The “IRS will functionally increase taxes” argument is a distraction and I doubt anyone here takes it seriously.
But the argument matters because it has given Congress political cover to let Intuit keep leeching off the system, so a response is in order.
Congress should require the IRS to give every person an auditable receipt of every tax they paid in a standard format.
Then, truly public-minded services can use the receipt to help people understand if their filings were correct.
There’s no good reason automated IRS filing would result in tax increases for anyone, it’s a fixable problem, and good grief I’m ready to stop paying TurboTax $180/year.
I'm usually lean to the side of "keep your government paws out of the business". But taxes aren't business - it's a governmental function, and there's no reason why the government who levies the taxes can't also produce proper documentation for it and make the compliance easier. There could be corner cases where it's hard to do, fine - just do the easy 80% and let the business take care of the rest. Let the business also be able to check it and profit if they find a mistake. If you don't believe The Man did it right - you should be able to download the data and give it to the same Intuit folks and see if they can do better. It's just adding an easy option, I don't see anything wrong with that at all.
Intuit would do fine with it - yes, they'd lose some income, but they have more then enough other business, both in more complex taxes and other ways of organizing business, they don't need to be able to fleece every single taxpayer. In fact, if such IRS system is built, they'd probably will make a good buck by providing added value offerings to it, just as they do now for existing tax filing systems.
Even if the system to do that costs double to the high estimate - let's say $0.5B per year, given the government projects are always over cost - it's still about 0.15% of the taxes collected every year. There's no reason why it'd have any influence at all on the level of taxes collected.
It seems illogical for the government to not have a free, easy way for the taxpayer to remit their taxes to the government (or submit the paperwork that should generate a return from that government). But at the same time I think it's fine to be skeptical that you should trust the government to be honest in showing you what amount of taxes you actually owe given how complicated the tax code is, and because there exists, ahem, a bit of an incentive problem there.
Is the free-filing system designed to maximize your return? Is it designed for ease of use? Generally I agree that TurboTax is a leech, but just because they're leeches doesn't mean there isn't an incentive problem that should be addressed.
>Then, truly public-minded services can use the receipt to help people understand if their filings were correct.
Do you mean a private company does this? Or something else?
Do you consider it an incentive problem for cloud providers to send you a bill instead of asking you to submit what you believe you should owe? We have societally solved these problems my making them auditable. People don’t necessarily trust the bill, and have means of disputing it. If you think the government’s tool is overcharging, you are welcome to file your own taxes and deal with the possibility of getting audited.
> Is the free-filing system designed to maximize your return?
The solution to this is for the government to publish the source code in the public domain. Then anyone who can do better can fork it and sell it, which will make that market more competitive when it's cheaper to enter because the government has already done 80% of the work, but there will only be a market for this if the government isn't maximizing your return. "Better return than the free system or your money back" would be a great way to get customers, and they'd be viable with fewer customers when they're only paying the incremental cost of doing what the government failed to.
And then the government system would be embarrassed if private forks could frequently beat them, which improves their incentives.
I'm sorry if this is stupid - I'm not American and this is entire conversation about taxes here is nuts, but:
>Is the free-filing system designed to maximize your return?
Why does it need to? I mean, why do you need a tax return, if your taxes would be lower if you just got charged the right amount in the first place? And then isn't the role of society to audit their own taxes, and at the same time support candidates that vow to simplify the tax code?
You've always been able to file your taxes freely.
My biggest problem is the IRS already knows what I owe, with the exception of a few small things. So why do I have to go through the process of telling them what I think I owe.
For anyone interested in why the system looks the way it does, I recommend patio11's insightful recent blog post, which is nominally about payroll systems but ends up discussing the history of taxation in the US because that's the origination of many of these systems: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-pow...
A relevant quotation for much of the discussion here:
> And, relevant to the question of whether Intuit controls U.S. tax policy: it can’t, because that would imply they have wrested control from Norquist. Norquist considers a public filing option a tax increase by stealth and opposes it automatically.
patio11 has a huge and well known bias here, which is that he wants to claim, not necessarily with evidence, that all inefficiency is caused by governments and not by the private sector.
A comparison of tax filing in the United States with other countries, including those where governments are much bigger and more interventionist, leads to a different conclusion.
