For most tax payers in the US, the government has all of the necessary information to calculate tax liability through W-2, 1099, and other filings from third parties.
A pragmatic approach might be to use this information, populate a tax form, send out for signature confirming accuracy and completeness. The balance of the tax payers could continue to use Intuit, H&R Block and others to handle their circumstances.
There is a contingent of Congress that does not want to make tax preparation easier because it aligns with their narrative that taxes are bad. The more painful tax preparation is, the more sympathy they find with this narrative.
> There is a contingent of Congress that does not want to make tax preparation easier because it aligns with their narrative that taxes are bad. The more painful tax preparation is, the more sympathy they find with this narrative.
I'm primed to believe this because I'm a registered Democrat raised in that kind of household. Is it true, though? The logic makes sense, but how could we really determine whether a tax-bashing neoconservative actively protects labyrinthine tax practices in order to justify adjacent political ends? I'm more likely to conclude that it doesn't happen.
You should do some reading about Grover Norquist, his organization Americans for Tax Reform, and the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that most Republican politicians are pressured to sign. I think you’ll find that your assumptions about what political operatives are willing to do are wrong.
A very large part of the current craziness has been enabled by people so incredulous that nobody would “stoop to such a level” that they ignore the topic completely, only to find out when it’s too late that they do, in fact, stoop down to that level and the damage has already been done.
This Planet Money episode[0] has a few short interview clips with Grover Norquist (author of the conservative Tax Pledge). He said that supporting a Ready Return program would be equivalent to breaking the pledge because it is then easier to raise taxes.
I would break US tax arguments down along a few axes. Individual political identities line up all over on different ones.
- Progressive rate vs flat
- Detailed vs simplified
- Policy via taxes vs outside of them
- Low taxes vs high taxes + benefits
- Use tax (e.g. sales) vs income tax
- Labor tax vs capital tax
- Gov-cooperative filing vs adversarial
My read on how we got to where we are is (1) all politicians love byzantine tax codes, because it allows sneaking favors in without repercussions + (2) people love getting money.
Consequently, we get a convoluted tax code that advantages special interests who can lobby, sold and balanced with enough direct benefits to people that they're happy.
Which... is a complicated sausage, but doesn't seem like the worst way to resolve a fundamental tension?
And then everyone stares at the resulting Rorschach blot of de facto tax codes and sees what they want to see.
"Look, it's ridiculously complicated! That's why we need a simple, flat rate tax!"
"Look, it's ridiculously complicated! That's because the corporations/wealthy are trying to screw you over!"
> how could we really determine whether a tax-bashing neoconservative actively protects labyrinthine tax practices in order to justify adjacent political ends?
We rarely have the ability to truly determine a politician’s motives in a concrete and objective way because many of the decisions they make are not transparent due to lobbying and other forms of influence.
Fundamentally, the American right argues consistently that the government does not represent the interests of the people and actively works to render the government ineffective.
Whether they intentionally use taxation as a means to achieve political gains or not, it’s pretty undeniable that taxation causes resentment when the government appears to be so ineffective. Ultimately, you’re trying to determine if this is intentional or not, which doesn’t make that much of a difference.
As Jon Stewart used to ask on his show when trying to assess the motivations of conservatives: are they stupid or evil? Which is just a simpler way of asking: are they being intentional about this or not?
Reagan believed paying taxes should hurt - the more painful to pay, the more the public would want to do away with taxes. Reagan did soften his stance while in the White House, but the GOP never got on board, even to this day.
"But in the United States, filing taxes is painful by design. The tax-collection system as we know it is the outcome of three forces: corporate lobbying, a stubborn resistance to borrowing good ideas from other Western nations, and the Republican Party’s decades-long campaign against taxation itself."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/american-t...
It's not proof, but it's telling: it's the same reason sales tax is not included in the price of an item, unlike VAT in Europe. They want you to know how much you're paying.
