Turbo Tax Melts Down on Tax Day

Raven17 writes "Turbo Tax by Intuit completely melted down under the load from last minute filers. Some people have been having problems as long as 24 hours already. I surrendered 2 hours before the East Coast deadline and schlepped on down to the Post Office."

Comments

Back up at the wire

[kannibal_klown]

My mom used TurboTax (I got stuck w/ TaxCut this year). Anyway, she said it came back up just a few minutes before midnight. People were flipping out.

Personally, I did mine back in February.

Re:Back up at the wire

[tg2k]

I filed in February too, with TaxCut, but I intentionally switched to it years ago when TurboTax pulled their malware installation BS (the rootkit, if you'll remember, from about 2001 or 2002). I haven't looked back much, TaxCut has been pretty comparable in my opinion.

Re:Back up at the wire

[TheRealFixer]

I did the same. I think it was back in 2002. Caused a huge black eye for Intuit because they took forever to acknowledge there was a problem.

I've been using TaxCut online since 2003, and it works great.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Moggyboy]

Yo momma used TurboTax...

Oh, wait....

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

And let me guess, you got a refund and your Mom had to pay?

Personally, I do my taxes in February if I have a refund, I file right away. If I owe, those rat bastards at the IRS can wait until the last frickin' minute to get their grubby paws on more of my money!

Steve Forbes in 08 - Bring on the Flat Tax!

Re:Back up at the wire

[LordKronos]

I think it was probably a bigger black eye for H&R block last year (or was it the year before) when they mailed out a bunch of TaxCut CDs to past customers and put their SSN on the address label.

Re:Back up at the wire

[sloveless]

Same for me. That "activation" crap they pulled sent me straight to TaxCut. Can't say that I'm sorry now, considering I've turned procrastination into an art form.

Re:Back up at the wire

[tsalaroth]

Yeah. I wasn't too happy about that.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Milican]

I switched to TaxCut for the same reason and haven't looked back. I filed on Monday the 16th around 8 PM and no problems. Next year I'll do it earlier...

JOhn

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - I switched to TaxCut that year too. Hated it. TurboTax has some rough edges, but TaxCut is a steaming POS.

I wrote intuit a letter explaining why I switched and telling them that I hated TaxCut, but wasn't coming back as long as they were pulling this shit. They actually responded to the letter with a reasonable reply. They stopped short of admitting that they screwed up, but went on a bit about customer satisfaction and how they were getting lots of feedback.

They got rid of the activation stuff the next year and I was glad to go back to TurboTax (Which STILL confused by the fact that my mortgage is held by an individual who did NOT sell me the house)

Re:Back up at the wire

[metlin]

I just find it way easier to pay an tax preparer to do it for me.

Easier and less of a headache. Besides, they tend to get you more savings than you would by yourself.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Ngarrang]

I have friends that will mail their returns to the IRS if they owe money. They do their taxes early, February-ish like kannibal_klown (that is an awesome user id, btw). It is their way of "sticking it to the man" by mailing the check at the very last moment possible.

All of the e-filing, though, has got to be saving money (overall) for the taxpayers.

Re:Back up at the wire

[GreyPoopon]

I just find it way easier to pay an tax preparer to do it for me.

Not me. Most of my time is spent gathering information (about half a day), and you have to do this even if you have a paid preparer. Since my financial situation remains basically the same each year, entry into TaxCut takes me less than an hour, and in the end I have personal knowledge about everything that was done.

Re:Back up at the wire

[ryanov]

The taxpayers may be saving money in salaries, but $16.95 goddamn dollars to file? Forget it, let them open my letter.

If it's going to save the government money, why should I pay for it?

Re:Back up at the wire

[garcia]

Personally, I did mine back in February.

So did I. I also found out that I owe the war effort $792. You think I'm going to pay them in February? No. They got paid the day it was due.

Re:Back up at the wire

[xonar]

I did mine within the first week that I got my w2s back (mid january) w/ turbotax online, and I got both myn state and federal tax returns as a deposit in my bank account within a week of submitting them.

Re:Back up at the wire

[corecaptain]

I also file via paper and handwritten - no pdf forms, etc. mainly because
I have this idea it just,just might lower my chances for an audit.

Working in IT I have seen many times how the same "form" goes down different rabbit trails
depending on whether it was submitted electronically verses paper. I figure that filing
electronically means for sure your numbers are immediately available for input into whatever
algorithm the IRS uses to flag you for an audit. With paper, and handwritten with a few erasures,
cross outs, etc who knows? I figure that the older manual based systems are probably much less efficient,
understaffed, etc.

Who knows, I guess it is mainly a pyschological crutch that helps me believe my chances for audit are
less, and that helps me forget about it...

Re:Back up at the wire

[Ngarrang]

"If it's going to save the government money, why should I pay for it?"

Um, because they are getting paid YOUR TAX DOLLARS to open the letter? You are paying the bill either way. It becomes a question of which bill you would rather pay. A small filing fee (which is free for the simpler cases), or a full-time temp worker making $12/hr?

Re:Back up at the wire

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

My local township has the unbelievable balls to charge me $50 as an "administration fee" to collect my house taxes. It's on the tax bill itself, and has nothing to do with method of payment.

Here's your check for $5300. What? I must pay an additional $50 to cover the administration costs of you collecting this? WTF!

Re:Back up at the wire

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I think it would be a wash. Handwritten returns are processed by humans and they are apt to spot things that algorithms miss. For example, in a machine readable form, if you get the numbers to match and all the sales reported in 1099s are found correctly, they will trust it and might miss a "creative" cost basis calculation. A human being might spot that guy named Lakshmanan Satyavakeswaran or a Meenarakshagan Vishnu giving 15% of income to the Church of the Laterday Saints of Jesus Christ. He might go, "hey wait a minute, isn't that a Hindu name? May be he converted or may be he is cheating, let me take a closer look".

If it has a few erasures and overwrites, he will think "may be this guy made mistakes, let me do all the calculations and see if they gel." Further the examiner is probably software assisted. She will punch in the hand written numbers in and run the algorithms too. So you might not get the benefit of avoiding the data mining algorithms but get the added scrutiny of an intelligent examiner.

Re:Back up at the wire

[nsayer]

A small filing fee (which is free for the simpler cases), or a full-time temp worker making $12/hr?

But the difference is that I'm not paying that temp - I, you and 300,000,000 others are.

So I'm supposed to just "take one for the team?" Uh, no. I sent a dead tree. Several, from the thickness of the envelope.

Re:Back up at the wire

[b0bby]

Actually, they're getting paid from EVERYONE'S taxes to open his letter, whereas he alone has to bear the filing fee. It's clearly in his best interests to make them open the letter.

Re:Back up at the wire

[shalmaneser1]

I, too, got stuck with taxcut.

I liked it well enough, until, upon reviewing my printed copy, I saw that an item i had accidentally checked, and *cleared* left associated data on another page and was costing me several hundred dollars. Only by deleting a whole slice of the deductions i had input, and then re-entering them from scratch was i able to correct the error.

That wasn't the only mistake -- it's trivial but the depreciation section decided to print out four copies of the same form completely blank with only the fifth and final sheet containing the info i actually needed to submit.

The "missing cash" completely shattered my faith in the product. I will move to either TurboMalware or a professional preparer next year.

Re:Back up at the wire

[charleste]

I filed using TurboTax online (again) on Monday night. No problems. Of course, I had it mostly done in January. Just adding up those Schedule C receipts.... I *am* above all, a slacker.

Re:Back up at the wire

[stlthVector]

Same here! I switched the year of the rootkit also and have been very happily using taxcut since. I won't be going back and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out why anyone would say they were "stuck with taxcut" this year.

Re:Back up at the wire

[stlthVector]

Wow! That was stupid. I hadn't even heard of that. I think I'd take that over the rootkit though. There are still plenty of companies foolishly (illegally?) using ssn's as usernames and for other things they shouldn't be.

Re:Back up at the wire

[frdmfghtr]

I went the opposite direction, from TaxCut to Turbo Tax because there was (at the time) no TaxCut for Mac...now that there is, I'll switch again, depending on who offers what services for the money.

Having used both, they are about equal in usability (for my tax case, anyway) so it comes down to pricing.

Re:Back up at the wire

[maxume]

Anybody not using an accountant pays less in taxes than they get in government services; they are paying the temp with SOMEONE ELSE'S TAX DOLLARS. Democracy is grand.

Re:Back up at the wire

[walt-sjc]

Oh I agree. My tax situation is plenty complicated, frequently with a lot of special cases... (real estate transactions, investments, AMT, etc.) I have had a CPA do it for the past 7 years. The other thing a good CPA will do is suggest ways of handing your finances / savings for maximum benefit. You aren't going to get that from a piece of software... In fact, I would bet that my CPA has saved me 10 times what he charges me. In fact, the first year, he checked my prior three years returns that I did with turbotax and found that I had paid several thousand too much. A few amended returns later and I had my refund.

My opinion on the whole thing is that if you can file the 1040EZ, or have VERY simple tax status (no investments, you rent, etc.) go for the software. Otherwise, get a professional, and I don't mean one of these "tax only" companies who hire people just for tax season to do data entry... Use a real CPA.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Asphalt]

There is no late filing penalty if the IRS owes you a refund ... which is the case for most wage workers.

The only people that need to rush to the post office are those that actually owe money.

I never understood the mid-April rush by the large numbers of people who are due loan paybacks.

You can file your payback in June if you wish ... without penalty.

Why all the mid-April hysteria every year?

