Direct File won't happen in 2026, IRS tells states(nextgov.com) |
Direct File won't happen in 2026, IRS tells states(nextgov.com) |
Obviously the 2025 version will be out of date for the 2026 filing season, though public code means it can always be revived by anyone else.
(previous HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 )
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trum...
This way, you’d have to really be into lobbying to suffer the tattoo pain and permanent branding.
It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
This is a better exploration of what needs to happen: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-corporate-power... ( I found this article via HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45317731 )
You guys need to raise your expectations.
Everybody seems to care about this issue so much, so this feels like an extremely high-impact thing to do.
a) You're already trusting them with every piece of information in your tax return. It'd cost like five cents to use that information to discover your phone number... if they're malicious, you're already fucked.
b) When? At the end of the process where you're doing stuff like attesting that you're not lied on your tax return? I don't remember them demanding a phone number up front, and I also don't remember whether or not I refused to provide a phone number at the end.
Cash App offers free Fed and State filing and it's quite good (used it last year for the first time). Not many people know about it though.
So I had filed taxes with CreditKarma one year, and then the next year the CreditKarma tax service had no information about my previous filing. So I tried out the CashApp app, since I was going to have to fill out all the info anyway, and it actually did have my information from the previous year and I only had to change the new information, rather than re-enter all of my address and employer info, etc.
So I also recommend the CashApp app - it's free for basic taxes, it's not helping turbotax and their relentless lobbying, and it's really convenient if you already use CashApp. Of course, all of this is subject to change any specific year. Big companies gonna big company, after all.
Not just the basics. I found that it could do everything I needed including Schedules C, D and E.
IIRC, its limitations are if you're earning in multiple states, or are earning foreign income.
I use it every year, and while I wouldn't exactly say I enjoy doing my taxes, I do enjoy being fully aware what I'm filing and not being forced to do it on paper just because others have obtuse opinions or are lazy.
Now, the various self-filing software products also feel a lot like guessing, but at least they walk you through which guesses are mostly likely to be correct and can catch the most egregious errors.
The instructions make it very clear when a field in the form should be used and what should go in it.
Wouldn’t the 3% number come out yo millions of people?
Free file: government partners with private companies to offer free tax returns through their software for low income people. It's suspected a lot of people don't know about it, and just use the paid versions of filing software because you have to start the process on IRS.gov and dark patterns were employed by the snakes at Intuit et al. Hence "just 3%". Been around for decades.
Direct file: New program (since 2024) for eligible people to file directly for free with the IRS, no third party tax software middleman. Only half the states are eligible, income criteria, simple taxes only. 300,000 touted as a bigger number because it's a very new program.
I live and work abroad and Turbotax requires a US billing address to pay the fee of using Turbotax. :facepalm
All the other self-service options do not work and I’m not sure if the risk is worth it to file it myself.
To my fellow Expats, what are you doing?
[1]: Although I find it incredibly frustrating the lengths they go to to avoid negative numbers on the forms.
Guess I get screwed so some asshole at Intuit can make an extra twenty bucks.
There, fixed that for you.
[1] Very related discussion six months ago posted by me.
Luckily for me, my state rolled out its equivalent of Direct File a couple years ago, and it's fantastic. Just like Direct File was.
I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...
I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice.
And even if you do have a lot of things to report, why not just report those things directly and let the IRS calculate your taxes, rather than you having to do it, fill out a complicated form, then the IRS does the calculation anyways to make sure you did it right?
For every form I've ever had to file with the IRS, there's a corresponding set of instructions. Those instructions inevitably have a definitions section and/or define the terms in-line.
The instructions for form W8-BEN-E are at [0]. The definitions section starts at printed page 4 and continues through to printed page 7. Some terms you mentioned (like "Excepted territory NFFE") are not in the definitions section, but are described in their own sections.
I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes. I'm definitely going to object to your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
Also, Americans have to file both fed and state taxes (with different rules)
Basic taxes are trivial in the US if you just work to live, it is essentially one page. However, there is an extremely long and fat tail where the government has no way of knowing the correct details to compute your taxes. There are myriad subsidies and offsets that have to be accounted for, many of which depend on what State you live in.