This happens in other spheres. Two that come to mind are death penalty cases, where opponents play for delay after delay, and divorce court, which is designed to be horrible for everyone, and therefore limit the number of divorces. I'm sure something similar happens to abortion clinics when there is a sizable resistance to them.
That’s honestly the right mindset. Our brain loooves conspiracy theories. In a way, it’s more comforting to us to think we are lead by very intelligent mischievous people than to realize most of us just do an ok job, have imposter syndrome, etc.
I suspect it’s more conservative politicians have a strong incentive to oppose easier tax filing—they want everyone confronted annually with how much taxes they pay—while conservative voters are cross-pressured and as a result won’t affirmatively demand easier tax filing or punish a politician for opposing it.
In Canada I push a button in my tax app to populate everything from the government database. I then add the things they don’t know about like donations, make some choices about my RRSPs, and then file. Maybe ten minutes?
One year I totally screwed up and they fixed it for me, giving me a considerably larger return than I filed. So I’m really happy that auto button exists now.
Data access is a good step, but it would be nice if the gov provided tools to do a declaration online. Of course the Provinces would need to get on board.
I don't like relying on third party apps. Especially that they're now all cloud based so they keep a copy of all your financials and it sucks. Turbotax even does a credit check (via equifax) on me once a year for god knows what reason...
I found the Canadian process much closer to the US process than what you describe. "Everything populating from government databases" didn't happen. I entered in stuff from my T4 slip by hand. Some financial firms linked to TurboTax, some didn't, and even the ones that did took almost as long to get working as doing it by hand.
It's a similar level of difficulty in the U.S unless you have a really complicated tax situation. All the major tax apps integrate with the payroll companies, banks, and brokerages, so it's just a few clicks to authorize it to import your data.
I used to do this and never spent more than 10 or 15 minutes on taxes either.
> There is a contingent of Congress that does not want to make tax preparation easier because it aligns with their narrative that taxes are bad. The more painful tax preparation is, the more sympathy they find with this narrative.
And yet we have paycheck withholding, which seems to be a relatively complex system and is also the thing that makes actually paying your taxes easy.
Perhaps this is just in my imagination, but it seems that there is an element to the byzantine tax process where it's desirable on the part of the government for people to feel that they have likely made some mistakes at some points with taxes, and this produces the feeling that the government has "kompromat" and therefore they should be careful and make sure to not do anything to get any unwanted attention. Of course, there is an analogy to be made with religion and the Catholic Church in particular.
The issue is that US tax code is based on a lot of information the IRS doesn't have access to - disability, number of child, marriage status, etc.
And then the other issues is that the information the IRS has comes from 3rd parties like your employer, your financial institutions, colleges, etc. That information can have errors in it, so you need to review everything and make sure it's correct anyways.
This happened to me when I worked in a country that automatically filled out your tax return - I pulled together all the information just like I would in the US to make sure it was correct. And guess what? My employer made an error that would have cost me several thousand more in taxes!
So the benefit is really pre-filling a form with numbers. Otherwise the work is very similar to just doing your taxes on your own anyways.
While it is true that many people have simple taxes, the philosophical shift is huge. It's just much better for the US citizen to be able to tell the government what he or she owes and then put the onus on the government to seek redress. In some countries, the government sends out a tax bill as if it's a fait accompli and the poor citizens just have to take it.
I realize there are some people who just want to frame this as Intuit is just a bunch of greedy people, but they're providing a service just like others. HR Block does offer some competition and it's often possible to get a free version of their software. I've seen some of my neighbors get the free option. It's real.
I like the option to control my taxes. It's worth the extra work.
> In some countries, the government sends out a tax bill as if it's a fait accompli and the poor citizens just have to take it.
I highly doubt this happens in any working democracy.
What the government does in those countries is just send the tax form pre-filled allowing the tax payer to make any corrections as they wish. You are just as much in control of your taxes in such a system as the US one but it just has a lot less work for most.
In an authoritarian/etc system you end up paying whatever the government says you have to pay no matter how the system works.
Really if you are living in a country where you can’t dispute your taxes when you think the government made a mistake you are living in a failed democracy or authoritarian/dictator system.
