Meanwhile in pretty much all other nations you go online to the free website, see your employer contributions already filled in and acknowledge they are correct for the year, add any extra income, check boxes for relevant deductions and you’re done.
This is true even of some third world countries like Sri Lanka (where I live). There is a web-based system called RAMIS (Revenue Administration Management Information System). Any taxpayer can log in using their tax identification number and file their taxes.
Which is basically how it works here too. If you just have W-2 income from an employer it takes less than 10 minutes to fill out the form. Sure, the system you mention is more convenient, but the difference is minimal.
The IRS already has most of my tax information and knows the tax code. Why must I deal with a third party (and potentially have to pay them) to electronically file my own taxes?
Doesn't America have uniquely complicated tax that requires you to keep all your receipts to claim all sorts of confusing deductions? How can the IRS know what you spent your income on if you don't tell them?
I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice.
For most people, those deductions are less than the "standard" deduction you can take instead. For most of the people who do itemized deductions, it's mostly just your mortgage payment and state taxes, which the IRS already knows about, and maybe charitable donations.
And even if you do have a lot of things to report, why not just report those things directly and let the IRS calculate your taxes, rather than you having to do it, fill out a complicated form, then the IRS does the calculation anyways to make sure you did it right?
> Just look at the dense jargon ... There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that?
For every form I've ever had to file with the IRS, there's a corresponding set of instructions. Those instructions inevitably have a definitions section and/or define the terms in-line.
The instructions for form W8-BEN-E are at [0]. The definitions section starts at printed page 4 and continues through to printed page 7. Some terms you mentioned (like "Excepted territory NFFE") are not in the definitions section, but are described in their own sections.
I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes. I'm definitely going to object to your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
Remember, Americans have to file taxes separately to the State and Federal government. The Federal government has little authority to dictate State taxes. The paperwork is in part a coordination problem between the State and Federal governments.
Basic taxes are trivial in the US if you just work to live, it is essentially one page. However, there is an extremely long and fat tail where the government has no way of knowing the correct details to compute your taxes. There are myriad subsidies and offsets that have to be accounted for, many of which depend on what State you live in.
If you earn a lot of money, like the tech people that frequent this website, you are much more likely to find yourself in that fat tail. It can become esoteric quite quickly. The Federal tax code has to accommodate the completely independent tax codes of all 50 States in a reasonable way.
afaik yes, its what the for-profit companies like turbotax use as well. While its "modernized" in comparison to older systems it was originally created in 2004 (and you can tell because it has XML galore).
I just looked up https://directfile.irs.gov/. While it says closed, the testimonies on this site speak to how easy the filing was. Almost feels like it is intentional to keep rest of the site as is with a small banner on top announcing the closure, as a way to hint at this stupid move by the administration.
The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
Yeah this needs to be the left wing "abortion" fight. Something we need to fight for 50 years before its finally overturned. Dont stop talking about it.
When you look at the donations politicians receive and the ROI they produce you quickly realize that they are way too cheap. Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
Congress created the PEPFAR program and allocated money to it, but the executive seems to have completely shut it down with no replacement. I'm not sure how to square this with your idea that if Congress starts a project, then the later administrations cannot shut it down without an act of congress. (I mean, obviously they legally cannot, but it seems like they can in practice)
You're clearly not paying attention. Which checks? The supreme Court OKed stopping people because they were brown ("Kavanaugh stops") and Congress has lost the power of the purse.
There are already ways to file your taxes for free or very cheap, e.g. https://www.freetaxusa.com. It would be hard for anyone to compete with a free or very cheap competitor, even as a nonprofit.
Yes, but Direct File moved us closer to a future where the government could pre-fill data for (and/or potentially just send a bill to) tax filers. Even if other free tax filing software exists, the loss of Direct File is painful because it was advancing the precedent of first party tax software.