Forget about the evidence of other countries (which is completely valid), I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective
In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top. If everyone agreed that, once we make a choice on what the government is going to do we should do it well, we could have government services that are just as effective as whatever private enterprise example people always like to cite (being from the South it's usually the Chick Fil A drive-thru)
Indeed! Japan’s system is very efficient, and he has lived there for some time, so he should be familiar.
Similarly, it took the US forever to implement an instant payment system (commercial banks built Zelle via Early Warning Systems and RTP via The Clearinghouse, and the Fed finally built FedNow after Congress directed them to in order to ensure universal access) while India and Brazil rapidly rolled out their implementations (UPI and Pix, respectively).
Having worked in IT with both the public and the private sector, my opinion is there is no difference in 'efficency' between them at all.
Efficiency seems inversely correlated with the size of the organization. Public sector usually has large orgs, but they are not run less efficient than equivalently sized enterprises.
You might jump to the conclusion that smaller entities would be the efficency solution, and even observe how this allows sometimes for a smaller entity to outcompete a big enterprise. However, if you approach it from a more systemic analytical point of view you have to take into account that surrounding the 'small' efficient business, there are dozens if not hundreds of unsuccessful competing small entities vying for the same niche. Taken together and purely looking at aggregate efficiency, this collection of competing businesses is even less efficient. The strenght of an openly darwinian struggle lies in innovation and adaptation, not in aggregate resource waste reduction.
> Norquist considers a public filing option a tax increase by stealth and opposes it automatically.
When phrased that way, it sounds ridiculous. But those are the author's words, not Norquist's or ATR's.
What Norquist and ATR want is for people to be aware of taxes. In their words (from the article): "More than any other public policy, the way the government raises revenue—how much, at what rates, under what circumstances, from whom, and for whom—has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance."
And even the article admits that making taxes easier to file has the side effect of "decoupling public sentiment and policy changes" (that is, making "tax increases by stealth" easier):
> ATR [Norquist runs Americans for Tax Reform] is institutionally skeptical of withholding, because they believe that withholding allows one to increase taxes by stealth. I don’t think it is excessively partisan to say that, if one phrases that claim a bit more neutrally as “withholding increases tax compliance by decoupling public sentiment and policy changes,” the people who designed the withholding system would say “I’m glad the National Archives makes our design documents so accessible. We wrote them to be read!”
> And even the article admits that making taxes easier to file has the side effect of "decoupling public sentiment and policy changes" (that is, making "tax increases by stealth" easier)
How on earth is this possible? Instead of not having any clue, you actually get to see everything. My taxes have been automatic for years and I still have to approve every step of them along the way and I get to see and approve everything which had been filled in. The big difference is I now not have to spend hours researching everything if it remains the same as it was last year and only check if it changes.
Norquist don't want people to be aware of taxes. They want to not pay taxes; and believe that if taxes would be citizen friendly, people would be more welcoming to pay them. By making it as obnoxious as possible, they hope to have a society that provides them services by the magic of fairy dust.
> What Norquist and ATR want is for people to be aware of taxes.
Norquist is entirely disingenuous. Nothing would stop a tax payer from looking into the details of taxes assessed just because the government prepared something for them. (In fact, nothing would prevent a tax payer to continue to use TurboTax to verify and understand the taxation.) On the flip side, nothing about the current system actually makes tax payers more aware of the taxes they’re paying. Half the marketing of TurboTax is to allow you to finish your taxes quickly by basically just clicking through and adding basic information.
Speaking for myself, I would definitely be _more_ aware of taxes I’m paying if the government would prepare taxes for me. When comparing my filing of taxes in the US to the filing in Sweden that’s definitely the case. Sweden sends me information which I can then verify and correct if necessary. The grunge work is done and I can focus on details. In the US, I need to waste a bunch of time duplicating work and the go through the details later (and hopefully have enough time and energy to do so).
P.S. I keep using TurboTax as an example but they’re obviously not the only one. I chose them since they’ve parasitically attached themself to the current system and lobbied government to keep it from making things more efficient at a detriment to their bottom line.
> "More than any other public policy, the way the government raises revenue—how much, at what rates, under what circumstances, from whom, and for whom—has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance."
A perfect world would have people writing a check for their entire annual tax just before stepping into the voting booth.
For reference, Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington State and Wyoming are participating.
For those who don't know, of those 12 states, only 4 actually have income taxes. The other 8 do not.
This whole system stinks. The overly complicated tax code, the sleazy corporations making tons of money on it, the entrenched politicians and bureacrats who make a living on it, etc.