>In some countries, the government sends out a tax bill as if it's a fait accompli and the poor citizens just have to take it.
In Australia at least we get a pre-filled form, but we still need to validate and submit it. If there is a discrepancy we can correct it then. The government isn't just "sending a bill", and because of pay as you go taxes happening via the employer most people are more likely to get money back than they are to owe more - for example if you get a pay rise you are taxed on each pay cheuque as if you were getting that pay rate for the whole financial year, but often people have part of the year at the old lower pay rate and so might get some back.
That's why the IRS is proposing an automatic preparation option, not "the government sending you a bill." The legal distinction between what their program initially suggests and what you file remains, and is deeply baked into the tax code.
It was 80,000 employees, not agents (Revenue Agents or CI Agents), the total includes IT, customer service, return processing/mailroom, legal research/appeals, HR, etc. across the entire organization.
Fun fact, the IRS has people that go out to oil refineries and make sure the transfers are being reported accurately and tax-free diesel is dyed correctly. They have people who advise the State Department on negotiating tax treaties.
Additionally, the total was an estimate of how many employees could be hired through 2031, including backfilling positions. Over half of all IRS employees are currently eligible for retirement, so significant departures are expected in the coming years.
No, but there is a contingent of Congress that does not want to make tax preparation easier because placating tax prep companies aligns with their campaign fundraising strategy. I assume that our president was one of them when he was a senator, and continues to be friends with legislators who are included in that contingent.
I'm surprised they don't go for an alternative idea, since the govt has all the data. Make filing taxes online easy based on the info they have, but then require everyone to scroll thru e.g. a "tax invoice" that would break down the taxes proportionally based on the latest budget, with congress controlling the yearly highlights. "You paid $X for war in Iraq", "You paid $X to advance gender equality in Peru", "You paid $X to build a bridge to nowhere", "You paid $X for loan forgiveness for people studying underwater basket weaving".
That might get people's attention... would you rather cancel Hulu or underwater basket weaving?
A step further: I've seen someone suggest before that we should be able to choose the percentages of what our taxes fund. Been in love with that idea ever since.
This is literally how it works in South Africa. It’s called auto assessment. You get sent a form to confirm all correct and click submit online. 99% it has all the correct information
>There is a contingent of Congress that does not want to make tax preparation easier because it aligns with their narrative that taxes are bad. The more painful tax preparation is, the more sympathy they find with this narrative.
Had me up until here. This is what I'd dismiss as a conspiracy theory.
In the U.K. a lot of people do not have much interaction with HMRC (the tax authority) beyond knowing their National Insurance number, knowing their tax code, and seeing tax deductions on their payslips.
> There is a contingent of Congress that does not want to make tax preparation easier because it aligns with their narrative that taxes are bad. The more painful tax preparation is, the more sympathy they find with this narrative.
I’m guessing you’re making a thinly-veiled reference to Republicans being the ones holding this up. Congress has had Democrat control many times over the decades, they could have pushed this through any time. Perhaps both parties share blame here.
> Congress has had Democrat control many times over the decades, they could have pushed this through any time.
It's not that simple. A party's agenda will include several things they want to pass when they have a majority, with different priorities.
For many of the items on their agenda there will not be unanimous support within the party and there won't be unanimous opposition from the other party. The result is that for some of their agenda items they will have to get some support from the other party.
Those other party members, even if they actually like the majority party's bill, will be reluctant to go against their own party and support it because their party might retaliate, doing things like deprioritizing those members bills or giving them less important committee assignments. The majority party might have to offer those minority members some incentive to get their support, such as agreeing to support bills that those members are pushing even if those are against the majority party's agenda.
And so parties have to pick their fights. Making tax preparation easier is not something that a lot of voters care deeply about, and so doesn't become something that is worth pushing through through when you've got a small majority.
Every House seat is up for election every 2 years, and it is very common for a party that has both the presidency and majorities in both the House and the Senate to lose that House majority in the midterm election. You want to spend the time before that on your high priority items.
