13 ms·

Or the IRS could file our taxes for us for free.

jonathanlb 6y ago
They could, but IIRC Intuit and HR Block lobbied the government to make this an impossibility.
Finnucane 6y ago
Turbotax et al. lobby heavily to prevent this. Given that much of the relevant information--W2s, 1099s, etc., are already reported, you'd think that this would be easier for a very large percentage of taxpayers. But it would effectively kill TurboTax's business.
- iamjake648 6y ago
  And that would be a good thing
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Couldn't the legislators just... not do what the lobbyists want? Are they really all that corrupt?
  - grecy 6y ago
    You can't actually use the word "corrupt" to describe what the legislators are doing, that's painting them unfairly. All they're doing is lining their own pockets with millions from TurboTax et. al to make sure laws are favourable for those big companies. But because it's perfectly legal, and there are no thugs with guns or drugs or "bad members of society", it's absolutely not corruption. /s
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    Absolutely. And with the tax companies, it turns out that it's very cheap to corrupt a US congressperson.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      what the going price? do you know?
      - goatcode 6y ago
        Bout 3.50
  - sib 6y ago
    The economist's answer: If that were so, there wouldn't be so much money spent on lobbyists by companies. I guess there's a reason they call it "the dismal science."
    - willhinsa 6y ago
      when something doesn't provide a reliable return on investment, they stop spending that money. that's how much you know something works, whether it's buying advertising or congressmen.
      - cratermoon 6y ago
        With the caveat that the ability to measure ROI exists and is also reliable. See for example advertising, and especially online programmatic targeted advertising: https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid
  - craigkilgo 6y ago
    ha
  - minkzilla 6y ago
    Yes. They really are. Here is just some over the table stuff: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/congress-corporate-sponsors/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/congress-corpor...
  - specialist 6y ago
    Legislators are basically doing triage, responding to perceived consensus. Kinda like a product manager. Think attention economy. There's 10,000s of bills filed every year. No one has the resources or bandwidth to handle that. Any given legislator has 1 maybe 2 issues that they care about, for which they will advocate an agenda. The rest, they rely on what they're hearing. Intuit's lobbying effectively drowns out alternative view points. Assuming that anyone anywhere is consistently advocating for something like free auto-filing. Source: Have lobbied. Know legislators and their staff. Also read many books about legislation. Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents; will bounce out pro lobbyists to give their own people an audience.
    - Dirlewanger 6y ago
      >Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents Yeah, I'm sure that desire to hear from them is only up to a point, at which they love the lobbying dollars more.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Source: Have lobbied. Ahh... that makes sense why this is one of the more reasonable descriptions of how lobbying works. HN seems to think it works by guys in $3,000 suits handing over bags of cash to Congressmen. Your point about legislators loving to hear from constituents is true - one reason why lobbyists are so effective is because there is often few or no other voices in the room. If voters actually organized around some of these topics they'd be surprised how much power they have.
  - Finnucane 6y ago
    They can ignore the lobbyists, but they like the money, and they like not having to campaign against the lobbyist's marketing. Enough to make it difficult to pass reforms.
- jeegsy 6y ago
  Does anyone have any idea what these lobbyists actually say? What excuse (however lame) that they actually give for blocking simplification etc?
  - angott 6y ago
    They usually claim that if people didn’t have to file their own taxes, they would not be aware of how much they are getting taxed. In their view, this would eventually make it very easy for the government to increase taxes without significant protests from the public.
Biganon 6y ago
I don't know where this idea came from (I've seen it on reddit a LOT), but it's the same here in Switzerland: you do it yourself because the tax department has no idea how much you made precisely, what you can deduce from it (expenses you had to do in order to acquire your income), etc. It just makes more sense to have everyone manage their own taxes.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  The government automatically doing it doesn't preclude from letting taxpayers be able to amend it. The vast majority of people have simple tax returns, and all that information is already electronically flying around with unique identifiers (social security number). It's trivial for government to be able to automatically produce a tax return that's basically almost all done for everyone.
  - lifthrasiir 6y ago
    This is exactly how South Korea does the taxation. Employeers are required to report employees' incomes and also deduct the tentative tax. The final tax is set by the year-end settlement where you can put documents for income deduction and tax credit to the National Tax Service. Common documents (e.g. credit card expenses count towards income deduction) are electronically available in one place and it is not very hard to get hold of other documents if you are an employee. In the end you pay or get the delta between the tentative tax and the settled tax.
- Kalium 6y ago
  The IRS already has most of your income information and much of your deduction information. They already use this to validate if your return makes sense. In effect, the IRS already does most of a taxpayer's paperwork. Since they do this, it might be nice to provide it to taxpayers for review and correction, rather than making us all start from zero each time.
  - specialist 6y ago
    The higher cost of administration is the part that makes me bug-eyed. Auto-filing and simplification would be so much cheaper.
kraig 6y ago
yes, because i want someone in the irs to evaluate all of my deductions and donations
- elicash 6y ago
  This isn't how most file. Also, the way it works is that you still have the option of doing it yourself. But by default, done for you.
- baumandm 6y ago
  That's like saying someone in Google is analyzing your web searches in order to show you ads.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  The usual proposed method would be the IRS calculates what you owe based on the standard deduction because they don't know about most donations or possible deductions.