The program is for federal tax filing, not state tax. I think you may be misreading this line:
> Most of those states don’t tax income at the state level, but the four that do...will guide participants to a state-supported tool that they can use to submit their state returns.
Which means it's _more_ incomplete in states with income tax (federal return through IRS pilot, state return through a state system) than in states without income tax (just federal IRS pilot return).
We can still appreciate progress. And this is progress.
Although if the IRS is gonna audit when I under pay, they technically already know how much I owe. Why not just tell me? Reckon it's since people also over pay, and there's no refunds for doing that.
I have a hard time understanding why the IRS doesn't at least have a basic web portal for individuals and businesses to do simple things like update addresses, send secure correspondence, check on the status of correspondence, file forms electronically, etc. A lot of paper forms and letters, human resources and time could be saved with such a system, even if it doesn't actually provide for any tax computations itself.
As someone from Mexico, it's honestly insane that our system works as good as it does compared to the US.
1. All my incomes are automatically filed.
2. Each month I say "yes this is correct" on the website, and pay immediately via any bank.
3. At the end of the tax year, the system calculates if they own me money automatically, I give it my bank account and in some days I have my return.
An archaic, windows-only Java app to generate pairs of password-protected keys, which then have to be fed back into the system to declare your tax status. And they expire every so often, so you have to track down your old keys from years ago and remember the password. Confused? Just set up a SAT appointment, they'll be with you in... weeks.
Having to declare your tax categorization multiple times per year.
Facturas that companies will only generate for you for a limited amount of time, and complicated questionnaires to fill out if you DO want one so you get the right type. Assuming they'll even give you a factura at all.
I fully admit that I have an incomplete understanding of the system, this is just what I've seen my wife try to deal with. And she's the equivalent of a 1099 so her situation may be more complicated.
Because they are constantly under resourced so rich people can use the 'IRS sucks' line to get everyone else on board with their ability to do tax evasion.
What would be awesome is if the IRS software would automatically prefill all the data and forms sent to it. It would be nice of your W-2, 1099s etc were all included and all you had to do was verify the information and enter any income not already reported.
> In one possible scenario included in the agency’s report to Congress, the I.R.S. could fill out tax returns with information it already has, like data from W-2 wage statements. For the pilot, however, participants will have to enter their own financial information, the I.R.S. said.
I'd go further and say it's less obnoxious than the alternatives thus far. It has always bothered me for example, having to enter into some weird murky relationship with a private company as a third party, in my communication with the government. (That's also true for the categorically similar but unrelated outrage of a few years back where you could get a better response from some agencies by engaging them on Twitter than you could through their actual communication channels.) And say what you will, the piece of paper doesn't try to "cleverly" redirect me to some irrelevant paid service. It has no functionality. I'm the one with all the functionality. And just to amplify your point about how it's free - Yeah there's no way I'm ever paying one red goddamn cent for any of this; I'm already paying the taxes!
Not sure it covers the 3rd party concerns, but freefilefillableforms has been around for a decade or longer. It's fillable PDFs of the IRS forms with all the instructions available, and basic calculation abilities.
No restrictions on income, etc. but federal returns only. You get an email from them within 24 hours of whether your return was accepted or not. It's still obnoxious but for easy returns it seems better than buying turbotax or whatever people use instead.
I heard that this sometimes takes them much longer to process the returns that way. Has that been your experience?
One time I reproduced the forms in a spreadsheet following the instructions and it wasn't much different from doing the online wizards. I would have liked to mail it in but I just paid to e-file anyway.
If you're looking for a fast turnaround I would recommend filing earlier in the period -- like as far in advance of April 15th as possible, i.e. as soon as you have all your supporting materials. As you get closer to April 15th, you are non-linearly further back in the queue.
I can't really make an authoritative comparison of filing methods because I'm mostly a die-hard paper filer and have only ever e-filed maybe twice in my life at most. And it was long enough ago that I barely remember, and in fact never really cared, how fast my refund arrived. I embrace and savor the luxury of simplicity. When will my refund arrive? Answer: sound of one hand clapping. It's a reminder I put in the calendar for like, mid-June, to the effect of "Hey did I get my tax refund yet?" Usually the answer's, yep, and you dismiss the reminder. I can't be arsed (as they say in the UK) to be more interested in it than that.
Now our family unit is not cash starved and can afford to wait, so in the past, before I started using the US Free Filing system I described in another comment, I always mailed in both US and AZ income tax forms. Sometimes it took a couple of months. The US form I think was pretty prompt occasionally.