I think the Democrats (Intuit headquarters in California) are primarily to blame here, but they find odd common ground with a portion of the Republican party who want to run up the debt by cutting revenue (while increasing spending).
I actually love it when republican politicians are actually and actively fucking over their own constituents while pocketing some money. truly an American dream through and through. sucks to be their constituents though, not that I'm sorry.
in the uk, most pay tax by an even simpler method, Pay as You Earn (PAYE). the taxes are all filed by the employer, and the online website allows taxpayers to add anything else
Yeah, there should be a filled-in form option (where you can make changes) but the reality is that if you have a W-2 with maybe a 1099 or two (with no cost basis complications) and standard deduction, it's really not that complicated today.
>> For most tax payers in the US, the government has all of the necessary information to calculate tax liability
A couple years ago, the US government owed me a bunch of money for taxes, I overpaid, it took the government many months to refund that money, and during that period, the US government could not tell me a single thing about where my money was, or what was the status of my return, or where my money was.
Not a single thing, after many hours on the phone, hours and hours, not a single piece of information.
And from your comment, I gather that you want these people to have more power over me, rather than less.
You don’t file a form with the IRS when you get married, have a child, divorce, pay for daycare, spend an unusual amount of income on healthcare, enroll at a local community college, leave your job, switch to selling pottery on eBay, buy a house, inherit money from the death of a relative, …
We could have IRS forms and the IRS maintaining an expansive database to cover all tax-relevant events and amounts, but that hardly seems desirable.
Federal income taxes are complex. Everyone will trip over that complexity multiple times in their lives, Federally-provided “easy file” or not.
EDIT: Just look at the qualifying criteria for the EITC, simultaneously one of the most important tax credits that many eligible low-income filers miss, and a massive source of tax fraud.
All of this can be provided to the IRS through a crud interface in your IRS account and it’s entirely desirable to make paying taxes as easy and cost efficient as possible.
Automate what can be automated, make what cannot straightforward.
> You don’t file a form with the IRS when you get married, have a child, divorce, pay for daycare...
Er, yes you do? I'm pretty sure all of the things you listed are explicitly included in the 1040 and associated tax forms we have today. Daycare expenses, for example, are supplied in form 2441: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-2441
This seems like pure FUD. The claim isn't that easy file would work for all people, the claim is that the present system is needlessly opaque in a way that benefits only the tax prep middle-men. More generally, it's really hard to claim that the US can't possibly accomplish something that many other countries already do.
I filed 2022 taxes with FreeTaxUSA. Pricing was very reasonable ($15 total for fed and state combined). The interface was better than I expected for such a low cost service.
Prior to FreeTaxUSA, I used TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and Intuit. Intuit does surprise me by charging roughly the same as a CPA firm but for a "do it yourself" service.
I have limited experience with US tax, I lived there only one year. Everybody strongly recommended to have someone do it for me because it's complicated. Turned out it wasn't that complicated. Slightly more so than in my country where everything is pre-filled and you just sign.
I'm probably stereotyping here, but I noticed Americans are more willing to pay for a service, where Europeans are more penny-pinching and don't see why they should pay for something they can do themselves. I guess American love their businesses, where we see them sometimes suspiciously.
you do not have to pay. you can do it for free by yourself. there is just a lot of papers, and the language used is confusing to people and they choose to get assistance.
No, they paid a service to do some of the more fiddly work for them.
I use the same service, but for just federal, and they are upfront about state filings costing $15 rather than surprising you at the end like Intuit/TurboTax.
No, you don't have to pay to file your taxes. You can pay to hv someone else do your taxes for you. The tax code is so screwed up, that it can be difficult to figure everything out yourself; but, you can. I've always done my own taxes.
No you pay to prepare your taxes. Inuit and a CPA have more thorough questions for more complicated tax situations. Nothing stops you from using the paper form and sending it through the mail.