- ghaff 6y ago
  They'd just assume you want to take the standard deduction--which isn't a bad assumption for a lot of people these days. My taxes are admittedly at least somewhat complex but, even if I did them myself, I'm not sure how much effort it would save if I had to do a bunch of additions and corrections. Pre-filling would mostly be useful if you could just check your W2, maybe a 1099, some things like dependents, sign it, and file it.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  They're already doing that
jounker 6y ago
This is the solution. We can already do this. A pilot program was run. The problem is that the anti tax wing of the Republican party and Turbotax are actively opposed. Instead of developing software, we should be writing our representatives.
- wwww4all 6y ago
  Democrats have the entire government now, President, senate and the house. Democrats had filibuster proof majority when Obama was president. Why are you just blaming Republicans?
  - drewg123 6y ago
    Because of Grover Norquist and his organization (ironically named Americans for Tax Reform). Their "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" taken by most Republican lawmakers (95% before 2012), locks them into supporting his policies. The problem is that he views any attempt to simplify tax filing just like a tax increase (presumably since people will be less upset about paying their taxes), and uses his influence to lobby against reforms like this.
    - wwww4all 6y ago
      The president can simply order IRS to give taxpayers itemized list of taxes and income information they have and the taxes for the year. If the taxpayer agrees, they can just sign and get refund or pay additional taxes. If taxpayer disagrees, they can submit additional information. The Democratic president can do this right now, for this tax year.
      - eppsilon 6y ago
        Wouldn't this cost money to implement? Money that Congress would need to appropriate?
  - specialist 6y ago
    It's true that the Democratic caucuses, both federal and state level, are much harder to hold together. Every year there's a bill in my state to reign in pay day lenders. Basically banning usury level interest rates on loans. Overwhelming popular support (~80%) and editorial support. And every year there's a "blue dog" Democrat living in a purple district which bends to the pro pay day loan lobbyists. Vetocracy is a tough problem. Our civic legacy is to fear the mob, tyranny of the majority. (Thanks Plato.) So it's rare that mere popular support ( >60%) is sufficient to attain progress. So, to your point, mere 50% + 1 vote ain't ever enough.
mavelikara 6y ago
Or IRS could let me know what they expect my taxes to be, and I could *choose* to agree to IRS's calculation, or provide my own.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  That's what they're system would be in essence, you'd get a piece of mail saying this is what you'd pay taking what we know and using the standard deduction. If you want you could calculate any itemized deductions and resumbit.
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  That's actually exactly what happened when I failed to file for over a year one time. They sent me all the forms prefilled and asked me to review them and just send them back if correct. Sadly, they weren't.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  That's how it works here, in Norway.
twiddling 6y ago
The intent of certain lawmakers is to make sure that the filing and reporting of taxes is onerous as a lesson about the illegitimacy of government taxation.
- MikeTheGreat 6y ago
  I don't suppose those lawmakers are voting to reduce their pay to $0, eliminating their government-provided pensions, or reducing the need for taxes by giving up any of their other benefits, are they? Otherwise, legitimate or not, that money is going to have to come from taxes somewhere..... Also, what does onerous have to do with legitimacy? It's like there's two orthogonal axes and they're trying to make taxes painful to convince the populace to dislike taxes, whether the taxation process is legitimate or not.
dyeje 6y ago
This. You can't kill TurboTax with tech, it has to be done with policy. TurboTax is in this position because they lobbied their way to it. Any tech solution will just be further lobbied into oblivion.
unixhero 6y ago
This is prevalent in Northern Europe
motbob 6y ago
The IRS can simplify the process, sure. And if you are living alone, have no children, and don't care about taking advantage of any special credits or deductions, then a "file for me" button would be fine. (Though the process for those taxpayers is already in a good place--I filed my taxes for free in about 30 minutes this year.) But if you, say, have children, the IRS will not be able to "file for you" in any meaningful sense. Whether you are allowed to claim dependents on tax returns is a complicated question that is highly fact-specific. Happily, the IRS does not have cameras in my house checking to see if my children are living with me. I have to report that information to the IRS myself. Drive for Uber? Your taxes are also gonna be pretty complicated, and there's no way the IRS can do them for you. After all, they don't have any information on how many miles you drove for Uber and what other business expenses you might have had. Right now, the system we have is pretty good. Most people qualify for free filing, and free-file tools get better every year. At worst, there is an issue of consumer education (psst, you might be able to find a better/cheaper tax filing option than Turbotax).
- kleer001 6y ago
  > Right now, the system we have is pretty good. Not compared to other countries it isn't. Not by a long shot. Video with transcript below: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-show-us-theres-another-way https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-s... Get the heck out of here with your bull pucky
  - motbob 6y ago
    Maybe it's "bull pucky" to you, but I have vivid memories of my parents agonizing over taxes as a child. The agony they went through is much ameliorated now due to advances in technology. And thank you for the link, but this news segment basically is big on opinion, low on specifics. Feel free to link me to a detailed article on how non-U.S. countries handle self-employment or dependent tax issues and whether/how those things are easier elsewhere.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
corytheboyd 6y ago
An Australian friend of mine showed me his tax receipt once and it made me yearn for this. It’s ridiculous what the US has created for its citizens, or rather not created.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