If you earn a lot of money, like the tech people that frequent this website, you are much more likely to find yourself in that fat tail. It can become esoteric quite quickly. The Federal tax code has to accommodate the completely independent tax codes of all 50 States in a reasonable way.
Until it wasn’t.
Deductions can get esoteric if you sold a bunch of stock. Even then, not that bad.
Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.
As the government it should be possible to reduce the negative impact of making mistakes.
>Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
Then start simple. You don't have to cover all of tax law at the start.
That seems like a nightmare of a product as far as privacy is concerned.
https://theworknumber.com/solutions/products/income-employme...
Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.
(The efiling never worked for me, always complained about something esoteric.)
They’re just values as far as it’s concerned. And it is dumped every October. But phone # validation up front is too much, an overstep.
Like I said, I just used it for the calc ability so a spreadsheet works as well. Bit of work the first year, then tweak.
> But phone # validation up front is too much, an overstep.
They definitely didn't do this to me any of the years I've used them to file taxes. When did you file yours? Did you file them long after the 2024 taxes were due?
You have the option of entering your
phone number and email address in the
spaces provided. There will be no effect
on the processing of your return if you
choose not to enter this information.
Note that the IRS initiates most contacts
through regular mail delivered by the
United States Postal Service.And if that weren't enough, you've go municipal taxes too, in a few places like New York and Detroit.
The instructions for each form published by the IRS every year are already written by professional technical writers to be unambiguous. Do you mean that someone ought to write a simplified english grammar transpiler? I think that would genuinely be interesting. What's missing are the guidelines the technical writers are using, but that can probably be derived.
Oh shit, wait.
Except those corrupt politicians want lobbying to be profitable, so they can profit from it too. And if they ask for too much, they’ll just bribe the next guy or may even try to put their own in office. Can’t have that!
Kirsten Sinema got a job as a senior lobbiest after her short congressional stint.
And loyalty seems particularly important with the current administration, because they have an agenda full of things that are illegal or otherwise unsavory and un-American, so they need a nation run by loyal henchmen if the agenda is to succeed.
It involves reading a lot of instructions, with many references to other documents and other sections. It involves copying a lot of numbers from one place to another, and doing basic math on them to get a new one.
It could be improved a lot just by automatically calculating more fields, and adding more of the "worksheets" that are in the instructions into the forms so it can calculate those for you.
It already does this. The form validation checks that you have filled in the required fields and on most forms about half of the field values are not user-editable and instead auto-calculated from the other half.
It also looks for the required related forms you should have attached. The worksheets are another matter and aren't required to be attached, so they aren't part of the validation. It's assumed that you have read the instructions and done the worksheets elsewhere, although you certainly can attach them anyway.
For some things. But there are also several fields that could be calculated, but aren't.
> It's assumed that you have read the instructions and done the worksheets elsewhere
Yes, but it would be helpful if it had something to do the worksheets as part of the site instead of you having to do the worksheet elsewhere.
You can also call the IRS and be told for free what the rules are. People pay h&r block and Intuit when the irs is extremely responsive and will connect you with an actual American irs rep to answer your questions.
People pay for the software because they've been marketed to not because they need it. For the situations that are actually hard, then a software like TurboTax is useless.
Also if you get the numbers wrong the IRS just corrects it
It's pretty clear that daemonologist did not know that. Which is weird, given that all the tax law the average USian needs to know is "Read and follow the instructions for Form 1040.".
(RIP 1040-EZ. You were a good form.)
Also, I've had to file several forms in the past. It 'adds up', but it's all mechanically following instructions... not anything difficult.
But if you're a rich person with dozens of companies and complicated trusts? Yep, nobody is going to be looking.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12521#:~:text=The%20I...
And they _will_ find them. For example, one year I forgot to add a line from one of 1040 forms to my return. I got a notification from the IRS about a year later that I have under-reported taxes.
And with the defunding of the IRS, they'll severely limit the complex audits.
"After mass firings, the IRS is poised to close audits of wealthy taxpayers, agents say" https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2025/03/after-mass-firings-...