Re:Back up at the wire

[walt-sjc]

Lucky you. Despite the legal deadline of Jan 31 for reporting companies to send you interest statements and such, I didn't get all mine until late Feb. I got all my stuff to the CPA by the end of Feb, and had my refunds 2 weeks later.

So yeah - simple returns can be easy, and you can get done early. Better make sure you have ALL those reporting statements though so you don't have to file an amended return later.

Re:Back up at the wire

[fbjon]

Meh. My tax form is pre-completed for me. I don't even need to send it in! :)

Re:Back up at the wire

[hackstraw]

Personally, I did mine back in February.

Same here. My algorithm is "If government owes me money, file taxes ASAP, else if I owe government money, file taxes as close to April 15th as possible".

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you referring to the fee that the tax prep companies basically pocket because the government could open up e-Filing to the public but the tax prep companies continuously lobby them to keep it closed so they don't lose their gravy train? Costs the government less if you e-file than if somebody has to open a letter and enter the data manually. That money goes to the tax prep company.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Asphalt]

Um, because they are getting paid YOUR TAX DOLLARS to open the letter?

Actually they aren't. Nobody working for the government gets paid with "YOUR TAX DOLLARS".

They get paid with Federal Reserve Notes well before you remit any of your earnings. And they will get paid whether you remit anything or not. Because there is a printing press that will give it to them regardless.

Your tax Reserve Notes go to the Federal Reserve to prevent devaluation of the currency. And since the "money" is created out of thin air, that's really the only reason you pay taxes.

The more dollars the general population has, the less a dollar is worth. So taxation serves to remove as many dollars out of circulation as possible, thus supporting the fiat currency.

When you pay FEDERAL taxes, you are not directly paying for any employees or programs ... as the money is simply printed and given to the Federal Government on demand, to distribute to whomever they want. So why, if money is printed on demand, does the Federal Reserve need YOUR money? They can create as much as they want. They don't need yours.

The reason is value. The more money YOU have, the less *value* your neighbor's money has and the government's money has.

Federal taxation doesn't pay for anything, it simply removes monetary supply from the hands of the populace. Less supply = more demand = curtailed inflation.

In short, your are not paying for anything with taxes. You are just supporting the perceived value of paper and ink that has no intrinsic value in and of itself.

Re:Back up at the wire

[xappax]

I have friends that will mail their returns to the IRS if they owe money. They do their taxes early, February-ish like kannibal_klown (that is an awesome user id, btw). It is their way of "sticking it to the man" by mailing the check at the very last moment possible.

I have friends that will refuse to pay their federal taxes for religious/ethical reasons, on the basis that paying the government to make war or use coercive force is wrong, and against their religious/ethical convictions.

It's called war tax resistance and it's an age-old anti-government tradition that has been surprisingly tolerated by the government in recent times.

That's their way of "sticking it to the man" :)

Re:Back up at the wire

[kannibal_klown]

Just a personal preference in the interface really. I didn't use TurboTax this year, so I can't compare them, but I wasn't too thrilled with the offline TaxCut this year. Seemed a little cheap and I had to wrestle with 1 or 2 bugs that also gave buggy error messages (told me to enter amounts for 2004 in such in the error, but the form said 2006).

TaxCut just rubbed me the wrong way with those bugs. I'm sure it's probably a better product than Intuit's.

Re:Back up at the wire

[ryanov]

Split over millions of people, it doesn't cost goddamn $16.95 to pay that person. And hey, that person gets a job out of it. My paying this $16.95 is probably going to some dick's golfing excursion.

Re:Back up at the wire

[profplump]

Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?! The doubled space after after a period rule was a hack to deal with the hard-to-read mono-spaced fonts on old computer and typewriters. Set type never used a double space after a period, before or after typewriters -- they used 1.5 spaces. And if your fonts are worth anything, they should approximate that 1.5 spaces with a full stop and a single space.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Mortanius]

NPR had a longer on-air piece about this, but unfortunately all I could dig up on their website was this brief (though the Listen link provides the whole story).

NPR : IRS Urges E-filing - But by Vendors Only, Please

Basically, Intuit (and presumably H&R Block and any other tax software producers) lobby long and hard to make sure the public can't e-file directly to the IRS, only by proxy. So your $16.95 is presumably going entirely to Intuit. Plus the $44.95 (or more, or less if you're lucky) you paid for the software. Plus the additional $29.95 if you have to file to two states.

It's a pretty nice gig.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Orion Blastar]

You can always print out the return and postal mail it instead of electronically filing it. All fees for doing your taxes are deductible for the next year if you save your receipts and you opt for the line item deductions.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Ngarrang]

This is the first time I have ever had taxation explained that way. It is certainly an interesting twist on the common perceived notion.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP!!

In all seriousness, that may be the single most insightful thing that I have ever heard said about money. It makes so much sense, but I had just never thought about it in those terms before.

Somehow, in a strange way, I find it almost comforting to know that the tax system is there to ensure that the paper in my pocket is perceived to have some value.

Thank you, I feel that I have been enlightened.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Moofie]

"Anybody not using an accountant pays less in taxes than they get in government services"

Really? You wouldn't mind if I just opted out, then?

Re:Back up at the wire

[stuntpope]

That is what I do. Prepare with TurboTax, print, and mail. I'm not paying an additional $17 when I can drop it off at the Post Office; ridiculous. But I could not deduct the $78 tax prep fee (the price of TurboTax) because that amount didn't qualify as a high enough percentage of my income. I don't recall that requirement last year, which was my first year using TurboTax and I wrote off its purchase price.

Re:Back up at the wire

[guruevi]

Do you have anything to back that claim up? I thought money had to be backed to be of any value. The government can't just start printing notes without backing it up (with gold or something else like property, land...) to be valued on the international market. And who decides what the dollar is valued today/tomorrow. I thought the market decided that, depending on how much companies and the people in the companies are worth.

It's a complicated issue, but I wouldn't just say that it was to take money out of circulation, because then as your dollar value drops (or rises), so do products in the store (given the price stays the same) so the companies would get the same relative value no matter what the dollar stands and there would never be any inflation anyway.

Remember, if what you say is true, and everybody pays their taxes equally, then the 'artificial' value is relative to everybody (also products and companies), and it doesn't matter whether that would be $100/$100 or $1/$1 then.

What I understand is that taxes pay for our roads and wars and government, if the government doesn't have enough money, they go lend some (as they have a huge debt now), they can't just print out some money and say: hey, we paid off all our debts.

Re:Back up at the wire

[cayenne8]

"There are still plenty of companies foolishly (illegally?) using ssn's as usernames and for other things they shouldn't be."

TELL me about it. I just went yesterday, to get water turned on in a new duplex I'm moving to temporariy. They would NOT talk to me, unless I had proof of my SS#. They would not take my word..I had to show documentation. My SS card is packed in storage with all my stuff post Katrina...but, fortunately, there was a SS Dept. office just recently opened in a mall closeby, and they gave me a printout which they stamped and the lady signed as a verification doc. This was stupid I thought..I could easily forge something like that if I wanted.

Anyway, neither the water nor the power company would entertain the idea of servicing me without a SS number...I was shocked!!! The last power co. I was with...wanted it if applying online, but, if you went in person and paid a deposit...they'd not need a SS#.

I swear, once I get settled and get some extra $$ back after buying a house..I'm getting a lawyer and working on getting something changed or passed in southern LA to FORBID them from even asking for a SS#.

I've had my identity stolen twice due to SS.....and I usually fight this tooth and nail when it comes up (like with insurance companies), and usually win...but, I'm on a tight time limit..and could not afford to miss billing hours right now...

Re:Back up at the wire

[cayenne8]

"Do you have anything to back that claim up? I thought money had to be backed to be of any value. The government can't just start printing notes without backing it up (with gold or something else like property, land...) "

We went off the 'gold standard' decades ago....

I believe at this point, we're on the tin foil or ball of string standard, and rapidly going downhill.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

they can't just print out some money and say: hey, we paid off all our debts

Yes they can, and they're doing it now. Ever wonder why the Federal Reserve stopped publishing its M3 money supply statistic? So that the sheeple don't know just how much 'paper' money they're pumping into the economy to pay off their debts. Think about it. And ever notice how the cost of most food items from the grocery have gone up by 25-50% in the PAST YEAR ALONE!?! Dude, put 2 and 2 together.

Re:Back up at the wire

[crabpeople]

You should watch a doc called 'money, banking and the federal reserve'. For every real dollar in the system, the fed loans about 10k to the banks. The american dollar hasn't been backed by gold since nixon killed the gold standard in the 70s. You could say that the american dollar is kept afloat on the global stage because its a petro dollar, people use it to buy oil. This is why iraq (2000) and iran (recently) have switched to euros. Iraq got bitchslapped back into dealing in USD, but if somewhere like saudi arabia started dealing in euros there would be big problems for the us.

Re:Back up at the wire

[The Great Pretender]

How is holding off paying taxes 'sticking it to the man'? Like it or not the taxes you pay cover things that you use everyday. Holding off to the last minute on paying the taxes is like 'sticking it to everyone in the country, including yourself'. The only way I could see a benefit from holding off to the last minute is if you owe a bunch of cash and have the money sitting in a high yield account, that way you would capture some extra interest.

Re:Back up at the wire

[cayenne8]

"I have friends that will refuse to pay their federal taxes for religious/ethical reasons, on the basis that paying the government to make war or use coercive force is wrong, and against their religious/ethical convictions.