They could, but IIRC Intuit and HR Block lobbied the government to make this an impossibility.

Turbotax et al. lobby heavily to prevent this. Given that much of the relevant information--W2s, 1099s, etc., are already reported, you'd think that this would be easier for a very large percentage of taxpayers. But it would effectively kill TurboTax's business.

iamjake648 6y ago
And that would be a good thing
nicoburns 6y ago
Couldn't the legislators just... not do what the lobbyists want? Are they really all that corrupt?
- grecy 6y ago
  You can't actually use the word "corrupt" to describe what the legislators are doing, that's painting them unfairly. All they're doing is lining their own pockets with millions from TurboTax et. al to make sure laws are favourable for those big companies. But because it's perfectly legal, and there are no thugs with guns or drugs or "bad members of society", it's absolutely not corruption. /s
- anonymousab 6y ago
  Absolutely. And with the tax companies, it turns out that it's very cheap to corrupt a US congressperson.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    what the going price? do you know?
    - goatcode 6y ago
      Bout 3.50
- sib 6y ago
  The economist's answer: If that were so, there wouldn't be so much money spent on lobbyists by companies. I guess there's a reason they call it "the dismal science."
  - willhinsa 6y ago
    when something doesn't provide a reliable return on investment, they stop spending that money. that's how much you know something works, whether it's buying advertising or congressmen.
    - cratermoon 6y ago
      With the caveat that the ability to measure ROI exists and is also reliable. See for example advertising, and especially online programmatic targeted advertising: https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid
- craigkilgo 6y ago
  ha
- minkzilla 6y ago
  Yes. They really are. Here is just some over the table stuff: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/congress-corporate-sponsors/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/congress-corpor...
- specialist 6y ago
  Legislators are basically doing triage, responding to perceived consensus. Kinda like a product manager. Think attention economy. There's 10,000s of bills filed every year. No one has the resources or bandwidth to handle that. Any given legislator has 1 maybe 2 issues that they care about, for which they will advocate an agenda. The rest, they rely on what they're hearing. Intuit's lobbying effectively drowns out alternative view points. Assuming that anyone anywhere is consistently advocating for something like free auto-filing. Source: Have lobbied. Know legislators and their staff. Also read many books about legislation. Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents; will bounce out pro lobbyists to give their own people an audience.
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    >Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents Yeah, I'm sure that desire to hear from them is only up to a point, at which they love the lobbying dollars more.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Source: Have lobbied. Ahh... that makes sense why this is one of the more reasonable descriptions of how lobbying works. HN seems to think it works by guys in $3,000 suits handing over bags of cash to Congressmen. Your point about legislators loving to hear from constituents is true - one reason why lobbyists are so effective is because there is often few or no other voices in the room. If voters actually organized around some of these topics they'd be surprised how much power they have.
- Finnucane 6y ago
  They can ignore the lobbyists, but they like the money, and they like not having to campaign against the lobbyist's marketing. Enough to make it difficult to pass reforms.
jeegsy 6y ago
Does anyone have any idea what these lobbyists actually say? What excuse (however lame) that they actually give for blocking simplification etc?
- angott 6y ago
  They usually claim that if people didn’t have to file their own taxes, they would not be aware of how much they are getting taxed. In their view, this would eventually make it very easy for the government to increase taxes without significant protests from the public.