Now we're also not talking a lot of money. +- a couple of thousand, usually less. But you would have to compare apples to apples which would be the e-file fee vs. the compounded inflation rate for the time difference in receiving, presumably, your refund. I suspect it's a wash.
You need to also factor in the ${turbotax} fee and/or the accountant, as well, if you don't actually fill out the forms yourself.
Fun fact: We moved from AZ to GA last year, and dutifully filed in each state. I am pretty familiar with AZ due to filing our own taxes for most of 25 years, but GA is much more complex, verbose, and quite stupidly, even aggressively, vague.
I produced a spreadsheet for my wife to evaluate that presented my first time interpretation of the GA partial residency filing. We're both B.S. ChE, she's an MS ChE, I'm a MS App. Math. So we know our numbers. The tables were low risk, low refund, medium risk, medium refund, high risk, high refund. She chose medium risk. Fine with me.
Both AZ and GA refunded something like 50% higher than what I filed and expected.
My experience has been that it can be relatively faster.
That is, the last time I filed online it took I think practically a year before they got to it (I think the year of the pandemic)
I figure there's so few people filing by mail these days that they're able to process them faster than the huge amount of online filing.
I'm guessing they're separate teams (online vs mail). However I have no idea.
Regardless mailing has worked better for me the last couple years.
Additionally I do not have to use the third party ID verify thing (might just be for accessing information on irs.gov) that I am just sure is going to have a breach and can not for the life of me fathom why our government (Federal) needs a private company to verify the identity of a citizen via government (State) resources.
Yes - especially for my state returns here in Oregon. I am due a refund. I received a letter stating that they made an adjustment. They still haven't sent the refund.
Honestly, I’m rarely getting enough of a refund to care; I’m more commonly writing a check.
In any case, I’m complicated enough I just outsource to an accountant. Yes it’s expensive but I’ve never had an issue even with very thick tax filings.
I do them on paper as well. It doesn't take me too long and I hope it adds to their pain of processing it so they get along with implementing free (and good) digital solutions faster.
I use free fillable forms, an online version of the paper forms. They're pretty much exactly the same, just the online one does some basic math and copying values between steps for you.
Readit News
The “IRS will functionally increase taxes” argument is a distraction and I doubt anyone here takes it seriously.
But the argument matters because it has given Congress political cover to let Intuit keep leeching off the system, so a response is in order.
Congress should require the IRS to give every person an auditable receipt of every tax they paid in a standard format.
Then, truly public-minded services can use the receipt to help people understand if their filings were correct.
There’s no good reason automated IRS filing would result in tax increases for anyone, it’s a fixable problem, and good grief I’m ready to stop paying TurboTax $180/year.
Intuit would do fine with it - yes, they'd lose some income, but they have more then enough other business, both in more complex taxes and other ways of organizing business, they don't need to be able to fleece every single taxpayer. In fact, if such IRS system is built, they'd probably will make a good buck by providing added value offerings to it, just as they do now for existing tax filing systems.
Even if the system to do that costs double to the high estimate - let's say $0.5B per year, given the government projects are always over cost - it's still about 0.15% of the taxes collected every year. There's no reason why it'd have any influence at all on the level of taxes collected.
It seems illogical for the government to not have a free, easy way for the taxpayer to remit their taxes to the government (or submit the paperwork that should generate a return from that government). But at the same time I think it's fine to be skeptical that you should trust the government to be honest in showing you what amount of taxes you actually owe given how complicated the tax code is, and because there exists, ahem, a bit of an incentive problem there.
Is the free-filing system designed to maximize your return? Is it designed for ease of use? Generally I agree that TurboTax is a leech, but just because they're leeches doesn't mean there isn't an incentive problem that should be addressed.
>Then, truly public-minded services can use the receipt to help people understand if their filings were correct.
Do you mean a private company does this? Or something else?
The solution to this is for the government to publish the source code in the public domain. Then anyone who can do better can fork it and sell it, which will make that market more competitive when it's cheaper to enter because the government has already done 80% of the work, but there will only be a market for this if the government isn't maximizing your return. "Better return than the free system or your money back" would be a great way to get customers, and they'd be viable with fewer customers when they're only paying the incremental cost of doing what the government failed to.
And then the government system would be embarrassed if private forks could frequently beat them, which improves their incentives.