In WA it’s free because no state taxes. You can pay money for consulting or for being sent a printed or more expensive binded copy of your return. I’ve used it for 5 years now maybe. So I feel comfortable knowing they have a revenue stream and when I did my due diligence when I started using them a while ago.
I should probably figure out how to get notified if they get acquired or something though.
The real scam is TurboTax charging over $100 for software that has a fixed yearly cost for development and a negligible cost for distribution and is used by millions.
I've only done my taxes with FreeTaxUSA, but I think I'll have to pay up for TaxSlayer for this year's taxes because FreeTaxUSA don't support a specific state form I need to file to save me money (Annualized income installment method for calculating estimated taxes). I did message FreeTaxUSA about supporting that about 2 years ago because I knew I was going to need it at some point.
That's too bad. State tax return forms are the worst. A lot of states don't have the resources to fine-tune their form design, and the instructions are often poorly written.
It's interesting to think about the harm done by Intuit and other companies' lobbying on this file, and compare it to the language that people like Ben Horowitz have used to describe Bill Campbell, Intuit's chairman in this period.
To hear it from people like Horowitz (in his book), Campbell is one of the best people he's ever met; one step removed from a saint. But the man's actions in stopping free online filing to become a reality in the US have caused incredible harm.
It's easy to confuse a nice person with a good person.
Isn't that the case with everyone Silicon Valley lionizes? People in tech always want to show how much they work for the "good side", when in reality, they're all part of the machine that causes long term societal harm.
I was recently at an event in New York, where they were honoring Kissinger. At least there, no one in the room was playing the part of a saint - everyone knew he was a near equivalent of the devil incarnate, possibly even the old man himself.
To me this illustrates something different than “all Silicon Valley people think they are the good guys”. Eg. Elon Musk is famously not very nice, doesn’t pretend to be nice, and many people have had bad experiences with him directly. But there is a different set of SV people who no one has ever said a mean word about personally, but whose influence on the world is deeply harmful, sometimes bordering on evil, like Campbell’s case here.
I think many people can’t tell the difference between a nice person and a good person.
If any billionaire wants to start real philanthropy, this would be a good start. Spend $100M or whatever to kill these companies and let free-filing happen.
I bet if the people had a simple way to simplify taxes, they would attack the billionaire and philanthropy, having a more effective way to understand what tax codes those entities use as well
there isn’t really a benefit in offering these tools when the alternative is another 100 years of “taxing the rich” by raising income tax on the upper middle class
There are about 125 million households in the US. I'm making the assumption that most households are filing a single tax return even if there are two or more incomes. Statistica reports that about 60% of households owe Federal taxes. So the market size of tax filing households is about 75,000,000.
How many small dollar donations would it take to either rival the lobbying dollars of Intuit or create a fantastic free alternative?
Track that $90 million, and publicize where it landed. Lots of corrupt politicians and regulators. I mean, I'm sure the money has been "legally" spent...just not ethically. Legal loopholes are deliberately left open...
The vast majority of lobbying dollars already are tracked, I recommend OpenSecrets. I don't think it's any secret that politicians are taking political donations and they (when they retire) or former staffers go to work for them for egregious sums of money.
No one can claim ignorance of the tax filing industry, mostly Intuit and HR Block, paying to block any such notion of easy IRS filings since the Internet and ecommerce took off. If IRS standardized e-filing for citizens, it'd remove what, 70% of Intuit's market value overnight, crippling net worth for how many employees and investors of such a fragile industry on the edge of collapse should this happen? Now it is, finally happening.
Finally some common sense took hold to let someone in government see beyond themselves the lobbying cash and veritable bribery that single-handedly kept Intuit their ilk as behemoths in the industry with nothing more than our politicians willfully overlooking the industry extortion of every common US citizen.
Sadly Intuit and like won't die overnight as sadly most silly accountants only know Quickbooks, same as people only know Microsoft Office or Windows itself, but it'll be fun to see them decimated soon once their services are no longer necessary to buy by de facto simply to pay taxes.
Hell, I'm sure if I tell ChatGPT they're a really good accountant, they'd gladly do it for me soon enough too.