Very odd. I wonder (but not enough to investigate) what's so different between your situation and mine that I'd not be asked for a phone number during initial configuration.
"Email and phone verification
If you are not receiving the verification codes, from both sources, you will not be able to create an account:"
The French tax system is pretty simple. Taxes are high, but simple. The website you use to file your taxes is also pretty simple, and every single field has a button that explains what it is about and in which cases you should write stuff inside.
The only annoying parts are if you have accounts outside of France, you have to declare them. And if you get dividends/capital gains in foreign currencies outside of the EU, you have to calculate yourself how much tax you owe using a bunch of tables per country and currency.
> The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: Recordkeeping, 12 hr., 40 min.; Learning about the law or the form, 4 hr., 17 min.; Preparing and sending the form, 8 hr., 16 min.
I spoke in objection to one very specific claim:
> [The] implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
Feel free to imagine that I was addressing something else. It's a free country and all.
You also might want to look at the estimated average time for a non-business taxpayer to complete a 1040. If the 1040 estimate methodology is typical, then those estimates are pretty pessimistic.
Nonparticipating FFI. A nonparticipating FFI means an FFI that is not a participating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, or exempt beneficial owner.
OK, then what's an FFI, a participating FFI, a deemed-compliant FFI, and an exempt beneficial owner? That's 4 other definitions to look up just to learn you should not choose option 1 of 32. If you keep track of this intermediate knowledge, it can help you skip some other options but you have to look ahead and see that possibility and find a way to store all these intermediate conclusions so that when you wake up the next day you haven't forgotten if you're an exempt beneficial owner or not - and by the way, before you even begin, you have to work out if you're a beneficial owner - exempt or not.
Once you've decided you're not an FFI, you look to see if you're a "Certified Deemed-Compliant Sponsored, Closely Held Investment Vehicle", which doesn't have a definition in the guide! What now? Try to find it in the Internal Revenue code?
By the way, the one you called out - "Excepted Territory NFFE" doesn't actually have a definition at all in the guide either and it refers you to "Regulations section 1.1472-1(c)(1)(iii)". Maybe if you're clever, you can set aside these difficult ones in case you discover an easy right answer first, but that gets back to designing a system to manage the intermediate knowledge and design your search strategy. Yes, you can do it, but also it's stupidly burdensome.
> ...your implied claim that the IRS dumps a bunch of jargon on you and leaves you to rely on general-purpose search engines to figure out what the fuck they're talking about.
I never suggested that satisfying the requirements of complex parts of the tax code would -somehow- not be complex. I even indicated support for talking to a lawyer when confused:
> I'm definitely not going to claim that it's foolish to consult with a tax lawyer (or similar such thing) when one is significantly uncertain about one's taxes.
If you'd slowed down and thought carefully about what I wrote, you probably would have spent less time overall than it took to write up your comment.
Speaking of reading too quickly:
> ...you look to see if you're a "Certified Deemed-Compliant Sponsored, Closely Held Investment Vehicle", which doesn't have a definition in the guide!
Did you read the part of the form to which those instructions apply? Those checkboxes are part of the FATCA Status section. Isn't it clear that you are to look at the FATCA regs for additional definitions?
Don't forget that this is for a random one-man business in another country doing a $100 job for a US client. The cost of what you're suggesting is completely disproportionate to the value of the transaction.
> Isn't it clear that you are to look at the FATCA regs for additional definitions?
Not at all. The form tells you to look at the instructions, not the FATCA regs. I have no idea what FATCA regs are or what FATCA even is. That's just more obscene over-complication.
Yes, the IRS does dump a bunch of jargon on you and leave you to Google it. "Google" here means searching the laws and regulations but probably Google itself because it's easier.
In my experience, the form instructions tell you clearly when you should and should not file a form. They also clearly indicate which other forms are to be filed when you meet specific conditions (income limits, possession of specific other forms, etc.).
Granted, I don't run a business, nor do I have exceptionally complex finances, so there are a great many IRS form instructions that I have never seen. Because I've not see them all, I'd never say that every such form instruction is clear, but the ones I've encountered have been.
It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!
However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.)