It's called war tax resistance [wikipedia.org] and it's an age-old anti-government tradition that has been surprisingly tolerated by the government in recent times."

I guarantee that if you are making any significant money at ALL....and you try to pull this, that the IRS will not be so tolerant of you.

Also, in general, I read an article that congress is really pressuring the IRS to start trying to close the 'tax gap'. Basically, I think they're gonna get meaner and go after more people in order to close the gap between what they think they should be bringing in.....and what they actually do bring in.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually answer some of your own questions without realizing it.

Inflation is defined as relative reduction in the value of the dollar (or $CURRENCY_UNIT of your choice.) Getting "the same relative value no matter what the dollar stands and there would never be any inflation" is self contradictory- if the dollar goes down in value, that is inflation.

Our money isn't backed up by gold or any other single commodity any more; that practice was stopped partly because there simply isn't enough gold to back up all of the money that an economy of our size requires - and even if there were, there are plenty of other uses for gold that make it too valuable to keep it all locked up supporting the value of our money.

Yes, I know about Fort Knox. No, that doesn't back up all of our currency.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency

Basically, inflation is what happens when the market decides that our money isn't worth as much as it used to be. That is why governments don't just print up money to pay their bills - or, when they do so without collecting an appropriate level of taxes, (hyper)inflation will occur as a result.

Of course, this raises the question: what determines the value of our currency? Basically, it is the number of available dollars divided by the market perception of the total value of the economy - how these things are determined is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Back up at the wire

[MCZapf]

That's an interesting way to look at it. Why does the U.S. Treasury go through the formality of borrowing money to make up budget deficits, though, if they could get all they want?

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the funny mod, but I was being completely serious.

Sadly, that probably only makes it that much funnier.

Re:Back up at the wire

[AJWM]

I switched to TaxCut about the same time, but only partly because of TurboTax's (nee MacInTax, which I'd been using forever) crap. The other reason was that it started requiring a version of MacOS that my ancient Performa wouldn't support. IIRC TaxCut went the same way the following year, sigh. This past weekend I pulled out the old W2K box to put the new TaxCut CD in and look what's in the drive -- last year's TaxCut CD. Shows how much I use that box ;-) (Allegedly TaxCut runs under WINE, I haven't tried that yet - since it's supported back to W98, it wouldn't surprise me.)

I won't touch anything from Intuit anymore. I once upgraded from Quicken 5 to Quicken 6 (Mac version) and 6 was so bad I quickly backed it out. Quicken 5 is Good Enough, and doesn't try tying you into a perpetual upgrade cycle.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh, the rest of the world might hear you...

Re:Back up at the wire

[mackyrae]

If you can file with a 1040EZ you don't need software. It has somewhere on the order of 30 or 40 lines (including the 2nd page where if you're a dependent of someone else you fill out that section), and 10 of them are "do you want to donate part of your return to ______?"

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you telling me you bought a piece of software AND GAVE THEM YOUR SSN? For what?

I don't give my number to the grocery store, I don't give it to Amazon, why give it to some software vendor??

Re:Back up at the wire

[gnuman99]

Saudis are already using Euros *and* USD for oil. Virtually all of Europe is using Euros only to get their oil. Russia is selling their gas to Europe in EUR as well.

I can't believe that Iran switched 100% to using EUR for oil. China is their biggest customer and they have tons of USD to spend. They probably have tons of EUR as well, but they probably have more USD at this point.

Re:Back up at the wire

[AJWM]

If you itemize, all that stuff should be deductable as tax return preparation fees. Not that it makes a lot of difference to the bottom line, but I've always deducted the cost of the tax software.

The State software is a ripoff, for Colorado anyway -- it's basically "what was your Fed taxable income? You owe us X percent." (There's a little more to it than that, but not much.) -- so I try to get the software version without it and do that one by hand.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight, your claims are:
1) Money has no value.
2) Any time the government feels like it, it can generate as much money as it needs.
3) Remission of taxes are arbitrary since the money has no worth to begin with and more money will get printed.
4) The more money you make, the less money you have.
5) $1=$1,000,000

Are you insane, did you fail Econ 101, or both?
I can spend hours trying to sift through deliniating and explaiing the various logical and economical fallacies that you've presented, but I think reading a couple of chapters on monetary theory would be of more use to you.

Re:Back up at the wire

[LordKronos]

Are you telling me you bought a piece of software AND GAVE THEM YOUR SSN? For what?

Well, probably because the IRS doesn't accept tax returns where the SSN field is blank.

Re:Back up at the wire

[ThosLives]

Except that's not at all how the government controls money supply: The Federal Reserve is the source/sink of dollars, not the IRS.

Money supply is controlled by the sale and purchase of bonds and the interest rate, not through taxes. This is why the Fed uses the interest rate to affect inflation. It's the effect on the amount of cash the Fed has to pay out to 'buy back' its bonds. Basically, if the Fed wants more cash in the market, it buys bonds more than it sells them; if it wants to curtail the money supply, it buys fewer bonds back than it sells. Note that the Fed target interest rate is based on the supply and demand for the notes. Also note that it's a target rate - the media and literature always calls it "the target federal funds rate". Because to get that rate, the Fed has to buy or sell its bonds. To increase the rate and "slow down" the economy, the Fed sells more bonds. The reason this increases the rate is because to sell more bonds, it has to make them more lucrative to the purchaser which means a higher interest rate. What happens then is the buyer gives dollars to the Fed in exchange for a bond. Note that a bond is not money, so money has effectively left the money supply.

When the Fed wants to reduce the interest rate, it starts selling fewer and fewer bonds (or buying bonds back). This reduces the supply of bonds so, for a given demand, the "price" the buyers are willing to pay (a lower interest rate) increases. Either way, this either puts dollars directly back into the economy via a buy-back, or indirectly because fewer people are buying the bonds so their cash stays in the system. Buying back takes bonds out of the free market and replaces them with dollars.

This mechanism, while not perfect, also helps adjust the money supply to a larger economy, because when real wealth is created in the economy, the creator of that wealth gets more dollars and more bonds are purchased. When those bonds are purchased back or redeemed for face value plus interest, there is an increase in available dollars. Inflation happens when the market guesses wrong at the interest rate, and more dollars are paid out during redemption than is representative of the current actual wealth. Similarly, if the economy contracts the money supply can also contract because eventually the interest rates on the bonds will fall and less additional money is required to redeem the notes; this will reduce the money supply relative to the amount of wealth. Stagflation happens when the nasty effect of a shrinking economy is paired with increasing inflation. (Yay for basic macroeconomic theory).

Another key thing to remember is that the Fed and money supply only control the tokens representing value in the US; they don't directly control wealth (and, as is important to note, value and wealth are not the same thing).

Re:Back up at the wire

[maxume]

I wouldn't, good luck with the government though. (and we can quibble over where it kicks in, but somewhere north of $100,000 is where taxes, theoretically anyway, cost more than they give)

Re:Back up at the wire

[joschm0]

Well, probably because the IRS doesn't accept tax returns where the SSN field is blank.

So, are you saying that they copy information from your tax form and use it for marketing purposes?

Re:Back up at the wire

[ncohafmuta]

the year of the rootkit huh, is that a new sign in the chinese zodiac/calendar?

"People born in the year of the rootkit are normally reserved quiet people, until you put them in the presence of financial software. Then they because frustrated and start spouting conspiracy theoreys as flashbacks of illegally installed software fill their heads. They are compatible with people born in the year of the presskit. They should avoid people born in the year of the messkit"

-Tony

Re:Back up at the wire

[gnuman99]

This is the "haha" factor for you! Government *prints* money. As much as they want. And US is probably one of the worst countries in that regard. IT just hasn't cought up with them yet.

Money is viewed as a money supply. M1, M2 and M3. US doesn't even publish M3 money supply!!!

For more information about M1,M2 and M3 money supplies,
    http://economics.about.com/cs/money/a/money_supply .htm
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/M3SL.txt
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/M2SL.txt
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2

Regardless, money supply is increasing now faster than before. How? Gov't is printing money. It is preferable that the money supply is representative of some real value, but it is not. US has been running a huge trade deficit now for a number of years, yet the currency has not devalued as much as needed. The reason is that other countries like China and Japan are storing their USD and not buying stuff with it. So it should be clear that money just represents a perceived value, not a real value.

When gov't "borrows" money, it may mean A LOT of things. In the US, they just transfered the money from the retirement plan (whatever it is called - social security?) which is currently overpaid, and spend the money. Now that they'll need to dip into the retirement funds, well, there's nothing in that "account" so they'll just move it from elsewhere. To get money you can issue bonds, increase taxes or just print money. The problem with printing money is inflation (devaluation of the fiat (or paper only, like USD) currency). They more you print, the less a single unit is worth. So essentially inflation caused by money printing is exactly the same as a flat tax.. Right now the inflation in the US could be lowered by slowing down of the money printing. *But* US can't do that because they have to pay for the deficits. So instead of increasing taxes, they just print money. The result is exactly the same (less purchasing power for people), but when you increase taxes the politicians get blamed, but when they print money the "economy" gets blamed. Another problem with printing money is that countries that hold huge amount of USD will start to see their stockpile decrease in value. So they will start to spend. And this will drive inflation in the US.

The US economy may be nearing a tipping point where the USD will be devalued by as much as 50%. For example, USD lost 30% with respect to CND (Canadian $) in the last 2 or 3 years. It used to be 1.6 CND/USD, but now it is 1.12 CND/USD. If a US person got a CND savings account that got them NO return at all (0% interest rate) they would have gained 43% in 2-3 years. An investment of 100,000 USD to canadian currency would result in 160,000 CND. Today, 160,000 CND is worth about 143,000 USD. This is all because of devaluation of USD due to US trade deficit. And the US trade deficit is NOT yet accounted for because China and Japan hold over 1 trillion USD!! They spend that, and USD is devalued further.