Biganon 6y ago

I don't know where this idea came from (I've seen it on reddit a LOT), but it's the same here in Switzerland: you do it yourself because the tax department has no idea how much you made precisely, what you can deduce from it (expenses you had to do in order to acquire your income), etc. It just makes more sense to have everyone manage their own taxes.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
The government automatically doing it doesn't preclude from letting taxpayers be able to amend it. The vast majority of people have simple tax returns, and all that information is already electronically flying around with unique identifiers (social security number). It's trivial for government to be able to automatically produce a tax return that's basically almost all done for everyone.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  This is exactly how South Korea does the taxation. Employeers are required to report employees' incomes and also deduct the tentative tax. The final tax is set by the year-end settlement where you can put documents for income deduction and tax credit to the National Tax Service. Common documents (e.g. credit card expenses count towards income deduction) are electronically available in one place and it is not very hard to get hold of other documents if you are an employee. In the end you pay or get the delta between the tentative tax and the settled tax.
Kalium 6y ago
The IRS already has most of your income information and much of your deduction information. They already use this to validate if your return makes sense. In effect, the IRS already does most of a taxpayer's paperwork. Since they do this, it might be nice to provide it to taxpayers for review and correction, rather than making us all start from zero each time.
- specialist 6y ago
  The higher cost of administration is the part that makes me bug-eyed. Auto-filing and simplification would be so much cheaper.

kraig 6y ago

yes, because i want someone in the irs to evaluate all of my deductions and donations

elicash 6y ago
This isn't how most file. Also, the way it works is that you still have the option of doing it yourself. But by default, done for you.
baumandm 6y ago
That's like saying someone in Google is analyzing your web searches in order to show you ads.
rtkwe 6y ago
The usual proposed method would be the IRS calculates what you owe based on the standard deduction because they don't know about most donations or possible deductions.
ghaff 6y ago
They'd just assume you want to take the standard deduction--which isn't a bad assumption for a lot of people these days. My taxes are admittedly at least somewhat complex but, even if I did them myself, I'm not sure how much effort it would save if I had to do a bunch of additions and corrections. Pre-filling would mostly be useful if you could just check your W2, maybe a 1099, some things like dependents, sign it, and file it.
RankingMember 6y ago
They're already doing that

jounker 6y ago

This is the solution. We can already do this. A pilot program was run. The problem is that the anti tax wing of the Republican party and Turbotax are actively opposed. Instead of developing software, we should be writing our representatives.