The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant.
https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office...
There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.
The fact that TurboTax is cheaper than a local CPA does not change the fact that Intuit actively lobbies to prevent free tax filing.
In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or “your taxes are complex, please work with a tax specialist”. Also in a sane world this would be free and the government would be incentivized to simplify the tax code so that as many people as possible were in one of the first buckets. In our world the government is aggressively lobbied for complex tax codes and prevention of free tax filing.
> A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
Define “regular”. Per TurboTax, only 37% of people qualify for free filing.
I have never tried to go through the TurboTax free file route but based on my experience with the paid service, I imagine they aggressively upsell free filers with the exact same scare tactics you associate with CPAs.
Which is free for nearly everyone, but is only marginally better than paper filing your own taxes.
Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial.
I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.
As soon as the words “passthrough LLC” (or “farm” or “S-corp” or “itemize”) are on the table, it’s usually worth it to pay $1,000 for a professional, assuming your time is worth something.
There is a reason Americans spend staggering amounts of time and money on tax preparation. It is simple until it isn’t.
If you mostly have income from wages, interest, and dividends, your tax is hard to reduce using special provisions and your return is easy to file. If you have a lot of income from business investments, property, minerals, esoteric securities, gambling, etc., then you have more places where you can use these things, and your taxes are accordingly complex.
And options are worse.
Where I've worked, they withhold the necessary number of shares from RSU's and it just gets taxed as W-2 income. Then, it shows up with the taxed cost basis in Fidelity so you don't get double taxed when selling shares. It doesn't appear like they have to factor in travel into that equation - that's only for your salary.
As far as options, it was similar where I was receiving them. The only issue I ever had exercising options was when the company whose stock I was trading changed names, and then the IRS suddenly believed all those options were 0 cost basis and wanted a bunch of money. That took two rounds of letters and a call to HR to get sorted out. Granted - laws have changed since then - that fiasco was 18 years ago.
The same as where I work (Schwab though for me, not Fidelity). However, they don't track wash sales for me. Do they track wash sales for you? From what I understand, federal law tells brokers to track wash sales for regular stock purchases and sales, but not for stock from vested RSUs, but still requires the stock holder to track wash sales for stock from vested RSUs.
>It doesn't appear like they have to factor in travel into that equation - that's only for your salary.
My employer also doesn't generally track travel for the purposes of taxes. But the state laws say I need to do it and file taxes based on my tracking.
SuperPACs get around that, but there is a chance a large company like Inuit isn't agile enough to defend against a well organized political attack.
Ultimately career politicians care about being elected. Even corrupt ones need to stay in office and they'll happily sacrifice one small donor to keep the gravy train coming with all their other connections.
If an independently funded lobbying group walks into DC and tells a senator they just raised 30M dollars and 80k residents in their state donated as part of that, I bet people will start to listen.
For details about why RSU vesting requires 4 years of MI taxes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676698
Decade later the US lost most of its soft power due to the abuse of its dominant military and economic position in the world and then lost its dominant position too with the rise of the economies around the world.
People now see the US as a strong state on the lands of native Americans on the continent called North America.
I definitely feel the RSU grantors are the customer here, not recipients like you or I.
They are missing the context that only a fraction of filers are eligible to use free filing and that TurboTax paid something like 140 million to settle claims that they are misleading filers. That suit is why they now admit only 37% of people are even eligible to file for free.
There are also other services that provide free efiling regardless of income, it’s not just TurboTax.
At the end of the day, you can always do the paperwork if you really don’t want anyone seeing your taxes and mail it. Could it be better? Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.
> In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or
As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
An additional factor is state taxes really need to be packaged together with the actual solution.
Just passionate enough to say that everyone unhappy with Intuit lobbying against free tax filing and simplified tax codes doesn’t understand?
> As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
This is misleading. The IRS does have this because for most people it does not change year to year. It would also be trivial for them to provide a way to input this data if/when it does change.
That said, there is a huge swath of America that's being preyed on by strip-mall tax prep, who derive zero benefit from it. (And an industry whose profits ultimately trickle up to the tax prep software companies)
It takes me about 20-30 minutes to enter a W2, 1099-INT, 1099-B, 1099-B (futures) and a 1256 (straddles and index options) into FreeTaxUSA every spring.