>Is the free-filing system designed to maximize your return?
Why does it need to? I mean, why do you need a tax return, if your taxes would be lower if you just got charged the right amount in the first place? And then isn't the role of society to audit their own taxes, and at the same time support candidates that vow to simplify the tax code?
But most of the time our government does sketchy things away from the attention and affliction of the selectorate.
If millions of influential people were using a system, the IRS would have an extremely strong incentive to avoid negative PR through chicanery.
And we already have an incentive problem in the current setup, anyway.
I just checked and it looks like a good start, even though I’d like it to be fully granular.
A relevant quotation for much of the discussion here:
> And, relevant to the question of whether Intuit controls U.S. tax policy: it can’t, because that would imply they have wrested control from Norquist. Norquist considers a public filing option a tax increase by stealth and opposes it automatically.
A comparison of tax filing in the United States with other countries, including those where governments are much bigger and more interventionist, leads to a different conclusion.
Forget about the evidence of other countries (which is completely valid), I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective
In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top. If everyone agreed that, once we make a choice on what the government is going to do we should do it well, we could have government services that are just as effective as whatever private enterprise example people always like to cite (being from the South it's usually the Chick Fil A drive-thru)
Similarly, it took the US forever to implement an instant payment system (commercial banks built Zelle via Early Warning Systems and RTP via The Clearinghouse, and the Fed finally built FedNow after Congress directed them to in order to ensure universal access) while India and Brazil rapidly rolled out their implementations (UPI and Pix, respectively).
These are intentional choices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/opinion/filing-taxes-in-j...
Efficiency seems inversely correlated with the size of the organization. Public sector usually has large orgs, but they are not run less efficient than equivalently sized enterprises.
You might jump to the conclusion that smaller entities would be the efficency solution, and even observe how this allows sometimes for a smaller entity to outcompete a big enterprise. However, if you approach it from a more systemic analytical point of view you have to take into account that surrounding the 'small' efficient business, there are dozens if not hundreds of unsuccessful competing small entities vying for the same niche. Taken together and purely looking at aggregate efficiency, this collection of competing businesses is even less efficient. The strenght of an openly darwinian struggle lies in innovation and adaptation, not in aggregate resource waste reduction.
When phrased that way, it sounds ridiculous. But those are the author's words, not Norquist's or ATR's.
What Norquist and ATR want is for people to be aware of taxes. In their words (from the article): "More than any other public policy, the way the government raises revenue—how much, at what rates, under what circumstances, from whom, and for whom—has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance."
And even the article admits that making taxes easier to file has the side effect of "decoupling public sentiment and policy changes" (that is, making "tax increases by stealth" easier):
> ATR [Norquist runs Americans for Tax Reform] is institutionally skeptical of withholding, because they believe that withholding allows one to increase taxes by stealth. I don’t think it is excessively partisan to say that, if one phrases that claim a bit more neutrally as “withholding increases tax compliance by decoupling public sentiment and policy changes,” the people who designed the withholding system would say “I’m glad the National Archives makes our design documents so accessible. We wrote them to be read!”
How on earth is this possible? Instead of not having any clue, you actually get to see everything. My taxes have been automatic for years and I still have to approve every step of them along the way and I get to see and approve everything which had been filled in. The big difference is I now not have to spend hours researching everything if it remains the same as it was last year and only check if it changes.
Norquist is entirely disingenuous. Nothing would stop a tax payer from looking into the details of taxes assessed just because the government prepared something for them. (In fact, nothing would prevent a tax payer to continue to use TurboTax to verify and understand the taxation.) On the flip side, nothing about the current system actually makes tax payers more aware of the taxes they’re paying. Half the marketing of TurboTax is to allow you to finish your taxes quickly by basically just clicking through and adding basic information.
Speaking for myself, I would definitely be _more_ aware of taxes I’m paying if the government would prepare taxes for me. When comparing my filing of taxes in the US to the filing in Sweden that’s definitely the case. Sweden sends me information which I can then verify and correct if necessary. The grunge work is done and I can focus on details. In the US, I need to waste a bunch of time duplicating work and the go through the details later (and hopefully have enough time and energy to do so).
P.S. I keep using TurboTax as an example but they’re obviously not the only one. I chose them since they’ve parasitically attached themself to the current system and lobbied government to keep it from making things more efficient at a detriment to their bottom line.
A perfect world would have people writing a check for their entire annual tax just before stepping into the voting booth.
