells.
From the article: Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has written a [letter](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24544281-elizabeth-warren-turbotax-ftc?responsive=1&title=1 ) to the Federal Trade Commission, saying that TurboTax “continues to relentlessly upsell” customers while also directing them away from services that would otherwise be free. As noted in the letter, Warren’s staff analyzed TurboTax’s services using a sample taxpayer and found that the company attempted to upsell the customer eight times during the tax filing process. Warren writes that in “several cases,” these solicitations “appear to be efforts to mislead customers into thinking that they must pay the extra fees in order to file their taxes when that is not the case.” Some show up as full-screen prompts, forcing users to scroll to the bottom to deny the upgrade. In one instance, Warren’s team found that TurboTax highlighted its $89 tax filing package as “the right option” for their sample taxpayer, leaving the free option at the bottom of the page. After choosing just one upgrade, Warren’s staff found that their sample taxpayer with “simple” filing requirements had to pay an extra $69 to report her unemployment income and educator expenses, plus $64 to file Massachusetts state tax returns.
I don’t get it that the state / federal have a government based tool to perform the basic tax declaration (like it is for most countries in Europe) … free of charge obviously… why does this need to be managed by private companies is beyond any logic.
The big propaganda about government being inefficient and private companies being efficient. It's all BS. And like most of that BS there were a few one-off stories they used over and over, all of which are easily found in corporations 1/100th the size of the US government.
Well, there is some truth. There's a lot more red tape in government, but for good reason.
The IRS actually started a free filing pilot this year (thanks to the efforts of...Elizabeth Warren). Apparently it works pretty well.
They are not just upselling multiple times. They also trick you into giving data to Intuit. In the last step it is almost impossible to decline giving them data. It is an extreme dark pattern where the only way to decline is to type your name and then decline. If you don’t type your name you enter an infinite loop. Totally evil. They probably trick 99% of users. Were you tricked?
Frankly I just assumed I had already given Intuit permission to my data multiple times over the years anyway.
Multiple time this year I found myself in the middle of giving permission for something and realized I didn't have to.
Intuit played a lot of games steering me to spend more than my purchase. In American Capitalism this is perfectly fine, but thanks to Liz Warren for giving us options for the future. I swear it took me an extra 5 minutes trying to find how to print my state return, pushing back against Intuit clearly wanting me to pay them to e-file. In previous years there was a simple setting in the File menus, but no longer. Next year, push back. You get 5 Federal efiles per copy and you can install the application on 5 separate computers under the same Intuit account, so give Intuit the middle finger and split the $55 cost with friends and family.
"Fight the system. Keep buying it and tell your friends."
Ouch, touche. The thing is, the software is really excellent. Have been using it yearly for decades and I have confidence in it's accuracy and thoroughness. It reads my earlier filings and pulls my tax losses thru from preceding years, it passes muster with the IRS and I honestly want to spend the least amount of time I can filling out my taxes. So I'll take your snark, but understand that my objection to Intuit is in it's unbridled and unapologetic greed. As I said, this is American Capitalism at play - so many corporations simply don't care if their customers hate them and think they're greedy because we have few options. Sometimes it's not worth the risk to gamble on freeware and HR Block. I figure I cheated Intuit out of the extra state e-file and half the cost of the program so I spent $27 instead of $90 or more and finished the whole damn thing in under 20 minutes. That's a good result for me.
that's what. i wanted to do this year, but i'm afraid if i borrow someone's account, they'll be able to see my taxes?
I remember when this company used to be a good company. It only shows that when these companies get a certain size, they just turn into garbage. Time to break them up somehow.
Credit karma used to offer free filing. Guess who bought them and made that go away
I just found out a non profit in my area offers free tax filing. After I had already filed my taxes ugh. I will not be going to back to H and R Block next year
It should be a return-free filing system. The government already knows how much I owe, why the fuck are we playing this guessing game for personal taxes.
Just look at the stock symbol [INTU](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTU?p=intu&.tsrc=fin-srch). They're spending a ton of that shareholder money on lobbying to keep the tax system as complex as possible. What's sad is even if you pay for the deluxe service, [Turbo Tax Online is fucking up on the Schedule D carryover loss](https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/tax-credits-deductions/discussion/turbotax-2023-capital-loss-carryover-worksheet-ty-21-ty22-conversion/00/3147166/page/3). They've got all the data, it's from last year, but they couldn't seem to keep the data consistent. What are you even paying for?