You know, the IRS is basically defunded, even not counting the whole shutdown thing. I wonder how many people need to file handwritten by mail before it becomes a significant problem
> It started requiring phone numbers and things...
a) You're already trusting them with every piece of information in your tax return. It'd cost like five cents to use that information to discover your phone number... if they're malicious, you're already fucked.
b) When? At the end of the process where you're doing stuff like attesting that you're not lied on your tax return? I don't remember them demanding a phone number up front, and I also don't remember whether or not I refused to provide a phone number at the end.
I’m currently making my way through a video series on Ancient Rome. Apparently, there were times when Rome contracted out the right to collect taxes from certain regions. So businessmen would bid on this, and the winner then had a limited time when they could go out and collect the taxes. If they managed to collect more than what they paid for the bid, that was their profit. It’s easy to see how this was heavily abused, and these “publicans” were hated by the people. They’re even referenced in the Bible; “sinners and publicans”. How long before the IRS considers this arrangement?
Direct File did have a lot of limitations, so I assume when they say “eligible taxpayers” that’s the total number of people that could have used Direct File, which is much less than 100% of taxpayers. Even then, I’d assume more than 10 million people in the U.S. have very simple tax returns.
Yes, and also, there's a difference between Free File and Direct File, and the article kind of switches between referring to the two.
Free file: government partners with private companies to offer free tax returns through their software for low income people. It's suspected a lot of people don't know about it, and just use the paid versions of filing software because you have to start the process on IRS.gov and dark patterns were employed by the snakes at Intuit et al. Hence "just 3%". Been around for decades.
Direct file: New program (since 2024) for eligible people to file directly for free with the IRS, no third party tax software middleman. Only half the states are eligible, income criteria, simple taxes only. 300,000 touted as a bigger number because it's a very new program.
If anyone's interested, the CashApp tax prep section (kind of its own app, but its contained within the CashApp app) is a feature they have purchased from CreditKarma when CreditKarma got bought out by Intuit (turbotax pricks).
So I had filed taxes with CreditKarma one year, and then the next year the CreditKarma tax service had no information about my previous filing. So I tried out the CashApp app, since I was going to have to fill out all the info anyway, and it actually did have my information from the previous year and I only had to change the new information, rather than re-enter all of my address and employer info, etc.
So I also recommend the CashApp app - it's free for basic taxes, it's not helping turbotax and their relentless lobbying, and it's really convenient if you already use CashApp. Of course, all of this is subject to change any specific year. Big companies gonna big company, after all.
If your tax situation isn't too complicated, it actually isn't too hard to fill out the forms yourself[1]. But if you are living abroad, unfortunately your tax situation probably isn't that simple.
[1]: Although I find it incredibly frustrating the lengths they go to to avoid negative numbers on the forms.
I pay $500 a year for an accountant to do my taxes for me. And then tell me I owe nothing. Support the Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad group, they’re working on fixing this.
What was wrong with using Free File Fillable Forms in the first place? It's the real deal forms just online and with nothing obscured or sugar coated.
I use it every year, and while I wouldn't exactly say I enjoy doing my taxes, I do enjoy being fully aware what I'm filing and not being forced to do it on paper just because others have obtuse opinions or are lazy.
I've used the fillable forms before; the problem is that to fill them out with confidence - to even know with confidence which ones you should be filling out - requires more knowledge of tax law than the average person can reasonably be expected to possess.
Now, the various self-filing software products also feel a lot like guessing, but at least they walk you through which guesses are mostly likely to be correct and can catch the most egregious errors.
Unless you have a unreasonably complicated return, you need absolutely no knowledge of tax law. It's all just "take the number from box X on form A and write it in box Y of form B."
Not only are Americans dumb, they're incredibly ego driven and stubborn. That means Americans always think they're right. Everyone else is doing it wrong.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
I'm American. If you don't buy into the insane status-symbol ego culture, it's daily insanity of excess consumption and selfishness.
The worst part is no one wants to hear this. There's a crazy culture of "Saying anything is mean". We shove our heads in the dirt all the time.