Readit News
A pragmatic approach might be to use this information, populate a tax form, send out for signature confirming accuracy and completeness. The balance of the tax payers could continue to use Intuit, H&R Block and others to handle their circumstances.
There is a contingent of Congress that does not want to make tax preparation easier because it aligns with their narrative that taxes are bad. The more painful tax preparation is, the more sympathy they find with this narrative.
I'm primed to believe this because I'm a registered Democrat raised in that kind of household. Is it true, though? The logic makes sense, but how could we really determine whether a tax-bashing neoconservative actively protects labyrinthine tax practices in order to justify adjacent political ends? I'm more likely to conclude that it doesn't happen.
A very large part of the current craziness has been enabled by people so incredulous that nobody would “stoop to such a level” that they ignore the topic completely, only to find out when it’s too late that they do, in fact, stoop down to that level and the damage has already been done.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...
Consequently, we get a convoluted tax code that advantages special interests who can lobby, sold and balanced with enough direct benefits to people that they're happy.
Which... is a complicated sausage, but doesn't seem like the worst way to resolve a fundamental tension?
And then everyone stares at the resulting Rorschach blot of de facto tax codes and sees what they want to see.
"Look, it's ridiculously complicated! That's why we need a simple, flat rate tax!"
"Look, it's ridiculously complicated! That's because the corporations/wealthy are trying to screw you over!"
We rarely have the ability to truly determine a politician’s motives in a concrete and objective way because many of the decisions they make are not transparent due to lobbying and other forms of influence.
Fundamentally, the American right argues consistently that the government does not represent the interests of the people and actively works to render the government ineffective.
Whether they intentionally use taxation as a means to achieve political gains or not, it’s pretty undeniable that taxation causes resentment when the government appears to be so ineffective. Ultimately, you’re trying to determine if this is intentional or not, which doesn’t make that much of a difference.
As Jon Stewart used to ask on his show when trying to assess the motivations of conservatives: are they stupid or evil? Which is just a simpler way of asking: are they being intentional about this or not?
This happens in other spheres. Two that come to mind are death penalty cases, where opponents play for delay after delay, and divorce court, which is designed to be horrible for everyone, and therefore limit the number of divorces. I'm sure something similar happens to abortion clinics when there is a sizable resistance to them.
One year I totally screwed up and they fixed it for me, giving me a considerably larger return than I filed. So I’m really happy that auto button exists now.
I don't like relying on third party apps. Especially that they're now all cloud based so they keep a copy of all your financials and it sucks. Turbotax even does a credit check (via equifax) on me once a year for god knows what reason...
I used to do this and never spent more than 10 or 15 minutes on taxes either.
Dead Comment
And yet we have paycheck withholding, which seems to be a relatively complex system and is also the thing that makes actually paying your taxes easy.
Paycheck withholding guarantees you pay your taxes.
Can't forget to file if you already paid all your taxes ahead of time.
"How much should I pay?"
"Enough"
"What if I don't pay enough"
"We'll fine you"
"What if I pay too much?"
"We'll refund you, in a year"
And then the other issues is that the information the IRS has comes from 3rd parties like your employer, your financial institutions, colleges, etc. That information can have errors in it, so you need to review everything and make sure it's correct anyways.
This happened to me when I worked in a country that automatically filled out your tax return - I pulled together all the information just like I would in the US to make sure it was correct. And guess what? My employer made an error that would have cost me several thousand more in taxes!
So the benefit is really pre-filling a form with numbers. Otherwise the work is very similar to just doing your taxes on your own anyways.
I realize there are some people who just want to frame this as Intuit is just a bunch of greedy people, but they're providing a service just like others. HR Block does offer some competition and it's often possible to get a free version of their software. I've seen some of my neighbors get the free option. It's real.
I like the option to control my taxes. It's worth the extra work.
I highly doubt this happens in any working democracy.
What the government does in those countries is just send the tax form pre-filled allowing the tax payer to make any corrections as they wish. You are just as much in control of your taxes in such a system as the US one but it just has a lot less work for most.