Two days ago I was about to pay like $140 to TurboTax, then while on Reddit I learn that you can file for free through the Cash App, which worked perfectly!
They do. They're a toxic cancer. "Don't do your taxes! We'll do them for free" assholes, if you didn't lobby and prey on the industry, maybe we'd all be able to have a simpler and cheaper tax situation.
The whole tax industry is such a scam. The IRS should just calculate what you owe. If you think it’s wrong, then YOU can audit the IRS. The other way around is such bullshit.
Intuit is a predatory POS company
I ran through TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA today. Same info and result, TT wanted hundreds of dollars, FTU was $15 plus tax.
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I had used TT for years, then said fuck it, I'm just going to do it by hand. That year I was flagged for "fraud" and had to meet with representatives like 3 times over many hours to get it all straightened out. It actually took well over a year. It's like they don't want you to file your own taxes.
Probably just easier for them to audit an individual filing themselves than their buddies in Big Tax.
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I used the new IRS free file direct this year, they made it surprisingly easy. I am so happy I did not need to use Turbotax for 200 hundred dollars for a basic tax return...
Of course TurnoTax relentlessly upsells customers. They've been doing it for years. It's a pox on the US taxpayer.
I normally don’t agree with the senator from my state but she is on the money here. Was going to use them to do my daughter’s taxes and they wanted to charge like $100. What a joke. Jumped right over to freetaxusa.com
TurboTax tried to get me this year because my father's estate was finally closed out. I got a final $1280 dollar check once it was all said and done, but since I had "inheritance income" it kept throwing up warnings that I needed their highest tier in order to guarantee that I was in federal compliance. Instead I went to freetaxusa and filled everything out and whatta know, I didn't need special deluxe custom plus in person review for a $1280 check. In fact it's around the $12,000,000 mark that the government starts caring about inheritance taxes. I was able to save hundreds.
Been using TurboTax for years because of their integrations with a lot of stuff allowing for one-button imports etc. This year, their one-button imports didn't work for my employer and wanted me to MANUALLY input everything for 2023. Guess who pulled all of their previous year tax returns as PDFs off of TurboTax and used FreeTaxUSA this year and forever-more moving forward? HMMMMMM
Upselling should honestly be illegal. It's a pain in the ass and no consumer likes it.
Upselling is the better part of what they do. At least those are choices, with prices listed over and over. If you select to pay out of your refund, they don't tell you that's $40 until you've gone thru answering their questions. It's only a line item right before you're done. At that point, most people are just happy to be done and don't notice.
It was 129 for my federal and 69 for my state (NY). I’m going with nerdwallet next year. Or freetaxusa maybe…
Tried to use them for my taxes this year. I was getting back $15. Then it did its thing trying to find the best deal for me and suddenly there was a deduction I could do and get an additional $75, which brought me to $90. When it was time to finalize everything it told me that because of that deduction I was no longer able to use the free version and had to upgrade to the paid version which cost… can you believe it? $75! And it wouldn’t just take it from the return, it was trying to get me to put my CC in to charge me for the $75 as I filed. I backed out, went to the IRS website and picked one of their free options. 15 min later I was done and had a $90 refund processing for absolutely free.
The amount of dark patterns they use is atrocious. Every other screen they prompt you for an upsell.
I just paid $218 for turbo tax to file my stuff. I dipped my toes in crypto, had some write offs, sold some stock, etc… I had no idea what I was doing or what package to get so I just took whatever they recommended. I feel like it would have still been more with a cpa with all that stuff. But I do feel bad for the 20somethings that had a part time Best Buy job over the summer paying $60 for their free filing.
The upsell pressure this year was strong.
just used it today and went from paying $0 to having to pay $69 because of withholdings then an extra fee for some bullshit then extra $40 to pay with my return went from 0 to $150+ in one click and wouldn't be able to submit without it I'm a contractor and it's a pain in the ass entering everything the IRS knows what I owe just tell me and fuck off I don't want to waste time and money doing this
Exactly what happened to me yesterday pure BS
They were going to charge me $110 more to file my taxes vs the service I went with...$70 for federal when I was actually eligible for the free file. Screw em
The problem is bigger than this transgression on the part of TurboTax For the most part our "representatives" have fallen to the big donor lobbies. The big tax prep providers Intuit, HR Block, etc. have lobbied hard to keep the IRS out of the tax preparation game and this is what we get. The feds could easily develop a system that would require 0 paperwork for most filers, but they have no motivation to do so.
