Intuit, Owner of TurboTax, Wins Battle Against America's Taxpayers

Just found, after seeing this thread, IL also has a great (seems that way) State tax filing website. Good thing - it can import your Federal Return information.

https://tax.illinois.gov/programs/mytax/il-1040.html

I agree that TurboTax should be unnecessary. And if you want to make it unnecessary by simplifying the tax code, go for it. In the meantime, we should have a free and efficient direct-to-IRS method of paying taxes that doesn't rely on paying extra fees to a middleman.

That reform needs to be a lot more substantial.

What I read in the article is an account of corruption on a staggering scale, permeating the democratic foundations of the US.

This is perfect being the enemy of good.

What's the URL for California?

Good to know, I've been doing it by hand (well, Free Fillable Forms) because I hate how opaque and shady TurboTax is. I'll try this one next year

Does anyone have recommendations to replace Credit Karma? I previously really liked the service, pretty straightforward, but it was recently bought by Intuit. Tried to login over web and it just redirected me to an app.

You are right! In his "politician" language, he committed only to this tax season.

Cash app is the best bar none. The only problem is part year state income taxes which I have to fill by hand.

I got the opportunity to learn about something like married, filing separately, on a single return or something because of course oomur tax policy is like a jury rigged bug fix on top of a bug fix.

That sounds like a disclaimer for something that is true for every company, no?

They don't give you fake loading screens and that's all I want.

same. +1 here. 3 years happy customer. Tried paper, turbotax, and a few others. Staying with freetaxUSA

Yes, one might argue it's a little misleading, but it comes across as significantly more genuine and less scammy than TurboTax. The federal filing is completely free, no matter which forms you have, and you just pay $15 per state. They also have the standard support upsells, but they don't push them crazy hard (I think it's one prompt between the federal and state sections).

I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).

Federal (USA) taxes are always free with them no matter what complications you have. They only charge for state filing or for live support. Seems fine to me to call it that.

I paid nothing because I live in Nevada. They charge for state income taxes, but federal taxes are free.

You only pay if your state charges to e-file, which many do.

They have up selling services like a prepaid debit card and whatnot, but all that is optional.

It works pretty well, but it took me a while to give it a go, because the name sounds like the scammiest thing ever.

The cost of Turbo Tax is not the just what you pay for the service. The real cost is that they now have a very detailed financial picture of you and your family and they will market that to any willing buyer (I will never be convinced that they don't do this).

If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic.

At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.

Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.

Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.

On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.

So, at least it’s not 100% bad.

Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.

The cost of giving money to Intuit is that they then give it to politicians to create a more convoluted tax return so that you are further locked into giving Intuit money every year.

> Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50

You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report

If paying for TurboTax works for you, that's great. If you find it worth the money, that's great. It's just not worth it for me and wanted to tell people there is another way.

I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.

Well, I've previously used Gentoo, so I don't view that as scary to be honest.

Yep. Might be worth doing once. But not twice.

big thumbs up to freetaxusa

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You'll first need to give them access to all your private financial transactions. I'm a fan of the 5th amendment.

Mine took the same time and only cost $15 because my state charges. Freetaxusa. I could have done it for free if I mailed my state, but whatever. My taxes are also well above what's average(personal plus 2 biz).

TurboTax is a rip off. There are dozens of free websites that do the same thing: ask you a handful of questions and fill out a spreadsheet/form.

$200 is mind bogglingly expensive for doing it yourself. TurboTax does nothing that dozens of other FREE services don't also do. It's just a few questions.

What sounds better to me is spending 58 minutes and $0. Seems like a better bargain.

10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)

If you just have W2 income and take the standard deduction, taxes are really quite simple to do on paper. It's a two page form, most of which you leave blank.

If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.

I don't think I'll make a blog post about this, but since you asked I will describe what you have to do briefly. 10 to 15 hours includes everything:

- Downloading all forms and instructions.

- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.

- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).

- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.

- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.

- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.

2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.

The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.

I used to use TurboTax but then compare the pdf it generated line-by-line to the pdf from the previous year, and caught things I'd missed fairly often. One year though I was having trouble finding where in the UI the field I needed to set was, and concluded that the whole process was stupid. I then switched to just filling out the forms directly using my previous year's as a guide, and found that it just didn't really take any longer. This year I spent about an hour on my taxes with W2 income, RSUs (with an incorrect cost basis), ESPP trades, dividend/interest income from four different brokerages, and some stock trades to report.

I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.

i did it by hand till 15 years ago. created a spreadsheet, with only the items I needed.

the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.

the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.

I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")

In this analogy Starbucks is attempting to making paper filters illegal.

Of course there is a reason- you don't spend your whole life at home near your coffee machine. Also it's not only about coffee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

I got into a discussion a while ago with a friend of mine that liked to think of themselves as libertarian. No beer was involved, but going to the absurd definitely came out. He tried to take the view that the government should get out of everything. My counter was that very quickly some company would take over enough of each market to effectively become the government and dictate terms to everyone else. My point to him was that -something- fills that void so at least if it is the government doing it there is a slim chance I can influence it. This is a bit indirect to your comments, but my big point is that I don't want companies ever trying to set the bar or come up with morals because their version of 'good' won't be one that is good for society. If we expect them to be 'good' they will define it and I want society to do that, not them. Dark patterns are bad, but we need to start holding our government accountable for not holding companies accountable. We also need to hold ourselves accountable for buying from those companies. I assume every company is adversarial because that is the nature of capitalism and I don't want to slip into the false security of 'they will eventually do the right thing because it is the right thing...'

Correct. Not saying the OP is, but many people conflate morality and law. They are completely separate, except for a few laws that might be inspired by moral concerns.

Corporations and ideology are not orthogonal concerns. The Republican small government ideology is about moving power out of democratically-accountable public institutions into accountable-only-to-their-owners private ones.

I had to google this name and I found that he "makes" them sign a pledge to not raise taxes and to simplify tax laws, not to a pledge to oppose easier tax filing.