In an authoritarian/etc system you end up paying whatever the government says you have to pay no matter how the system works.
Really if you are living in a country where you can’t dispute your taxes when you think the government made a mistake you are living in a failed democracy or authoritarian/dictator system.
In Australia at least we get a pre-filled form, but we still need to validate and submit it. If there is a discrepancy we can correct it then. The government isn't just "sending a bill", and because of pay as you go taxes happening via the employer most people are more likely to get money back than they are to owe more - for example if you get a pay rise you are taxed on each pay cheuque as if you were getting that pay rate for the whole financial year, but often people have part of the year at the old lower pay rate and so might get some back.
Is this why the current president hired 80000 new IRS agents instead of making a simple system that presents this electronically for confirmation?
Fun fact, the IRS has people that go out to oil refineries and make sure the transfers are being reported accurately and tax-free diesel is dyed correctly. They have people who advise the State Department on negotiating tax treaties.
Additionally, the total was an estimate of how many employees could be hired through 2031, including backfilling positions. Over half of all IRS employees are currently eligible for retirement, so significant departures are expected in the coming years.
That might get people's attention... would you rather cancel Hulu or underwater basket weaving?
Had me up until here. This is what I'd dismiss as a conspiracy theory.
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax/how-you-pay-income-tax
Even when they do, it can be done online, or by post, or by phone.
Anecdote: I rang HMRC and within 60 minutes all of my questions were answered.
I’m guessing you’re making a thinly-veiled reference to Republicans being the ones holding this up. Congress has had Democrat control many times over the decades, they could have pushed this through any time. Perhaps both parties share blame here.
It's not that simple. A party's agenda will include several things they want to pass when they have a majority, with different priorities.
For many of the items on their agenda there will not be unanimous support within the party and there won't be unanimous opposition from the other party. The result is that for some of their agenda items they will have to get some support from the other party.
Those other party members, even if they actually like the majority party's bill, will be reluctant to go against their own party and support it because their party might retaliate, doing things like deprioritizing those members bills or giving them less important committee assignments. The majority party might have to offer those minority members some incentive to get their support, such as agreeing to support bills that those members are pushing even if those are against the majority party's agenda.
And so parties have to pick their fights. Making tax preparation easier is not something that a lot of voters care deeply about, and so doesn't become something that is worth pushing through through when you've got a small majority.
Every House seat is up for election every 2 years, and it is very common for a party that has both the presidency and majorities in both the House and the Senate to lose that House majority in the midterm election. You want to spend the time before that on your high priority items.
Dead Comment
A couple years ago, the US government owed me a bunch of money for taxes, I overpaid, it took the government many months to refund that money, and during that period, the US government could not tell me a single thing about where my money was, or what was the status of my return, or where my money was.
Not a single thing, after many hours on the phone, hours and hours, not a single piece of information.
And from your comment, I gather that you want these people to have more power over me, rather than less.
My answer is simple, no.
We could have IRS forms and the IRS maintaining an expansive database to cover all tax-relevant events and amounts, but that hardly seems desirable.
Federal income taxes are complex. Everyone will trip over that complexity multiple times in their lives, Federally-provided “easy file” or not.
EDIT: Just look at the qualifying criteria for the EITC, simultaneously one of the most important tax credits that many eligible low-income filers miss, and a massive source of tax fraud.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...
How in the world does the IRS figure out automatically if you’re eligible?
Automate what can be automated, make what cannot straightforward.
Er, yes you do? I'm pretty sure all of the things you listed are explicitly included in the 1040 and associated tax forms we have today. Daycare expenses, for example, are supplied in form 2441: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-2441
This seems like pure FUD. The claim isn't that easy file would work for all people, the claim is that the present system is needlessly opaque in a way that benefits only the tax prep middle-men. More generally, it's really hard to claim that the US can't possibly accomplish something that many other countries already do.