The GP probably described the tax system as best as one possibly can. You are just a little ignorant that the value of fiat currencies is arbitrary.

PS. Gov't does actually need to *print* money. They just punch in a number and that's how much money is lend out. It only takes a fraction of a second to create another billion and thereby decrease the value of current money.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Moofie]

Who made up those numbers?

Seriously, I'm curious. I'm trying to remember the last time the government did something for me, and I'm having a hard time.

Re:Back up at the wire

[rfunches]

Also, in general, I read an article that congress is really pressuring the IRS to start trying to close the 'tax gap'. Basically, I think they're gonna get meaner and go after more people in order to close the gap between what they think they should be bringing in.....and what they actually do bring in.

This is in fact true. The IRS is more carefully examining middle-class tax returns.

Re:Back up at the wire

[maxume]

You would have to agree that there is value in being able to buy products without wondering if you are part of a market test to see if it is safe enough to sell widely and so forth, that your roads, on average, are better than if they were toll roads, that fucknobs get in trouble when they pump sewage into your yard(without you having to own a bigger gun than they do). So in general, someone guessed what all that stuff was worth to people, and yeah, they may not have gotten it right, but the people who can really get indignant make a lot of dough, and the rest of us are doing ok.

Re:Back up at the wire

[sreedotsree]

Scary..Makes me Wonder why I dont go back to paying an accountant do my taxes on paper and mailing it the old fashioned way!

Re:Back up at the wire

[LordKronos]

No, you are the one saying it, but it sounds about right. :-)

Re:Back up at the wire

[bandini]

she said it came back up just a few minutes before midnight.

Must have. I submitted my return in TurboTax at about 11:45 EDT on the 16th and had no problems. So you see, the problem was not that people were procrastinating, it's that they weren't procrastinating enough.

Re:Back up at the wire

[homer_ca]

Tax prep fees are deductible only if they exceed 2% of your adjusted gross income. 50 bucks for Turbotax and electronic filing don't even come close to that.

Re:Back up at the wire

[homer_ca]

It is ridiculous because it costs less for the IRS to process electronic returns vs. paper, but the only way to file electronically is through a tax prep firm thanks to industry lobbying. They lobbied to legislate inefficiency to protect the economic rents of private companies.

Re:Back up at the wire

[IMarvinTPA]

1) No, it has the value of the material costs put into it.
2) Yes, they're technically loans, but the lenders aren't forced to produce the hard cash and none of the banks force them to pony it up.
3) Taxes are a hold-over from when money was a commodity instead of faith.
4) The more money you make, the faster you need to spend it before it looses value.
5) Brazil had a few new pesos that had conversion rates like that.
Zimbabwe had 1100% inflation last year. Imagine Wendy's Dollar menu turning into the $12 menu in the span of a year. This was caused simply because the government is printing ever more and bigger denominations of their fiat currency.

Buy real silver and real gold coins that you can hold. Our economy and currency are going to go belly up within the next few years. Especially if foreign governments stop taking our money into their bank hoards; and BTW, China just started "Diversifing" their trillions of US$ reserves.

Another side note, a Pre 1965 quarter has about $2.50 in silver content today. You can nearly buy a gallon of gasoline with one of those quarters.

IMarv

Re:Back up at the wire

[Johnboi Waltune]

If you have a State Farm insurance policy or bank account, and sign up to view your accounts online, they will pay your TurboTax fees. You just log into State Farm's website and click the link that says "Free TurboTax", and when you get to the end of filing your taxes, the cost is $0. I have done it for the past 2 years.

Re:Back up at the wire

[xappax]

I guarantee that if you are making any significant money at ALL....and you try to pull this, that the IRS will not be so tolerant of you.

I totally understand this reaction, because the government gives the appearance of being a real hardass about taxes, and we're told our whole lives that we absolutely must pay taxes no matter what, or certain doom awaits us. People tend to be stubbornly disbelieving or downright hostile to the suggestion that they have, in fact, been paying taxes voluntarily.

But I'd encourage you to do some research on your "guarantee", because you'll find that there are many people who withhold significant amounts of tax money due to their religious/moral convictions, and they do it openly, with nothing to hide. Some people go so far as to fill out their tax paperwork and send it to the IRS with a message explaining why they aren't paying some or all of what they owe.

I'm sure the IRS would love to jump on them, but it's a sticky issue for the government, because it borders on persecuting people for their religious beliefs, which is even more illegal than tax evasion.

Re:Back up at the wire

[R2.0]

Ah, yes - the Fiat Currency conspiracy theory.

I will grant that, by itself, paper money is worth its weight in paper pulp. So let's do a thought experiment, and switch to a backing. Let's pick gold for the sake of historical continuity.

So now I can trade in my $1 bill for a certain weight of gold. Now, let me ask "what is that gold worth?" "One Dollar", you respond. Bzzzzt - thanks for playing. The worth of that weight of gold cannot be valued in terms of the paper currency it backs.

So let's try to value it in other terms. One could say that it is worth about 1/3 gallon of regular gasoline. But is it really? Can I replace regular gasoline with gold? Can I burn it in my car engine, or huff it to make me high? Obviously not. It's the same case with other products, until you get to personal ornamentation (oooh, shiney), backing for archival CD's, or electrical contacts. Gold's "worth", in industrial terms, is very limited. So, if we use gold as a "backing" for paper money, its value is just as symbolic - it is a token by which we quantize another object's value.

I may not disagree with you that US monetary policy is flawed, but the flaw certainly isn't in it's lack of "backing". ALL money, whether fiat or backed, is purely symbolic.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Jason Hood]

Because as a US taxpayer, you fund the government. We will all pay for it one way or another. efiling also gets you your refund quicker.

Or just print more money ;)

Re:Back up at the wire

[tbo]

You just log into State Farm's website and click the link that says "Free TurboTax", and when you get to the end of filing your taxes, the cost is $0.

Thanks for the tip--I'll try to keep it in mind for next year. Do you know if they let you file Schedule C (statement of Profit/Loss for small business) that way, or is it just super-basic tax returns?

Re:Back up at the wire

[proxima]

They get paid with Federal Reserve Notes well before you remit any of your earnings. And they will get paid whether you remit anything or not. Because there is a printing press that will give it to them regardless.
  Your tax Reserve Notes go to the Federal Reserve to prevent devaluation of the currency. And since the "money" is created out of thin air, that's really the only reason you pay taxes.

You're getting at the point in an odd way and also making a few incorrect statements. While I don't want to get bogged down with too much detail here, I think there are a couple of important points to make.

First, your use of "Federal Reserve Notes" seems odd to me. Federal Reserve Notes, technically speaking, are just the paper currency which can be redeemed (by banks) at the Federal Reserve for reserve holdings. Most would just say "dollars", or "currency", or "paper dollars". The reserves, though, do form the basis of the banking system.

Second, when you pay your taxes, your money does not go to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is somewhat separate from the rest of the government, financing its operations in large part by the return on government debt (i.e. U.S. Treasury bonds) it holds. As the FAQ states, any returns above that are paid to the U.S. Treasury.

The U.S. Treasury is the department that really handles the budget and taxes. If you pay your taxes by check, note that you make out that check to the "U.S. Treasury". When the U.S. government spends more than it receives, it issues debt in the form of Treasury bonds. The U.S. Treasury makes decisions about printing new money (aka seigniorage). The Fed's control over the money supply is through the fractional reserve banking system, which I'm not going to focus on here.

Going back to paying your taxes, it's more accurate to think of them as keeping the government from having to borrow that money with bonds. Many of those bonds are held by people and firms in the U.S., so we essentially owe money to ourselves. In addition, many of the bonds are purchased with Social Security taxes which, at least for now, exceed Social Security payments.

In some governments, it's true that if the government can't raise the revenue it wants to spend it will end up printing large amounts of money. We know that tends to lead to hyperinflation, as is the case with Zimbabwe right now. However, the U.S. is considered such a safe borrower that bonds have a fairly low rate of return on them, yet people are still willing to buy them. It's through these bonds that we have almost $9 trillion in national debt. So for the most part the U.S. borrows to spend more, not prints to spend more.

If your claims about printing money and seigniorage were true, then we'd be having incredible inflation, since we've been spending way more than we've been taxing in the last 50 years on average.

Re:Back up at the wire

[kannibal_klown]

Must have. I submitted my return in TurboTax at about 11:45 EDT on the 16th and had no problems.

Actually, you were ahead of the game (1 day early). They gave us a 2 day extension, making the taxes due at about 11:59:59 PM Apr 17. I think it was because of some holiday in 1 of the southern states.

She was supposedly able to submit at 11:55PM-ish on Tuesday Night (April 17th).

Re:Back up at the wire

[ifdef]

That seems kind of stupid. I assume SS#s are like SINs here. In that case, employers need them because they have to send you a T4, banks need them because they have to send you a T5 for any interest you earn on a savings account, but why would water or power companies need them? Are power or water expenses tax deductible in the States or something?

Re:Back up at the wire

[AJWM]

Like I said, it doesn't make much difference to the bottom line.

Re:Back up at the wire

[IMarvinTPA]

My oppologies, but Zimbabwe's hyperinflation is up to 1700%.
Last year's Zimbabwe dollar is worth 18 of them today.
IMarv

Re:Back up at the wire

[Moofie]

Um, the people who are really making a lot of dough, don't pay taxes on it.