If you donate to a large charity, there is a good chance some of that $ goes to lobbying, as it should. (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)
If you work at a large company, 100% chance it lobbies, for good reason. Large employers lobby for better mass transit (because parking garages are expensive), more housing (because it is cheaper to lobby than pay employees more so they can afford $$$$ houses), or friendlier business laws (no one likes paying more taxes).
Lobbying is everything from "help us use orphans as a source of cheap protein!" To "keep the national parks funded".
Not all lobbying is straight-up mustache twirling. But it definitely left a bad taste in our mouths.
Is this how you reason about corruption in government service? Unlike your argument about about lobbying, the problem is very conspicuous here - you're supposed to get those services without paying anything beyond the nominal service charges. They're your rights in an society where you already pay taxes to fund them. The government officials are already being paid with your tax money to do this job. What's even worse? If such loose and open-ended bargaining is permitted for basic essential services, then the only ones who will get those services will be the ones with money, not the ones who need it. Your housing permits and your kids' food assistance will become increasingly costlier and harder goals to achieve. That's why bribes are illegal.
If you look at this scenario carefully, it isn't much of an analogy. It's exactly the same situation, but with different players! When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests - because the public are the primary stakeholders in a democracy, and it's the utilization of their tax payments that these politicians are debating. Those politicians are supposed to be the people's 'representatives' who are elected and paid to listen to their constituents and lobby on their behalf. The public shouldn't have to 'lobby' with them too, especially for basic essentials like nutrition, national parks or tax filing!
What you call 'lobbying' in the US is known as 'political corruption' in most of the rest of the world. It's just a weasel word used to underplay the seriousness of such corruption. And as I pointed out earlier in my analogy, the rich ones outcompete the majority public here too. It's abundantly clear that even town councils favor big corpos even in the face of loud vocal opposition from the majority of their constituents. It's clear how much special treatment these professional grifters called 'lobbyists' get when they walk into the town hall just minutes before the discussion of a topic, while the town's people have to wait there for one and a half days without proper food, water or sleep in order to speak a few words in opposition. This is what happens when you legitimize corruption with cute terms like 'lobbying'.
We formalized it! It is called an application fee, and it is set high enough so they the government employee doesn't need to take bribes outside of their salary.
Other countries set application fees so low that government employees barely earn enough money to eat, so they take bribes.
NYC solves a huge part of their police corruption problem by just paying officers more.
> When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests
I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!
The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
Is 'goy' a typo? I only know of its meaning as 'non-Jewish person'.
Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.
Every time they speak there should be a visual reminder of who they've taken money from.
Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
The US is not a county optimized to provide quality services inexpensively. It is a business optimized to maximize profits.
https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
As for "having most of your tax information", they don't. They know your reported income. You see that on your W2s/1099s/etc. What they don't know is whether or not you had a kid this year, or whether you lost a kid this year, whether you got married or divorced, if your spouse is claiming the kids this year or not, the number or amount of your charitable contributions, whether you have deductible mileage expenses, or a million other things.
Would just relying on the information from your employers cover all possible edge-cases? No.
Would it dramatically simplify the process for (tens?) millions of people? Absolutely.
No? 2 more clicks and you are done.
Yes? 2 + nr of changes clicks and you are done. Took me an extra 5 seconds when my son left.
You can make your taxes as complcated as you want but for 95% of the population foling taxes takes a few minutes.
Another factor most people are ignoring is that state taxes are filed at the same time and each state has its own separate system. These third parties let you fill in and file both at the same time. It would be nice if the US gov did this too but it requires a total restructuring of the American system, and Intuit’s lobbying has nothing to do with why it hasn’t happened or for that matter why the tax codes looks like it does.
Countries like the U.S., Canada, the U.K. cannot easily do that without huge data-sharing reforms.
IRS should just have a public free filing solution for everyone. If you have complicated taxes or want to do your own filing, you can still do that.