Turbo tax is free for federal filers with no business income, same thing as this service. Except now no taxpayer dollars were spent on maintaining this. This would have been useful if it also did state taxes, which turbo tax is not free for.
No business income (including no Uber/doordash/etc due to schedule SE?), no dividends over $1500, no itemized deductions, no capital gains, no nanny (like you hiring a nanny), no unemployment income, no gambling winnings, no alimony, etc etc
They were rolling out matching services state by state. Something like 12 last year. And Turbo tax is NOT "free for federal filers with no business income". Just look at the Costco Turbotax stands every year.
Wasn't part of the impetus for the free file program because TurboTax actively hid the free filing options?
I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any.
The entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
No tax software or expert will never produce a wrong answer, because too many questions have no guaranteed right answer, due to inconsistent interpretatios within the IRS.
Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.
People file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.
The only reason I care about companies having my data is that it means the government can get to it. In this case I am required to give my data to the government anyway, so why would I care if OpenAI / Google has it?
ISTM one ought to be able to use AI to translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format. No personal data needs to go anywhere near the AI.
Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.
Also, a good satire presents what the author believes is the right thing as well as ridiculing the wrong thing. "A Modest Proposal" is famous for the proposition that the Irish should eat their own babies - ridiculing the obviously wrong solution of blaming the Irish for their problems but it also explicitly lists things that would work in the guise of dismissing them as unworkable. Ideas like taxing the people who own everything in Ireland (many of whom were not Irish), and that's much less famous but it's right there in the text.
Meanwhile in pretty much all other nations you go online to the free website, see your employer contributions already filled in and acknowledge they are correct for the year, add any extra income, check boxes for relevant deductions and you’re done.
This is true even of some third world countries like Sri Lanka (where I live). There is a web-based system called RAMIS (Revenue Administration Management Information System). Any taxpayer can log in using their tax identification number and file their taxes.
Which is basically how it works here too. If you just have W-2 income from an employer it takes less than 10 minutes to fill out the form. Sure, the system you mention is more convenient, but the difference is minimal.
The IRS already has most of my tax information and knows the tax code. Why must I deal with a third party (and potentially have to pay them) to electronically file my own taxes?
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The system he mentioned is usually equally simple for self-employed.
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In theory, yes. In practice, no.
Also, Americans have to file both fed and state taxes (with different rules)
Lol not really in practice.
Doesn't America have uniquely complicated tax that requires you to keep all your receipts to claim all sorts of confusing deductions? How can the IRS know what you spent your income on if you don't tell them?
I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8bene.pdf
For most people, those deductions are less than the "standard" deduction you can take instead. For most of the people who do itemized deductions, it's mostly just your mortgage payment and state taxes, which the IRS already knows about, and maybe charitable donations.
And even if you do have a lot of things to report, why not just report those things directly and let the IRS calculate your taxes, rather than you having to do it, fill out a complicated form, then the IRS does the calculation anyways to make sure you did it right?
The majority of Americans are W2 wage earners that take the standard deduction.
For a truly uniquely complicated tax system please move to Germany.
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I highly doubt that it's more complicated than the French or German tax system.
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> Just look at the dense jargon ... There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that?
For every form I've ever had to file with the IRS, there's a corresponding set of instructions. Those instructions inevitably have a definitions section and/or define the terms in-line.
The instructions for form W8-BEN-E are at [0]. The definitions section starts at printed page 4 and continues through to printed page 7. Some terms you mentioned (like "Excepted territory NFFE") are not in the definitions section, but are described in their own sections.
I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes. I'm definitely going to object to your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
[0] <https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8bene.pdf>
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When you say America you certainly mean USA? Or is America a country now?
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Remember, Americans have to file taxes separately to the State and Federal government. The Federal government has little authority to dictate State taxes. The paperwork is in part a coordination problem between the State and Federal governments.
Basic taxes are trivial in the US if you just work to live, it is essentially one page. However, there is an extremely long and fat tail where the government has no way of knowing the correct details to compute your taxes. There are myriad subsidies and offsets that have to be accounted for, many of which depend on what State you live in.