Sorry, your principle is flawed.

Re:Back up at the wire

[mutterc]

One needn't wait... one can spec on one's tax forms a date to direct-debit the amount owed, anytime up to 4/15.

Re:Back up at the wire

[SuperMog2002]

Probably just so they can report you if you don't pay. Actually, that's consistent with what the GP said earlier where if you pay a deposit, they don't need your SSN. If you don't pay up, they just keep your deposit instead of reporting you and forwarding you to collections.

Re:Back up at the wire

[maxume]

To which I nod and back away slowly. Here are some lies and misinformaion:

http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/gale/20030 929.htm

(Heres a benchmark about what 'rich' means: US GDP is $12 trillion; distribute that across 200 million working people and you get $60,000 a person; distribute it across 100 million working people and you get $120,000 a person; Somewhere in between is where people start 'keeping other people down')

Re:Back up at the wire

[Jehosephat2k]

I've been using Tax Cut for the past 6 years (maybe 7 something like that) and I have never had any problems with it. It also isn't laden with spyware.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Moofie]

See? Now that's what I was asking for in the first place. I shall now process data.

Re:Back up at the wire

[quantum bit]

Years ago I used TurboTax once and I had to laugh when, after completing the questionnaire and filling out my return, it popped up and tried to sell me "TurboTax State (Texas edition)".

Hint for those who haven't lived in Texas: there is no state income tax

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have anything to back that claim up? I thought money had to be backed to be of any value.

Money is essentially "backed up" by the implicit belief that the US (or another) government will limit the growth in the money supply. That is why they can't just print more and more of it (or issue Reserve Notes, et cetera). You know there's only going to be a certain amount of it around, and you know that it will be useful for buying things and paying taxes since it's official US legal tender and all that.

Re:Back up at the wire

[FooAtWFU]

This is the "haha" factor for you! Government *prints* money. As much as they want. And US is probably one of the worst countries in that regard. IT just hasn't cought up with them yet. The government can print as much as they want, but they've apparently been smart enough to realize that if they print billions of dollars, then the money wouldn't be worth anything anymore. Rather, they increase the money supply at a certain rate (specifically, the Fed conducts open market operations, buying and selling government securities, in order to get the interest rate on a certain class of funds to match a certain level - that's the Interest you hear them talking about so much). At present, that gives us a nice, stable inflation rate of 2-4% a year. This is really not too surprising, or harmful. (And they do need to increase the money supply, since the economic output of the country is also increasing, and if there's more stuff to buy with the same amount of money, you get deflation. That's a bit more harmful.) This is one of the reasons the Federal Reserve is so independent of the government - specifically, that the members of its Board of Directors are appointed with 14-year terms. This is what keeps any current El Presidente from messing too much with the money supply for short-term political gains.

As for your complaint about measures of M3, well, that's not really liquid enough for most people to worry about as Money most of the time. A CD of over $100,000 (one of the components of M3) isn't really money money, that someone is going to go out and spend: it's an investment. It's just going to sit there and earn interest. For years, usually. It's really only Money, Third Class - it doesn't work too well as a Medium of Exchange. Repurchase agreements and such (also in M3) are similar.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Johnboi Waltune]

There are four 'tiers' of the TurboTax service:

Free Edition > Deluxe > Premier > Home and Business

To do a Schedule C you need the Home and Business version, which costs $99.95 without State Farm's referral. I remember the Premier and Home and Business versions were not free, but sharply discounted. I chose the Deluxe version since it was free, and my return was relatively simple.

Re:Back up at the wire

[zCyl]

Otherwise, get a professional, and I don't mean one of these "tax only" companies who hire people just for tax season to do data entry... Use a real CPA.

I'll grant that a CPA would know more than the tax-company employees. But can you give a ballpark of how much a CPA would charge for filing taxes?

Re:Back up at the wire

[cayenne8]

"Probably just so they can report you if you don't pay. Actually, that's consistent with what the GP said earlier where if you pay a deposit, they don't need your SSN. If you don't pay up, they just keep your deposit instead of reporting you and forwarding you to collections."

That's why I thought it so strange...I told them I'd give them whatever deposit they needed...but, they would not even TALK to me at the water board without proof of Social Security number....sucks.

Re:Back up at the wire

[bandini]

You mean I did my taxes in haste? On the wrong day?
That holiday would be Emancipation Day. The DC government's observation of that holiday on the 16th is what pushed the tax deadline back (further). Emancipation Day is also celebrated in Texas on June 19th (as Juneteenth) and in Puerto Rico on March 22nd. But that's just what Wikipedia tells me. I'm in DC and saw a lot of people going to work that day.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. Use the software. Do the free E-File from the IRS if you qualify. No sense in paying the government more money just to pay the government.

I've used TaxCut online free E-File for the past couple years. Works like a charm for all those poor 1040EZ filers.

Re:Back up at the wire

[boingo82]

Me too...and as I'm currently in the -8.5% tax bracket, I was filing within 3 hours of receiving my last W2.

Re:Back up at the wire

[profplump]

Paper money has as much or more "intrinsic value" as gold, depending on your needs. Gold is poisonous, heavy, doesn't burn well and is difficult to write on. Paper can be used to make fires, as a form of dietary fiber, or for note taking while still being easy to transport. The difference is not the "intrinsic value", which is entirely dependent on the application, but rather the scarcity. Paper has an effectively unlimited supply, while gold gets expensive it dig up in large quantities.

Moreover the problem is really the unbalanced spending, not the material we choose as a basis for trade valuations. If the federal government took in the same amount of gold/dollars/fish/whatever than it paid out it there wouldn't be a problem -- it's the unbalanced spending that creates the temptation to remove the resource scarcity limitation in the first place.

Re:Back up at the wire

[belg4mit]

Huh, my understanding was that it came from setting crappy type like Linotype. Personally, it bugs the hell out of me to see text with extra fucking whitespace after a period, it seriously breaks the flow of non-justified text: Have you ever read a real book with that shit? It's an outmoded practice and is no longer justifiable.

Re:Back up at the wire

[UnixSphere]

actually they do take them, they just take much longer to process.

Re:Back up at the wire

[UnknownSoldier]

Solution is simple:

Ask them to SHOW you the LAW that REQUIRES you to HAVE one.

They can't -- because there is NONE.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the U.S. Treasury go through the formality of borrowing money to make up budget deficits, though, if they could get all they want?

The GP never said anything about U.S. Treasury. He was talking about a Federal Reserve Bank - a private tax-exempt corporation that can print dollars. It costs them $0.02 to print a $100 bill which they use to buy $100 worth of government bonds (issued by U.S. Treasury, as I understand it, may be wrong here). The US Treasury must sell bonds to get dollars because bonds are not legal tender.
I am actually surprised GP was moded +5, usually what he says never leaves the conspiracy theory realm; there are lots of sites about this.

Re:Back up at the wire

[stuntpope]

That's good to know, wish I'd known it this year and saved $20 plus being able to e-file free. I have State Farm for home and car, and use TurboTax Premier since it makes it dead-simple to do taxes for my investment property. Hope they offer this discount next year, too. Thanks for the tip.

Re:Back up at the wire

[cayenne8]

"Ask them to SHOW you the LAW that REQUIRES you to HAVE one."

OH...there is no law, but, just their 'policy' that appears set in stone.

Re:Back up at the wire

[ryanov]

So does doing my taxes earlier.

For that matter, what refund?

Re:Back up at the wire

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is the most intelligent and informative comment I have ever read on Slashdot.

Re:Back up at the wire

[ryanov]

I really don't think that's true. I didn't have Home and Business, and Schedule C worked just fine. They told me I'd be better off with some other version, but it did everything it needed to do.

Re:Back up at the wire

[Johnboi Waltune]

Well, check out the front page of TurboTax.com. They make it seem like Schedule C is only for Home and Business. But you are right, I don't have any firsthand knowledge. Good for you if you got it cheaper.

I submitted mine

[Timesprout]

on my blackberry.

Perhaps

[niiler]

Sourceforge could help them with their server load next year :-)

Re:Perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets hope not. As any Sourceforge project manager knows, at any given moment at least one Sourceforge service is down or otherwise broken. This is especially true of the CVS servers and/or the file release servers whenever you have scheduled a release.

Re:Perhaps

[maxume]

Come on now, everyone knows that Sourceforge projects don't do releases.

Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[NeverVotedBush]

It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.

I just don't understand the dorks that wait so long they have no options.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't get the figures for my last 1099 until YESTERDAY. Kinda makes filing hard ya know.

(And yes, I've been kicking and screaming about it since Feb.)

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Mr. Underbridge]

It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.

All true, but the fact that people wait until the deadline is not news. If you're going to get into the online tax-prep business, you'd better have a stout server. This kind of failure can kill a business.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[extremescholar]

It's not the interest that is a problem, it's the penalty for late filing that bites.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Aladrin]

I think you meant 'DOS attack', but it was more like a self-slashdotting.

As for people... Combine laziness and hatred and you end up with a gajillion people that will wait until the last possible second to deal with it. It shouldn't be a real big surprise.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[tehSpork]

All true, but the fact that people wait until the deadline is not news. If you're going to get into the online tax-prep business, you'd better have a stout server. This kind of failure can kill a business.

Or a stout series of servers, God knows you shouldn't be relying on a single box to handle that information with that liability.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Skidge]

All true, but the fact that people wait until the deadline is not news. True. A woman from the IRS said (IIRC) that almost 20% of filer wait until the last day.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[value_added]

With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect?