wwww4all 6y ago
Democrats have the entire government now, President, senate and the house. Democrats had filibuster proof majority when Obama was president. Why are you just blaming Republicans?
- drewg123 6y ago
  Because of Grover Norquist and his organization (ironically named Americans for Tax Reform). Their "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" taken by most Republican lawmakers (95% before 2012), locks them into supporting his policies. The problem is that he views any attempt to simplify tax filing just like a tax increase (presumably since people will be less upset about paying their taxes), and uses his influence to lobby against reforms like this.
  - wwww4all 6y ago
    The president can simply order IRS to give taxpayers itemized list of taxes and income information they have and the taxes for the year. If the taxpayer agrees, they can just sign and get refund or pay additional taxes. If taxpayer disagrees, they can submit additional information. The Democratic president can do this right now, for this tax year.
    - eppsilon 6y ago
      Wouldn't this cost money to implement? Money that Congress would need to appropriate?
- specialist 6y ago
  It's true that the Democratic caucuses, both federal and state level, are much harder to hold together. Every year there's a bill in my state to reign in pay day lenders. Basically banning usury level interest rates on loans. Overwhelming popular support (~80%) and editorial support. And every year there's a "blue dog" Democrat living in a purple district which bends to the pro pay day loan lobbyists. Vetocracy is a tough problem. Our civic legacy is to fear the mob, tyranny of the majority. (Thanks Plato.) So it's rare that mere popular support ( >60%) is sufficient to attain progress. So, to your point, mere 50% + 1 vote ain't ever enough.

mavelikara 6y ago

Or IRS could let me know what they expect my taxes to be, and I could *choose* to agree to IRS's calculation, or provide my own.

rtkwe 6y ago
That's what they're system would be in essence, you'd get a piece of mail saying this is what you'd pay taking what we know and using the standard deduction. If you want you could calculate any itemized deductions and resumbit.
boring_twenties 6y ago
That's actually exactly what happened when I failed to file for over a year one time. They sent me all the forms prefilled and asked me to review them and just send them back if correct. Sadly, they weren't.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
That's how it works here, in Norway.

twiddling 6y ago

The intent of certain lawmakers is to make sure that the filing and reporting of taxes is onerous as a lesson about the illegitimacy of government taxation.

MikeTheGreat 6y ago
I don't suppose those lawmakers are voting to reduce their pay to $0, eliminating their government-provided pensions, or reducing the need for taxes by giving up any of their other benefits, are they? Otherwise, legitimate or not, that money is going to have to come from taxes somewhere..... Also, what does onerous have to do with legitimacy? It's like there's two orthogonal axes and they're trying to make taxes painful to convince the populace to dislike taxes, whether the taxation process is legitimate or not.

dyeje 6y ago

This. You can't kill TurboTax with tech, it has to be done with policy. TurboTax is in this position because they lobbied their way to it. Any tech solution will just be further lobbied into oblivion.

unixhero 6y ago

This is prevalent in Northern Europe

motbob 6y ago

The IRS can simplify the process, sure. And if you are living alone, have no children, and don't care about taking advantage of any special credits or deductions, then a "file for me" button would be fine. (Though the process for those taxpayers is already in a good place--I filed my taxes for free in about 30 minutes this year.) But if you, say, have children, the IRS will not be able to "file for you" in any meaningful sense. Whether you are allowed to claim dependents on tax returns is a complicated question that is highly fact-specific. Happily, the IRS does not have cameras in my house checking to see if my children are living with me. I have to report that information to the IRS myself. Drive for Uber? Your taxes are also gonna be pretty complicated, and there's no way the IRS can do them for you. After all, they don't have any information on how many miles you drove for Uber and what other business expenses you might have had. Right now, the system we have is pretty good. Most people qualify for free filing, and free-file tools get better every year. At worst, there is an issue of consumer education (psst, you might be able to find a better/cheaper tax filing option than Turbotax).

kleer001 6y ago
> Right now, the system we have is pretty good. Not compared to other countries it isn't. Not by a long shot. Video with transcript below: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-show-us-theres-another-way https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dreading-taxes-countries-s... Get the heck out of here with your bull pucky
- motbob 6y ago
  Maybe it's "bull pucky" to you, but I have vivid memories of my parents agonizing over taxes as a child. The agony they went through is much ameliorated now due to advances in technology. And thank you for the link, but this news segment basically is big on opinion, low on specifics. Feel free to link me to a detailed article on how non-U.S. countries handle self-employment or dependent tax issues and whether/how those things are easier elsewhere.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago

corytheboyd 6y ago

An Australian friend of mine showed me his tax receipt once and it made me yearn for this. It’s ridiculous what the US has created for its citizens, or rather not created.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]