If you earn a lot of money, like the tech people that frequent this website, you are much more likely to find yourself in that fat tail. It can become esoteric quite quickly. The Federal tax code has to accommodate the completely independent tax codes of all 50 States in a reasonable way.
Even so, Direct File was possible.
Until it wasn’t.
It is not that complex. RSU's or options are pretty straightforward.
Deductions can get esoteric if you sold a bunch of stock. Even then, not that bad.
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If they genuinely can't work out what you owe, why bother paying it at all? Shouldn't there be a massive tax evasion problem?
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 )
Does the "Modernized eFile API" still exist?
afaik yes, its what the for-profit companies like turbotax use as well. While its "modernized" in comparison to older systems it was originally created in 2004 (and you can tell because it has XML galore).
Fascinating repo, thank you for sharing!
I just looked up https://directfile.irs.gov/. While it says closed, the testimonies on this site speak to how easy the filing was. Almost feels like it is intentional to keep rest of the site as is with a small banner on top announcing the closure, as a way to hint at this stupid move by the administration.
Update (11:30 ET, Nov 5): This link redirects to a service outage -- https://www.irs.gov/static/maintenance/RUP_Outage.html.
Citizens United.
The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
Yeah this needs to be the left wing "abortion" fight. Something we need to fight for 50 years before its finally overturned. Dont stop talking about it.
1000%
Money well spent
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trum...
Such a cheap bribe holy crap.
When you look at the donations politicians receive and the ROI they produce you quickly realize that they are way too cheap. Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
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I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing.
It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
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Maybe lobbyists should be punished by having their skin fully tattooed blue like smurfs.
This way, you’d have to really be into lobbying to suffer the tattoo pain and permanent branding.
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Most bribes are
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I thought we were draining the swamp >:(
There's more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_q741QO_m0
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Congress created the PEPFAR program and allocated money to it, but the executive seems to have completely shut it down with no replacement. I'm not sure how to square this with your idea that if Congress starts a project, then the later administrations cannot shut it down without an act of congress. (I mean, obviously they legally cannot, but it seems like they can in practice)
You're clearly not paying attention. Which checks? The supreme Court OKed stopping people because they were brown ("Kavanaugh stops") and Congress has lost the power of the purse.
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Paying a private company so you can pay the government.
You guys need to raise your expectations.
Why won't a non-profit pick up the open-source code they released and modify it for 2026?
Everybody seems to care about this issue so much, so this feels like an extremely high-impact thing to do.
There are already ways to file your taxes for free or very cheap, e.g. https://www.freetaxusa.com. It would be hard for anyone to compete with a free or very cheap competitor, even as a nonprofit.
Yes, but Direct File moved us closer to a future where the government could pre-fill data for (and/or potentially just send a bill to) tax filers. Even if other free tax filing software exists, the loss of Direct File is painful because it was advancing the precedent of first party tax software.
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As long as they don't kill FreeFillableForms...
If they do, I'm filing paper. Clowns.
You know, the IRS is basically defunded, even not counting the whole shutdown thing. I wonder how many people need to file handwritten by mail before it becomes a significant problem
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It started requiring phone numbers and things and I stopped using it in favor of my own spreadsheet.
> It started requiring phone numbers and things...
a) You're already trusting them with every piece of information in your tax return. It'd cost like five cents to use that information to discover your phone number... if they're malicious, you're already fucked.
b) When? At the end of the process where you're doing stuff like attesting that you're not lied on your tax return? I don't remember them demanding a phone number up front, and I also don't remember whether or not I refused to provide a phone number at the end.
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[sorry](https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...)
That's about it being closed for the 2025 tax year (because the filing deadling has passed), not about the program being shut down.