There was a story on NPR a day or so ago on the subject of tax filings. An IRS spokeswoman mentioned that more people than ever (a euphemism for "I don't remember the percentages") are filing electronically. Of those filing electronically, most file last minute like their paper counterparts.

Plus ca change, huh?

At any rate, I don't think it's fair to characterise last-minute filers as fools. Everyone hates hates filing. It's human nature to put off something so disagreeable. Ask yourself when was the last time you went to the dentist.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[rabun_bike]

Spoken by someone who fills out a 1040-EZ form with W2 employment. Some of us "dorks" are not getting a "refund" because we multiple sources of income, own businesses, and actually owe money to the government because we made more this year than last year. As long as we don't incur a penalty, paying additional money to the IRS early actually costs us money. Would you make a 10k payment to the IRS in Feb if you could put that money in an interest bearing account and wait until April to pay it without penalty? Other "dorks" have complicated tax filings with rental income from houses, 1099 income, complicated investment income, capital gains, inheritance, major illness and medical expenses, alimony, child payments, and business expenses as well as the fact that tax filings only happen in April so my accountant is bogged down with tons of other people with complicated tax filings. And finally, the true dorks are the ones that really do want until Tuesday night to actually try to file their 1040-EZ returns and instead of printing them out they try to file electronically.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[powermacx]

Losers. I did my taxes last year. - Homer

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

One might hope that you have been putting that money into an interest bearing account throughout the year, such that the last few months aren't -that- big of a deal.

Besides, if you make that payment sooner, you can start saving for next year sooner. You end up with the exact same amount of interest gain as you have now.

I don't really have any argument for the rest of your points though.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdotting = HTTP request flooding which is a legitimate DoS tactic, albeit a relatively shitty one which only works with a large pool of attacking IPs and a target too stupid to set up mod_evasive or suchlike. It gets used more frequently than you might suppose because it's relatively easy for the non-technical to do, just throw up a page based on the LAD vampire script on some free host then get people to visit it. This tactic was recently used to hilarious effect against crazy racist Hal Turner.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Daniel_Staal]

Also, if you are not getting a refund, filing on the last day makes fiancial sense, as you can earn interest on your money up until the last day.

(Ok, so only if you don't know that you can post-date your filing, but...)

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[whoop]

Hell, I've mailed returns out the day after a few times because I was too lazy to drive to the post office that night. IRS didn't give me any problems with it. I got the same amount back I was expecting, no penalty or anything.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Maximum Prophet]

I'm using my poor memory here but there are something like 180 million filers, 60% of which use Tax software or professional help (almost all the professionals use Tax software)

TurboTax should know it's market share, let's pretend it's 75%. That's 180,000,000 * .60 * .75 * .20 = 16.2 million on the last day. Let's say most, 75%, wait until the last half of the day, that's 8.1 million in the last 12 hours. That's 187 per second.

On NPR they gave a figure that the TurboTax servers were processing like 40 per second.

I do peak load extimation for Unix servers for a living. Somebody at TurboTax screwed up big time, real big time. They should have doubled the number of servers they thought they might have needed. They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache the returns, then process them batchwise as fast as they could.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[plover]

It's human nature to put off something so disagreeable. Ask yourself when was the last time you went to the dentist.

Dude, you need a better dentist. Seriously. I mean how hard is it to go in every six months for a cleaning?

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.

I just don't understand the dorks that wait so long they have no options.

More than a decade ago, I a had a friend at a former job who did this kind of thing. He was the cheapest guy I ever met in my life. He had no home telephone because it cost money. He worked for the US government as an engineer in a small town and was making good money, better than most of us other employess as Uncle Sam paid engineers on a higher scale than us "mere programmers", but he refused to pay for a telephone. He lived in a dumpy, cheap, one bedroom apartment in a small complex and his mom would either call his work phone or the apartment business office if she needed to talk to him. I couldn't believe it, but the apartment business office would actually walk over to his nearby apartment to get him if his mom called. This was a small town, like I said. Our state used to have this crazy system for renewing automobile tags where everybody had to renew by the end of April every year. They randomly assigned you to one of the first 4 months of the year and you had until the end of your month to renew. I forgot which month he had to renew his tag in, but every year he would take leave from work and go down to the tag office and wait in line for 2-3 hours to renew his tag on the very last day you could do it. He wouldn't do it through the mail, which was an option, because that would cost money for postage AND the state charged you 1 dollar extra for renewing it by mail. Nope, it made far better sense for him to take vacation time and just wait in line for 2-3 hours so he could hold on to his money until the last possible moment rather than to pay the cost of one stamp and one extra dollar to mail it in. Now that is cheap!

Needless to say, he was unmarried and had no girlfriend. I lost contact with him years ago because he had no home phone, hence no home internet, so that left work email as the only way to stay in touch with him and he expressed some reservations about using work email for personal correspondence, so that was the end of that friendship. He has a younger brother who's also unmarried, so I figure one day when he dies he'll leave a fortune to some distant cousins he barely knows and he won't have spent any of the money he saved on anything to give himself any happiness.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[LordKronos]

File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill?

File a few weeks before. When you file and when you pay can be different, so you aren't actually losing any interest. You can file in January but tell the IRS to deduct it from your bank account on the due date in April. Or you can do the same if you are paying by check (file in January, mail check in April).

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Waiting until the last day has nothing to do with the interest, since you can set the date you want to pay when you file electronically.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[sloveless]

You don't get penalized for filing a federal return late if you're getting a refund. A few years back, before I started filing electronically, I prepared my taxes, noticed I was getting a nice little refund, and promptly failed to put it in the damn mail. It was December before my lazy butt realized I hadn't received my check. (No, I'm not exaggerating.) So I mailed it. The IRS promptly issued my refund PLUS INTEREST! Granted, it was a crappy rate and I would have been better off putting that money in a savings account. Regardless, no penalties.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[kekoap]

You don't have to pay an extra day's worth of interest, so waiting doesn't make any sense. You have the option of either sending in checks or using electronic fund transfers on tax day.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Agelmar]

There's a problem with your argument... you say that if one pays now, one can start saving up for next year now and wind up with the same amount of interest gain. The problem is that you assume the two are exclusive.

There's no reason I can't start saving up now *and still* keep the $10k in the bank until 4/17. Assuming you're making some non-zero return off of your money, it hurts you to give it away any sooner than you have to. No matter when you start saving for next years taxes (or whatever other confounding factors you care to throw in), you are going to lose two months' interest on $10k by filing in February rather than April, and although it's not going to make a huge difference, it's rather pointless to throw that money away.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[FooAtWFU]

All true, but the fact that people wait until the deadline is not news. If you're going to get into the online tax-prep business, you'd better have a stout server. This kind of failure can kill a business.

Or a stout series of servers, God knows you shouldn't be relying on a single box to handle that information with that liability. IBM called; they'd like to sell you some On Demand e-Business infrastructure. (I'd bet Sun has some "grid computing" power to sell as well...)

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[pla]

What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill?

Just for those who never thought about this, what you suggest works the other way, as well... As long as they owe you a refund, nothing bad happens if you file a day late.

The IRS bases all its penalties on how much you owe. Don't owe anything? No penalties for filing a day late.



The government cares that it gets your money. It doesn't care so much if you don't get your money.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[archen]

Some people have legit reasons for waiting. I filed mine back in January, only to find out that the IRS rejected my W-7. So I spent a LONG time running around trying to figure out if my taxes were thrown out or going though. I only found out last week that there is essentially no record of me even filing now. But I don't file electronically anyway. A 1040EZ takes about 15 minutes if you check through it 3 times after you're done.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that TurboTax will let you file in February/March and Schedule the payment to be sent at a later date (April 17). There's no excuse for not getting your end of the work done before the last day.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Kythorn]

When you e-file, you can tell them exactly what day to debit the money from your checking account, so you can't even attribute this to people wanting to earn a little more interest -- the blame falls squarely on laziness and procrastination.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache the returns

Excellent, then my tax return could be stored along side my e-mail, calendar, documents, searches, and every website I've visited that uses Double-click or Google ad services ... in fact, can't Google just fill out my returns automatically now, with the info they have?

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[hal2814]

"He had no home telephone because it cost money."

"he won't have spent any of the money he saved on anything to give himself any happiness."

Yes, because you haven't experienced true joy until you get interrupted during dinner by telemarketing calls.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Orange Crush]

Would you make a 10k payment to the IRS in Feb if you could put that money in an interest bearing account and wait until April to pay it without penalty?

No. I'd do my taxes in February so I have some advance notice of a $10,000 tax bill so I have enough time to scrounge up the funds if necessary. *Then* I'd put the $10k in an interest bearing account and stuff my return in an envelope with a check but hang on to it until tax day.

BTW, the interest earned on $10k over 3 months at 6% = $150.75. Penalty for not filing on time when you owe $10,000 = $450.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd better have a stout server.

Or a stout series of servers ... or a beowulf cluster of stout series of servers.

Let loose the 6-sigma black belts! A process must be improved.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of failure can kill a business.

I disagree.

I used TurboTax this year to file back in February. The system worked fine and I had a good experience with the service so I'll return next year. The same is probably true for all those who filed from January through April 14th.

So they lost out on some business April 15th. No big deal to Intuit's bottom line. They literally had all the business they could handle.

So a few customers might not return next year. Or, those people might file earlier next time.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[gfxguy]

Only if you owe. Of course, we all owe at the end of the tax year, right? Otherwise you're not entering enough withholdings.

