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https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/

Free e-file for any income. It's not as easy as most tax software packages, but it does work.

To be fair, April 15th is the cutoff date for filing return forms and any other appropriate forms along with any taxes owed (besides any you're filing proper forms to defer). It's not like April 15th is a surprise or that there is not adequate time.

I did our taxes a month ago, using the government's "Free Fillable Tax Forms" website. Also using that site, I scheduled our payment to be withdrawn from our bank account today. The return was accepted by the government.

Now as of right now (11:46am PST), the government hasn't pulled the money out of our account. I don't know if this is because of the outage or not - but in the past it's happened early in the day.

But, in any case, I did not wait until the last minute, and I used a 100% IRS-approved-and-managed system... yet this still may affect me. I would argue that I should not face any penalties if my pre-scheduled payment is delayed by a government server outage.

(to be fair, we have no idea whether or not the IRS will apply late penalties related to payment delays caused by this outage).

They do:
https://www.freefilefillablefo...

The U.S. I.R.S. does provide free fillable forms online. I've been using it for years because I got sick of the TurboTax wizards I had to walk through for hours. Better than Turbo tax, and you get the instructions straight from the IRS instead of a summary from Intuit.

https://www.freefilefillablefo...

*the forms have not been uploaded yet, and won't be until January 20 if you go to the site now.

Considering that this is one of those things that are virtually perfect for computer automation

You would think that but I've personally seen Turbotax screw up my taxes in years where I had a somewhat but not really complicated (by American standards) tax return. I can't speak for the rest of the World but in the United States your taxes are not a simple matter of mathematics. There's a logic flow involved, "Is X true? Proceed to Y." and at the end of the day if you can read the instructions you can do a better job of following the logic flow than Turbotax's programmers. It's my opinion that Turbotax is useless for anything more than 1040-EZ and if your taxes are so simplistic that you can file 1040-EZ why the hell would you pay someone else to do them for you?!

The year that Turbotax screwed up my return to the tune of $2,800 was the year that I stopped using it and started doing my taxes the "hard" way. It's not all that difficult, the hardest part is collecting the relevant information for your return and if you're enough of a geek to be reading Slashdot I assume you're enough of a geek to use some sort of financial management software. Moneydance is my personal favorite but even a well kept spreadsheet would work in a pinch. Once you have the data is simply a matter of knowing which form to file and going through it line by line. My Federal taxes take no more than two hours, my New York State taxes about three. The former can be electronically filed through Free Fillable Forms, the latter has to be done by mail, unfortunately, but most States are ahead of NYS here and provide an e-filing option for people who roll their own taxes.

Even if you outsource your taxes you're still on the hook for any errors or omissions, so what's the benefit to paying someone else to do them for you? Do them yourself, you'll save some money, learn a little bit about our tax system (and the absurdities therein) and be ultimately responsible for your own actions rather than trusting some other idiot's software to do the job for you. Of course, Americans aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to taxes; how many people do you know that live paycheck-to-paycheck all year but get four digit refunds? A $2,000 refund is $38.46 per week that you could have had in your pocket if had bothered to fill out your W-4 properly.

If you are a die-hard, you can download [irs.gov] the forms and send them in for the price of a stamp or two (my state forms, seven pages of paper, cost $0.70 to mail.)

You don't even have to do that. There's Free Fillable Forms, which are exactly what the title suggests. Electronic copies of all the relevant paper forms that you fill out online and E-File. It doesn't have the logic of Turbotax but it performs basic math checks and saves you the hassle of printing and mailing the forms.

I can't understand why anyone would pay a third party to do their taxes. The logic flow isn't that complicated, even when you throw capital gains and itemized deductions into the mix. I've filed the long form 1040 by hand in years when I had to deal with capital gains and losses and was able to complete it in under two hours. Who are the people who pay Intuit or H&R Block to do their 1040ez filings?

This is exactly the kind of thing that Intuit is lobbying to prevent. They have already been successful in several states and free e-file doesn't apply to state taxes, even if you qualify for federal free file. There are instances of states offering similar forms to what you linked but then getting rid of them after lobbying by tax firms. This is just unacceptable, government forcing us to pay a private company to file our taxes in a manner that saves the government money.

If you are a die-hard, you can download [irs.gov] the forms and send them in for the price of a stamp or two (my state forms, seven pages of paper, cost $0.70 to mail.)

You don't even have to do that. There's Free Fillable Forms, which are exactly what the title suggests. Electronic copies of all the relevant paper forms that you fill out online and E-File. It doesn't have the logic of Turbotax but it performs basic math checks and saves you the hassle of printing and mailing the forms.

I can't understand why anyone would pay a third party to do their taxes. The logic flow isn't that complicated, even when you throw capital gains and itemized deductions into the mix. I've filed the long form 1040 by hand in years when I had to deal with capital gains and losses and was able to complete it in under two hours. Who are the people who pay Intuit or H&R Block to do their 1040ez filings?

I use the IRS's free online tax filling service:

https://www.freefilefillablefo...

It's free, does the math, and links to instructions in case you have a question. There's even a troubleshooter that will check for errors. You can print to pdf when you are done.

I have a very complex tax situation (stock grants, home office, etc) and it can handle anything. You can create a log in, save the form, and come back to it many times to keep working on it. The only draw back is it will only do individuals, not corporations or LLCs.

As amazing as this seems, the IRS (and many state and muni tax agencies) have in fact figured out how to produce a form-style PDF that can be filled in ENTIRELY electronically. The IRS does make you do the math yourself, but I am sure you can find an open source calculator to help with that, right?

While the IRS does provide PDFs, if you're OK with Flash, they also provide a version that you can fill in electronically, and it'll do the math for you too: Free File Fillable Forms. No income limits either.

That being said, I would like the IRS to come out with some basic tax forms which do the calculations and look up by itself. i.e., you would still need input the numbers, but the simple “multiple by 28%” and “Look up income in tax table” would be automated.

http://www.freefilefillableforms.com. It's listed pretty prominently on irs.gov, and has been for a few years.

"But that's just because (blah blah blah)!!"

Exactly.

You mean you wish the IRS provided a service that they started providing last year? Despite the some what sketchy looking design, this it the site that the IRS provides for free online submittable forms: https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/FFA/Gateway.htm