I’m currently making my way through a video series on Ancient Rome. Apparently, there were times when Rome contracted out the right to collect taxes from certain regions. So businessmen would bid on this, and the winner then had a limited time when they could go out and collect the taxes. If they managed to collect more than what they paid for the bid, that was their profit. It’s easy to see how this was heavily abused, and these “publicans” were hated by the people. They’re even referenced in the Bible; “sinners and publicans”. How long before the IRS considers this arrangement?
https://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/
Why innovate when you can be a perpetual rentier?
Direct File won’t happen in 2026, Intuit tells IRS
This is the correct headline
Very related discussion from 6 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267
The article touts the ~300k users of direct file as a big number, and the “just 3% of eligible tax payers” used free file as a small number.
Wouldn’t the 3% number come out yo millions of people?
Direct File did have a lot of limitations, so I assume when they say “eligible taxpayers” that’s the total number of people that could have used Direct File, which is much less than 100% of taxpayers. Even then, I’d assume more than 10 million people in the U.S. have very simple tax returns.
Yes, and also, there's a difference between Free File and Direct File, and the article kind of switches between referring to the two.
Free file: government partners with private companies to offer free tax returns through their software for low income people. It's suspected a lot of people don't know about it, and just use the paid versions of filing software because you have to start the process on IRS.gov and dark patterns were employed by the snakes at Intuit et al. Hence "just 3%". Been around for decades.
Direct file: New program (since 2024) for eligible people to file directly for free with the IRS, no third party tax software middleman. Only half the states are eligible, income criteria, simple taxes only. 300,000 touted as a bigger number because it's a very new program.
Isn't it great to have a government that serves corporations and not its people!
no
But corporations are people
Corporations are people, my friend!
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310
The Trump Administration is hell bent on doing everything it can to benefit large corporations at the expense of the American people.
Cash App offers free Fed and State filing and it's quite good (used it last year for the first time). Not many people know about it though.
If anyone's interested, the CashApp tax prep section (kind of its own app, but its contained within the CashApp app) is a feature they have purchased from CreditKarma when CreditKarma got bought out by Intuit (turbotax pricks).
So I had filed taxes with CreditKarma one year, and then the next year the CreditKarma tax service had no information about my previous filing. So I tried out the CashApp app, since I was going to have to fill out all the info anyway, and it actually did have my information from the previous year and I only had to change the new information, rather than re-enter all of my address and employer info, etc.
So I also recommend the CashApp app - it's free for basic taxes, it's not helping turbotax and their relentless lobbying, and it's really convenient if you already use CashApp. Of course, all of this is subject to change any specific year. Big companies gonna big company, after all.
> it's free for basic taxes,
Not just the basics. I found that it could do everything I needed including Schedules C, D and E.
IIRC, its limitations are if you're earning in multiple states, or are earning foreign income.
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FreeTaxUSA
Ok, fine, I’ll use TurboTax.
I live and work abroad and Turbotax requires a US billing address to pay the fee of using Turbotax. :facepalm
All the other self-service options do not work and I’m not sure if the risk is worth it to file it myself.
To my fellow Expats, what are you doing?
If your tax situation isn't too complicated, it actually isn't too hard to fill out the forms yourself[1]. But if you are living abroad, unfortunately your tax situation probably isn't that simple.
[1]: Although I find it incredibly frustrating the lengths they go to to avoid negative numbers on the forms.
Does FreeTaxUSA work for you?
I pay $500 a year for an accountant to do my taxes for me. And then tell me I owe nothing. Support the Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad group, they’re working on fixing this.
If your accountant doesn't give you the forms AND worksheets, change accountant.
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TurboTax is one of the products of Intuit, the company that's fucking us all over with this - its not fine, stop being ok with it.
What was wrong with using Free File Fillable Forms in the first place? It's the real deal forms just online and with nothing obscured or sugar coated.
I use it every year, and while I wouldn't exactly say I enjoy doing my taxes, I do enjoy being fully aware what I'm filing and not being forced to do it on paper just because others have obtuse opinions or are lazy.
I've used the fillable forms before; the problem is that to fill them out with confidence - to even know with confidence which ones you should be filling out - requires more knowledge of tax law than the average person can reasonably be expected to possess.