Frankly, there should be no such thing as withholdings. It's just a way for the government to get an advance on YOUR money. We should all just cut a check at the end of the year to pay our taxes.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Peter Mork]

As long as they owe you a refund, nothing bad happens if you file a day late.

My gut reaction was that you still have to file on time. But, I stand corrected and I think you for the information.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Kamots]

"Besides, if you make that payment sooner, you can start saving for next year sooner. You end up with the exact same amount of interest gain as you have now."

You seem somewhat confused about interest... so, an example :)

Two scenarios.

1) You invest your future tax payment as it accumulates. Assume you accumulate $1k/month, and earn 0.5% per month (around 6.17% APY). You're going to owe $12k after interest, and everything. You file as soon as you can.
2) Same as above, but you wait 4 months. You're going to owe slightly more than in scenario 1 (on years 2+) due to having earned more the previous year from keeping your money earning you interest an extra 4 months.

In both cases assume you have a starting $10k accumulated.

After 3 years (and after paying taxes on the extra that scenario 2 earns at 25%), scenario 2 will have earned almost $600 more than scenario 1.

Why?

In the second scenario you're earning interest on $12k for 4 additional months. You get to keep that interest. It earns more interest next year. You again get 4 months worth of interest on the $12k. etc.

After 3 years, scenario 2 has not only earned essentially a years worth of free interest, but you've earned interest on the interest from previous years.

Sure, it's not big money, but hey $600 is $600.

Now, do I bother worrying about that when I only owe a few hundred in taxes? Naw, the 50 cents or $1 or whatever is well worth paying to get it done with and not worry about it.

Of course the opposite is true if you're getting a return. You want to get it ASAP so that you can start it earning you more money. :)

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[rssrss]

It's not laziness. I owed them about a month of your pay. And yes that is deliberate. It's my money and I like to hang on to it as long as I can. And I file on paper. It takes longer to get there.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[GoRK]

I didn't get the figures for my last 1099 until YESTERDAY. Kinda makes filing hard ya know.

No it doesn't. They missed the filing deadline; not you. What you are supposed to do here is timely file your 1040 without that information then re-file your 1040 when you get the additional information then either pay the difference with interest or claim the difference as a refund (in many cases this is with interest too). Optionally you can include estimated tax payments on your first 1040 filing if you want to avoid paying interest when you file again. Your final easy option is to file form 4868 for an extension along with your estimated payment. If you expect a refund the best thing is to file 1040 twice so you can go ahead and get your money back. If you expect to pay, the 4868 is much simpler.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Orange Crush]

But that's no reason not to have already prepared everything so you need only to drop it in the mail. Late penalties are more than any interest you're likely to earn in a mere 3-4 months.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[papageorgio02]

I did my taxes a few weeks ago...but around here between TurboTax melting down and this people had a hard time getting their stuff in.

Am glad I didn't wait until the extremely last minute.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

We did...we have the capability to process over 200 returns per second. At our peak around 11am yesterday we were receiving AND processing 118 per second....nowhere near our max load. The bandwith wasn't the issue. They still haven't figured out what went wrong.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[revlayle]

As much as one can hate the IRS, they offer *seemingly* endless ways to work thru or around the deadline. They know not everything IS the taxpayers fault (except for not filing anything).

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[antdude]

Or do it weeks/months before. My folks and I finish ours months in advance. We're not proscrinators. We do this just in case there are problems and have enough time to fix.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Daniel_Staal]

You don't need the servers to run the program and print out your returns. (Well, mostly.) You need their servers to file electronically. That is what I expect brought down their servers: people attempting to file their returns.

And, when that wasn't working, I expect a fair number of people just printed and mailed in their returns.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[ptbarnett]

Frankly, there should be no such thing as withholdings. It's just a way for the government to get an advance on YOUR money. We should all just cut a check at the end of the year to pay our taxes.

Unfortunately, even if you aren't subject to withholding (because you are retired, or self-employed), you still have to pay installments at least quarterly. And, if you wait until the last quarterly payment to pay all of it (or most of it), you will be subject to a penalty.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

I never think about it and when I do I promply forget for lack of caring. I haven't been to the dentist in over 10 years.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect?

[b]Poor Quality Software Engineer 1:[/b] Ahhh, finished with the server setup, finally!

[b]Poor Quality Software Engineer 2:[/b] We can only handle 1000 concurrent users. What if more than that try to use it at once?

[b]Poor Quality Software Engineer 1:[/b] That'll never happen. And if it does, they can just wait until the next day and try again. There's only one time a year where this might even happen, and we shouldn't bother building to handle that scenario since it's so rare.

[b]Poor Quality Software Engineer 2:[/b] Sounds like a plan. Where are my stock options?

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[networkBoy]

Yeah, I filed a year late once.
They don't care if they owe you money (you have up to three years).
Other way round though and it's called Tax Evasion / non payment penalties...
-nB

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[networkBoy]

Yeah like that would work.
Your above average American has issues budgeting their finances for the month. Your average American would be completely hosed. The deductions are simply a forced budgeting system to ensure the IRS gets paid at least most of what they're due.
-nB

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all well and good, but why did you make the online users click through 10 pages to resubmit? The resubmission should happen automatically or at worst be just another click.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Remember: They just want your money.

You still have to pay on time with an extension request (or face penalties). Hence you have a Catch-22 -- you have to do your tax form to know how much to pay, which means you're actually done.

The easiest thing is to just over-estimate how much you have to pay, just to be safe. I haven't run any numbers on that (and lost interest on it, to you) vs. the cost of a penalty.

But making things as easy as possible to keep the money flowing through is one hell of an engineering problem. Hence things like major post offices strongarmed to stay open until midnight, and TurboTax probably will be granted their request to consider as "on time" eFiles submitted through their system up through today. Yes, the IRS could be an ass about it, but then they've pissed off hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of registered voters.

Microsoft has been through this wringer -- if only one in 10,000 Windows users had a big enough of a problem every day to make them want to try to get MS help, that's 10,000 calls a day Microsoft has to field. And all that turns into rage against their corporation. Managing this is quite the engineering problem.

Linux itself is cute, for the techie. See what happens if a hundred million people try to install it. "Oh, just go do this, this, and this, and for that driver, that." 99% of people's eyes will glaze over and they'll just play dumb (not even playing, actually) and wait for it to be fixed.

Engineers who release real, mass products into the real world encounter this and learn from it the hard way. "It's in the manual" may be a technically correct response to a problem, but it's incorrect from the point of view to selling a system to a customer and his 10,000 employees.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[KlomDark]

Good thing I got my taxes done on Friday! That's the exact post office that I mailed my return from (Four blocks from my house.).

Tried TurboTax, but it's completely retarded when it comes to Health Savings Accounts. It thought every bit of money I put in the HSA was taxable. Um, no, dumbasses.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[jcnnghm]

You don't have to file if you are entitled to a refund.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

You're fired.

I don't want anyone with this attitude working at any of my corporations. Thxbie.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the IRS was having trouble, but why couldn't online users file at least their state returns? Some users owed taxes to the state but had a refund coming from the IRS, but turbotax would not efile the state return until the federal one had gone through.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The IRS loves the new tax software because it makes the horrendous Alternative Minimum Tax calculations easy and automatic, and thus lowering political pressure on politicians to get rid of it. (I would have had to pay if I and my wife had filed "married but seper

Hence TurboTax will probably be granted the extension.

Remember: They just want your money.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[A Commentor]

It's very doubtful that the issue had anything to do with DNS unless their DNS servers were BADLY configured, most likely the tax return processing servers just couldn't load. The DNS system scales nicely... Each ISP has their own set of DNS servers that will cache 'the name to IP address mapping' and not bother the authoritative DNS server until the cache expires which is typically 24 hours. So once one of the ISP's customer does the lookup, all the lookups for that IP from all the ISP's other customers will not bother the authoritative DNS server until the cache has expired and then it will only do one lookup again.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[frdmfghtr]

I didn't get the figures for my last 1099 until YESTERDAY. Kinda makes filing hard ya know.

No it doesn't. They missed the filing deadline; not you.

On top of that, whomever sent the 1099 info also missed a deadline; isn't that info supposed to be send no later than the end of February?

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, if you are not getting a refund, filing on the last day makes fiancial sense, as you can earn interest on your money up until the last day.

If you file electronically and have the money pulled from your bank account, you can file early and still not pay until tax day. The date you pay can be quite long after the date you file.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[UbuntuDupe]

I'd like to add this advice: This year, when I did my taxes, I had online access with all of the institutions from which I had investment income, and TurboTax let me just input my login information for those sites and it imported all the relevant numbers right over. So, I didn't even really need to wait for the 1099's to come.

Of course, most of you wouldn't trust TurboTax enough to give it that information, so YMMV.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[terrymr]

You can electronically file any time and have the payment come out of your bank on the last day - there's no need to file at the last possible minute.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

'Virtual' corporations in World of Warcraft don't count.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Lord Ender]

Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute[.] It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect?

Where do I start? First, it was not a DNS attack of any sort. Secondly, people MUCH smarter than YOU, but with no special knowledge of the IT domain, expect their computers to work. Thirdly, people smarter than you with IT domain knowledge might expect that the IT people engineering a system with a predictable peak-load would take the peak-load into consideration when designing the system.

So, basically, you are a bit of an idiot, but if insulting thousands of people makes you feel better about your own inadequate intellect, go right ahaed.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[snarlydwarf]

Wrong.