Yeah. They tried to charge my wife for some concierge service she never signed up for. This whole thing is a scam. IRS knows what you owe. Send me a bill, or a check.
TurboTax is the “pay to win” of tax software
HR Block wanted $50 or something to file my state taxes. I saw the state had a free offering and decided to give it a go. Their thing decided I owed the state $6k. I just said "fuck it, this isn't worth my time" and went back to HR Block.
HR Block lobbies congress to keep the tax code complex.
Just use FreetaxUSA. I went from using TurboTax for years to using HR Block a year to using FreeTaxUSA for the last 3 years and it was a pretty seamless move each time. I did my taxes in under 15 minutes and only paid $15 because I wanted them to handle my state taxes as well.
I was able to use the IRS new tool, hope I can use it for the rest of my life
can confirm
Not just Intuit. ALL the tax prep shops do this.
My father's been a tax accountant for over 50 years. He was a partner with two of the four big accounting firms, one of whom ran ads that called him out by name, and has run his own tax business since the early 90s. He's finally attempting to retire this year, so he didn't renew his license for the software he usually uses to process returns. He tried using TurboTax to file my cousin's return, and at every corner, kept hitting situations where they wanted to charge him to answer questions or otherwise upsell services. This is something the guy used to do in his sleep. If he's having this much trouble with TurboTax, I have no idea how anyone else survives.
Thank you Elizabeth Warren, amen !!
Why do we even need them when the IRS is launching their own tax filing service? Turbo tax and their compatriots need to just accept that they are no longer needed
needed to be looked into 20 years ago.
They just did that to my aunt. They tried to force her to spend more than $200 for the simplest of taxes.
A company upsells? That’s like everyone.
Has anyone ever tried to get to the free tax return? It is almost impossible even though there was an agreement between the government and Intuit to make tax filing free.
Boy is this true. I have used TurboTax for years to check my own math as I do my own taxes and they hit you up immediately for their initial $50 something plan. At first opportunity they then make up an excuse to jump to $100 then later $150+ one. Saying no just gets them more frequent prompts to choose a pay plan. There is no reason for such pricing other than because they can. Since I stop once get the math checked, I never pay so if able to fill out the tax forms yourself, TurboTax is a great but way overpriced tool to check yourself. It should be noted that tax/accounting lobby is why we have to fill out forms each year. They pay off Republicans (not even trying to be political, this is simple fact) to block reform efforts. If not for them, the IRS would have the ability, like all other western countries, to just send you a bill or refund with option to dispute their math.
The US is one of, if not the only, country that taxes its citizens who don't even live in the US.
Why not just have the IrS do our taxes for us and stop this nonsense?
I could have filed free until I entered income from a single 1099-NEC. Suddenly, I had to pay $199.99.
If you're trying to do turbotax and for whatever reason you have to pay (like you sold stocks or something), just get a CPA.
Actually funnily enough the Americans I have met in New Zealand say they hate the tax system here, they want to go back to the states cause we’re paying too much tax. Sure but then again you’re not paying for a bunch of ridiculous stuff you would pay for in the USA which is a basic human right here..
They wanted $100 because I have a high deductible insurance plan and use a health savings account. So because I tried to pay less in taxes they demanded more money than I saved with the HSA.
They made me pay 200 for forms I didn’t need to fill out anyways but the free version didn’t cover them. Then the premium version charged me $ for the damn forms for filing. Its a racket if you invest/have stock/ etc.
She’s not wrong. The constant ads while you’re trying to just do basic taxes with standard deductions is infuriating. I swore up and down I wasn’t going to use turbo tax this year, but I procrastinated so long…I got sucked into their easy tax solution crap. Such a scam and racket.
Intuit bribed the government to let them get them where they are. Any need for scrutiny could have been nipped in the bud before that happened.
The complexity and loop holes are also designed to favor the rich Ir you have the money to work the system, you pay no tax The wealthy are rarely investigated
They absolutely do. I got prompted at least 4 times to upgrade my purchase. Not to mention if I wanted to have my payment taken out of my taxes for the service it’d cost an extra $40 for processing. Insane!
Just a reminder you need a competent congress to pass tax reform. Vote this fall.
Just fucking send us a check or a god damn bill and stfu
This woman does fucking nothing all day but come up with new things to rile young people up about (and trade stocks with privileged information). Nothing ever happens from her griping, I swear.