Prior to FreeTaxUSA, I used TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and Intuit. Intuit does surprise me by charging roughly the same as a CPA firm but for a "do it yourself" service.
I'm probably stereotyping here, but I noticed Americans are more willing to pay for a service, where Europeans are more penny-pinching and don't see why they should pay for something they can do themselves. I guess American love their businesses, where we see them sometimes suspiciously.
I use the same service, but for just federal, and they are upfront about state filings costing $15 rather than surprising you at the end like Intuit/TurboTax.
The only "automation" I now use is an Excel spreadsheet, put out each year, for free, by Glen Reeves, (https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home/chan...)
> $15 total
Sounds like a scam to me.
I should probably figure out how to get notified if they get acquired or something though.
I agree with everyone that it should be a completely unnecessary product, but I don't feel that it is excessively expensive for what it does.
The email address is at the bottom of every page.
To hear it from people like Horowitz (in his book), Campbell is one of the best people he's ever met; one step removed from a saint. But the man's actions in stopping free online filing to become a reality in the US have caused incredible harm.
It's easy to confuse a nice person with a good person.
I was recently at an event in New York, where they were honoring Kissinger. At least there, no one in the room was playing the part of a saint - everyone knew he was a near equivalent of the devil incarnate, possibly even the old man himself.
I think many people can’t tell the difference between a nice person and a good person.
there isn’t really a benefit in offering these tools when the alternative is another 100 years of “taxing the rich” by raising income tax on the upper middle class
How many small dollar donations would it take to either rival the lobbying dollars of Intuit or create a fantastic free alternative?
https://apnews.com/article/tax-irs-taxpayers-direct-file-ef2...
I’m not holding my breath on “fantastic”.
Deleted Comment
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/05/turbotax-owner-intu...
IRS moves forward with a new free-file tax return system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36804710 - July 2023 (221 comments)
IRS tests free e-filing system that could compete with tax prep giants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35950836 - May 2023 (567 comments)
Call on the IRS to provide libre tax-filing software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35705469 - April 2023 (129 comments)
60M Americans have taxes so simple the IRS could do them automatically - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35476709 - April 2023 (277 comments)
Lobbyists begin chipping away at Biden’s $80B IRS overhaul - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35381701 - March 2023 (214 comments)
Intuit pouring money into lobbying amid push for free government-run tax filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34840039 - Feb 2023 (178 comments)
IRS builds task force to explore running its own free e-file system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34764952 - Feb 2023 (199 comments)
IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34462122 - Jan 2023 (247 comments)
IRS will look into setting up a free e-filing system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32753099 - Sept 2022 (408 comments)
The IRS could be on the verge of changing the way Americans file their taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32550841 - Aug 2022 (17 comments)
IRS will study free tax filing options - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32502321 - Aug 2022 (25 comments)
TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31072202 - April 2022 (394 comments)
Filing taxes could be free & simple. H&R Block & Intuit lobby against it (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856968 - March 2022 (114 comments)
FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846071 - March 2022 (587 comments)
Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409523 - Feb 2022 (122 comments)
Why do Americans have to pay much to file their tax returns when the IRS knows? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267361 - Feb 2022 (22 comments)
Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against It (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185484 - Feb 2022 (18 comments)
California tried to save the nation from tax filing, then Intuit stepped in - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28944200 - Oct 2021 (283 comments)
The IRS has a big opportunity to fix the way Americans file taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28177289 - Aug 2021 (12 comments)
--
GOTO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970518
Finally some common sense took hold to let someone in government see beyond themselves the lobbying cash and veritable bribery that single-handedly kept Intuit their ilk as behemoths in the industry with nothing more than our politicians willfully overlooking the industry extortion of every common US citizen.
Sadly Intuit and like won't die overnight as sadly most silly accountants only know Quickbooks, same as people only know Microsoft Office or Windows itself, but it'll be fun to see them decimated soon once their services are no longer necessary to buy by de facto simply to pay taxes.
Hell, I'm sure if I tell ChatGPT they're a really good accountant, they'd gladly do it for me soon enough too.