I touched this point in my previous reply. But let me reiterate it again. Those politicians are supposed to just talk to their constituents and represent their interests. That's their job description. If the voters who sent them to the legislatures have to lobby them afterwards, what is the purpose of these politicians anyway? Is their job to con the public into choosing them, so that they can leech the same public? Evidently so, and that's the fundamental problem with democracy in US these days.
> The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
While EFF and ACLU do a commendable job, their existence don't justify lobbying. It's the other way around. Lobbying make them a necessity to regain some semblance of balance and fairness. They wouldn't be needed if the politicians were doing their job in the first place.
You also seem to be simultaneously claiming that the US tax system is too complex for the government to feasibly automate and that filing taxes is trivial.
Either you hold contradictory viewpoints here or you have some undisclosed interest in this area.
That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is: "We did your tax return for you based on all the information reported to us. Please click 'OK' to complete your return for the year."
This part makes enough sense.
> They're like fucking Eagles fans.
Now you've gone and implied 95% of sports fans aren't that way?? I don't understand your argument any more.
Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)
that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer). https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
> ranked voting methods ... can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
Can you clarify whether you're referring to some ranked methods (eg IRV), or all ranked methods (ie including ranked pairs) ?
> that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score) ? A quick skim of that VSE page has it talking about "utility", which I would imagine is a scalar per candidate representing "happiness" ?
The problem I have with Approval is that coming from our two-terrible-party system - do I Approve my latent terrible party or not? That choice seems purely down to strategy, compared to being able to rank them to say I completely prefer the new party/candidate over my latent terrible party, and my latent terrible party over the other latent terrible party. The dynamic also seems exacerbated knowing there will be a lot of people who continue to vote exactly as they did under plurality.
https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.
Not for most people. It’s a giant pain in the ass if you have bank accounts and want to file correctly.
If all you do is plug in your w-2 and pretend that’s your whole tax return and you don’t care about anything except the standard deduction, sure. That’s not correct for most people.
> state taxes are filed at the same time and each state has its own separate system
Can we stop pretending like this is a problem insurmountable for the federal government?
This idea that TurboTax can make this work but the government can’t is absurd.
Interest income from your bank account comes on a 1099 and it takes 30 seconds to add onto your 1040. I do it every year.
Again, you seem to simultaneously believe that nearly everyone has trivial taxes to file while believing that the government cannot reasonably support free direct filing for these people. I have to wonder how you reconcile these beliefs in your head. “I mean, this is so simple. Any moron can do it. But not the agency specifically responsible for handling trillions in tax revenue. Nah, too complex for them.”
> Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score)
1. i did not define performance in a way that is congruent with approval/score. scores are not utilities. they are the modification of utilities via ignorance, normalization, and strategy.
2. that the correct social welfare function is just the sum of all voter utilities (the definition of "performance") is mathematically proven. https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
> do I Approve my latent terrible party or not?
this is not a "problem". it's well understood. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
approval voting obliterates IRV ("RCV") with any mixture of strategic or honest voters, so i'm not sure why you're bringing up strategy. https://www.rangevoting.org/StratHonMix
> These aren’t wealthy people filing with CPAs. These are lower income folks who specifically benefited from the IRS direct file program.
Lower income people were not using IRS direct file. That’s would be the economically rational thing to do, but this is exactly the market the strip mall CPA target. They also offer advances. I have tried and tried and tried to get lower income people to use free or direct file. Virtually none are interested. They have “their guy” who is getting them a great refund.
The web page has all this information, you say OK and you are done. There is not a single "figuring out" you need to do.
This is, of course, the case for 95% of the population. You can be in the 5% where your tax filing becomes very complicated. In that case, though, you give this to a CPA and the cost of this service is zero compared to the amount of euros you deal with.
In other countries there are such things as national citizen registries with domicile and familial information, this doesn’t exist in the US. If it did you could use that information to get much more of a start.
I did not state otherwise. The point is that you are misstating the complexity of the typical tax return. It is not in fact “enter your W-2, take the standard deduction, and done” for most people, even for those with relatively straightforward taxes.
> Lower income people were not using IRS direct file.
I don’t think the IRS has released this data. I do know that direct file was specifically limited to simple cases though.