Deleted Comment
This whole system stinks. The overly complicated tax code, the sleazy corporations making tons of money on it, the entrenched politicians and bureacrats who make a living on it, etc.
> Most of those states don’t tax income at the state level, but the four that do...will guide participants to a state-supported tool that they can use to submit their state returns.
Which means it's _more_ incomplete in states with income tax (federal return through IRS pilot, state return through a state system) than in states without income tax (just federal IRS pilot return).
Although if the IRS is gonna audit when I under pay, they technically already know how much I owe. Why not just tell me? Reckon it's since people also over pay, and there's no refunds for doing that.
1. All my incomes are automatically filed. 2. Each month I say "yes this is correct" on the website, and pay immediately via any bank. 3. At the end of the tax year, the system calculates if they own me money automatically, I give it my bank account and in some days I have my return.
It even handles tax deductibles and everything.
An archaic, windows-only Java app to generate pairs of password-protected keys, which then have to be fed back into the system to declare your tax status. And they expire every so often, so you have to track down your old keys from years ago and remember the password. Confused? Just set up a SAT appointment, they'll be with you in... weeks.
Having to declare your tax categorization multiple times per year.
Facturas that companies will only generate for you for a limited amount of time, and complicated questionnaires to fill out if you DO want one so you get the right type. Assuming they'll even give you a factura at all.
I fully admit that I have an incomplete understanding of the system, this is just what I've seen my wife try to deal with. And she's the equivalent of a 1099 so her situation may be more complicated.
Dead Comment
They do have such a portal which does some of the things you list and several other things too.
https://www.irs.gov/payments/your-online-account
Unfortunately it can't do everything, but you can get your tax notices there, check filing status, refund status, get tax transcripts, etc.
Dead Comment
Shocking.
It is free.
A little obnoxious but the forms do have instructions/directions.
No restrictions on income, etc. but federal returns only. You get an email from them within 24 hours of whether your return was accepted or not. It's still obnoxious but for easy returns it seems better than buying turbotax or whatever people use instead.
One time I reproduced the forms in a spreadsheet following the instructions and it wasn't much different from doing the online wizards. I would have liked to mail it in but I just paid to e-file anyway.
I can't really make an authoritative comparison of filing methods because I'm mostly a die-hard paper filer and have only ever e-filed maybe twice in my life at most. And it was long enough ago that I barely remember, and in fact never really cared, how fast my refund arrived. I embrace and savor the luxury of simplicity. When will my refund arrive? Answer: sound of one hand clapping. It's a reminder I put in the calendar for like, mid-June, to the effect of "Hey did I get my tax refund yet?" Usually the answer's, yep, and you dismiss the reminder. I can't be arsed (as they say in the UK) to be more interested in it than that.
Now we're also not talking a lot of money. +- a couple of thousand, usually less. But you would have to compare apples to apples which would be the e-file fee vs. the compounded inflation rate for the time difference in receiving, presumably, your refund. I suspect it's a wash.
You need to also factor in the ${turbotax} fee and/or the accountant, as well, if you don't actually fill out the forms yourself.
Fun fact: We moved from AZ to GA last year, and dutifully filed in each state. I am pretty familiar with AZ due to filing our own taxes for most of 25 years, but GA is much more complex, verbose, and quite stupidly, even aggressively, vague.
I produced a spreadsheet for my wife to evaluate that presented my first time interpretation of the GA partial residency filing. We're both B.S. ChE, she's an MS ChE, I'm a MS App. Math. So we know our numbers. The tables were low risk, low refund, medium risk, medium refund, high risk, high refund. She chose medium risk. Fine with me.
Both AZ and GA refunded something like 50% higher than what I filed and expected.
Some sort of emoji here.
That is, the last time I filed online it took I think practically a year before they got to it (I think the year of the pandemic)
I figure there's so few people filing by mail these days that they're able to process them faster than the huge amount of online filing.
I'm guessing they're separate teams (online vs mail). However I have no idea.
Regardless mailing has worked better for me the last couple years.
Additionally I do not have to use the third party ID verify thing (might just be for accessing information on irs.gov) that I am just sure is going to have a breach and can not for the life of me fathom why our government (Federal) needs a private company to verify the identity of a citizen via government (State) resources.
In any case, I’m complicated enough I just outsource to an accountant. Yes it’s expensive but I’ve never had an issue even with very thick tax filings.