Now, the various self-filing software products also feel a lot like guessing, but at least they walk you through which guesses are mostly likely to be correct and can catch the most egregious errors.
The form that you fill out has a very tearse description of the field, but the actual instructions are in a separate document. For example, form 1040 is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf and the instructions document is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
The instructions make it very clear when a field in the form should be used and what should go in it.
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Unless you have a unreasonably complicated return, you need absolutely no knowledge of tax law. It's all just "take the number from box X on form A and write it in box Y of form B."
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Why does anyone want a better option when a worse option is available…
As one of those ~300,000 that filed with Direct File these last two years I’m sad and disgusted.
Guess I get screwed so some asshole at Intuit can make an extra twenty bucks.
This wont bode well.........
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Not only are Americans dumb, they're incredibly ego driven and stubborn. That means Americans always think they're right. Everyone else is doing it wrong.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
I'm American. If you don't buy into the insane status-symbol ego culture, it's daily insanity of excess consumption and selfishness.
The worst part is no one wants to hear this. There's a crazy culture of "Saying anything is mean". We shove our heads in the dirt all the time.
Yeah, it's incredibly dumb to pay Turbo Tax when you could just fill in the forms yourself for free. But that has nothing to do with Direct File.
Direct File won’t happen in 2026, Intuit TurboTax tells states[1]
There, fixed that for you.
[1] Very related discussion six months ago posted by me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267
Turbo tax is free for federal filers with no business income, same thing as this service. Except now no taxpayer dollars were spent on maintaining this. This would have been useful if it also did state taxes, which turbo tax is not free for.
No business income (including no Uber/doordash/etc due to schedule SE?), no dividends over $1500, no itemized deductions, no capital gains, no nanny (like you hiring a nanny), no unemployment income, no gambling winnings, no alimony, etc etc
They were rolling out matching services state by state. Something like 12 last year. And Turbo tax is NOT "free for federal filers with no business income". Just look at the Costco Turbotax stands every year.
The federal government doesn't do state taxes.
Luckily for me, my state rolled out its equivalent of Direct File a couple years ago, and it's fantastic. Just like Direct File was.
Wasn't part of the impetus for the free file program because TurboTax actively hid the free filing options?
I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...
With the rise of AI there is no excuse on why tax software should be so hard to make.
The entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
No tax software or expert will never produce a wrong answer, because too many questions have no guaranteed right answer, due to inconsistent interpretatios within the IRS.
Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.
People file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.
1% of returns filed by tax software have errors, which is infinitely more than 0%
>it can NEVER produce a wrong answer
As the government it should be possible to reduce the negative impact of making mistakes.
>Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
Then start simple. You don't have to cover all of tax law at the start.
You’re going to give your tax data - some of the most sensitive data to some constituents - to OpenAI / Google / some other startup?
That seems like a nightmare of a product as far as privacy is concerned.
Fwiw they have already bought all you financial info from Experian
https://theworknumber.com/solutions/products/income-employme...
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I think they meant that it should be a lot faster to develop software that implements the tax code with the assistance of AI coding tools.
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The only reason I care about companies having my data is that it means the government can get to it. In this case I am required to give my data to the government anyway, so why would I care if OpenAI / Google has it?
ISTM one ought to be able to use AI to translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format. No personal data needs to go anywhere near the AI.
Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.
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Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target, lest it be mistaken for, and contribute to, that which it intends to criticize.
Also, a good satire presents what the author believes is the right thing as well as ridiculing the wrong thing. "A Modest Proposal" is famous for the proposition that the Irish should eat their own babies - ridiculing the obviously wrong solution of blaming the Irish for their problems but it also explicitly lists things that would work in the guise of dismissing them as unworkable. Ideas like taxing the people who own everything in Ireland (many of whom were not Irish), and that's much less famous but it's right there in the text.
I'm surprised that there hasn't been an "this is good for bitcoin" comments yet.