"If you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien, whether you must file a federal income tax return depends upon your gross income, your filing status, your age, and whether you are a dependent. For details, see Table 1 and Table 2. You also must file if one of the situations described in Table 3 applies. The filing requirements apply even if you owe no tax." says the IRS.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[proxy318]

Or a series of stouts. I know I'd be looking for a beer if my servers went down right before the deadline.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how the majority of the states work. Fed first, state second. There are only a couple standalones that don't care.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Kelson]

All true, but the fact that people wait until the deadline is not news.

This is also why I try never to go anywhere near the post office on April 12-15 (or 16, on years like this one). With very few exceptions, whatever it is can wait until the crowds of "postmarked on April 15" tax filers people are done.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Sangui5]

The sad thing is they wouldn't have even needed to buy the machines. You can "buy" them, use them for a short while, then return them, minus some small depreciation amount. Big retailers (e.g. Macy's) do this for the Christmas shopping season--and the big machine vendors (e.g. IBM, HP) are happy to oblige, since if the machines are used for a sufficiently short amount of time, they still count as "new", so they get to sell them again, full price, to someone else.

Or, another cheap and easy way is software-disabled hardware. Buy a blade system and have a large percentage of disabled (but present) blades; pay for them and turn them on only if you need them. Or you can do the same thing with most mainframe systems. Nearly every mainframe system ships with additional processors installed but disabled; IBM even has this thing where they skip every other clock cycle until you pay for the upgrade. Intuit was really quite short sighted about this. Obviously there is going to be a huge load spike right before the deadline. They could have easily allotted themselves a large over provision amount for not that much money.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell us where you do your banking. The IRS pays 8% interest. I'd like to see a savings account that pays better than that crappy rate.

http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=168552,0 0.html

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[macbort]

What they really should have done was use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or something similar.

I think this would have been a perfect application for cloud computing. If they had the ability to turn on more instances of their processing servers as demand required, they could have met any level of service.

The Gigavox Audio Lite media publishing platform was designed from the ground up using Amazon's web services, including EC2, S3, and SQS. Because of their application architecture, they can scale infinitely without doing anything special. IT Conversations has an excellent Technometria podcast describing how it all works. It's really pretty incredible stuff.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"...to ensure the IRS gets paid at least most of what they're due."

Put the kool-aid down and think about what you just said.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[georgemoot]

but every year he would take leave from work and go down to the tag office and wait in line for 2-3 hours to renew his tag on the very last day you could do it. He wouldn't do it through the mail, which was an option, because that would cost money for postage AND the state charged you 1 dollar extra for renewing it by mail

And he was actually *losing* money by waiting in line to do it in person. Cost to renew by mail: ~$1.37, whereas 2 hours of his time cost (I have no idea what his rate would have been, but let's assume $50/hr) $100 in lost income. So he's not only cheap, but stupid.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Reziac]

Any idea what the load distribution among the various online tax prep outfits might be? would be interesting to see, for sure.

For the 2nd year in a row I found myself using TaxAct (type the obvious) as it had all the forms, none of the "sell you something on every page" BS, their server performed fairly well (even tho I was probably among a large late crowd, on Sunday night), and they were in the low range for the filing fee.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

I literally spent five minutes just now on wikipedia figuring out where http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer lived and where he would pay taxes to before I realized you were speaking of Homer Simpson

:P

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[nschubach]

I know this is off-topic, but I agree with your sig. ;) I've also seen it work it's way into everyday life for some people as acceptable.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

OR instead of going through all that hassle, if you know you're getting your taxable income documents before the deadline, you can wait for those documents and file like the grandparent did. Why create more work for yourself and the IRS?

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[2short]

If you making a 10K payment, you've had to be paying quarterly estimated taxes, so your total tax bill is more like 40K, so I'm thinking the 100 bucks you're trying to save by paying at the last minute may not be worth the hassle, but I guess that's up to you.

On the other hand, every accountant I've worked with has you get stuff in asap, determines the most advantageous time and method for you to file, and takes care of it.

Unless someone else misses a deadline, I see little reason not to be done with ones taxes in February. In any case, extensions are easily obtained.

Everybody loves to hate the IRS, but what they really hate is paying taxes. As long as you are actually trying to pay your taxes, the IRS is quite accommodating.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[rabun_bike]

You pay no penalty is you earned more than your estimates for the previous year cover. Is you earn the same or less you pay a penalty. In my case I earned more, my estimates did not cover the difference but I have no penalty. That is how the tax code system works. Estimates are based on prior year income.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Knara]

Well, I don't know where to look to disprove you technically, but for practical purposes, you can go years without filing a return if you owe nothing. Might not be the official line, but sure is the real-life fact of the matter.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[rabun_bike]

I never said you should save up money and pay it later. That was simply an example for my situation where I earned more than the prior year and therefore owed money beyond my estimates without IRS penalty. I never said "you should do x or y." I was only giving examples. In my case it makes no sense to pay early since I pay without penalty.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Only fools make assumptions like that.

This year when I did my taxes (with a pencil, in January as soon as my W-2 got to me) I mailed it in the next day. First week in February I had my $160 refund check.

Last year when I did my taxes (with a pencil, in January as soon as I got my W-2) I saw that I owed $700 (divorced, no mortgage, kids grown) I freaked out, got a new form, checked "let the IRS figure my taxes for me" and mailed it in at 11:45PM on the deadline day.

I got a refund check in May, bigger than this years. My math had been bad. Or I looked at the wrong table or something.

But last year I had a valid reason to wait until the last minute, or would have if my math had been correct. If I owe the IRS, I'm a fool not to wait until the last minute to pay. I get interest on unused money, you know.

Fool.

-mcgrew

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[viking099]

I highly doubt he was taking unpaid leave to do this.

He was being paid to wait at the DMV to renew his tag.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[zurmikopa]

I'd say they were uncle-sammed.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody loves to hate the IRS, but what they really hate is paying taxes. Not that I enjoy the paying part, but what I really hate is the hassle of the paperwork, and the complexity of the tax code. (Don't tell me it isn't that bad, no two people get the same result for a moderately complex return.) That and the harsh enforcement penalties that hang over your head if they decide you made too much of a mistake.

I'd rather pay a flat tax, even if it cost me more money.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[pezzonovante1]

The IRS does not pay interest on your refund. Receiving a large refund every year basically gives the government a X dollar interest free loan. You'd be better off getting more money in your paycheck every week and socking it away in a high rate money market account or a mutual fund, even if you wind up owing a little at the end of the year.

However, you do pay interest if you owe the IRS money.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[RealSalmon]

What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.

I seem to recall that you can file your return, but choose to have your money deducted on a specific date. So interest shouldn't be any concern in the first place. File your return early, and choose to have your money deducted on the "the last day".

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[networkBoy]

While I agree with your sentiment, and what they are really due is a lot less than what they take, the pragmatic answer is that we all enjoy (assuming you are paying taxes) common services and infrastructure funded by taxes. These are due to and remitable to the US treasury department via the IRS.

It's a fact of life. On a side note: DO NOT address your taxes to the Infernal Revenue Service. My dad did that once and was audited. I said "funny" and did it . . . and was audited :(
-nB

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Orange Crush]

You pay no penalty is you earned more than your estimates for the previous year cover.

Correct, but I'm talking about filing late--for which there *is* a penalty.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[lgarner]

If you keep any kind of records, you don't need your 1099 to file. You don't submit them (the payer does), you just enter the amount from them into your forms.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[AJWM]

You don't have to file if you are entitled to a refund.

Yeah, you do. Mind, the IRS probably won't get nasty about it until a few years after the deadline, but then they'll go ahead and file a return for you which, gee whiz, probably shows that you owe them a few thousand dollars based on their "estimates" of your income and what you already paid.

At that point you can -- if you don't delay too much longer -- go ahead and file a correct return, and they might (if it hasn't been too many years) even send you the refund if you're owed one.

(Been there, done that. Company I'd worked for went out of business and never got around to sending out W-2s, so I put off filing the return, and so on.)

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[AJWM]

Just wait until you get a friendly registered letter from the IRS notifying you that, because you missed filing a couple of years ago, they helpfully went ahead and filed a return on your behalf. Oh, and by the way, by their estimate of your income, you owe them $5,432.10 in back taxes and penalties. Due in 30 days.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct - I meant denial of service. Not domain name service. But it was early in the morning and I was running late for work...

Thanks!

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[2short]

"Not that I enjoy the paying part, but what I really hate is the hassle of the paperwork, and the complexity of the tax code"

That, again, is not a reason to hate the IRS.

"I'd rather pay a flat tax, even if it cost me more money."

If you're not sure, it's going to cost you a *lot* more money; (not to mention that utter- destruction-of-society thing, but that's just my prediction) In any case, wanting a simpler tax code is an often-given, but stupid argument for a flat tax. Flat vs. Progressive is just different numbers in one lookup table. What makes the tax code complex is not the numbers in that table; it's the many exceptions, deductions, credits, etc. You could elimintate any or all of those independently of any changes to the base rate calculation.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[LunaticTippy]

[b]Poor Quality Software Engineer 2:[/b] Sounds like a plan. Where are my stock options?

Poor Quality HTML writer: Why weren't you the preview button?!?

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Some credit unions have 10% CDs

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/high-cd-yiel ds-out-there/story.aspx?guid=%7BB790BE3E-60C0-4D71 -8D9B-C8D0A9AC45EC%7D

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

As long as they owe you a refund, nothing bad happens if you file a day late.

What exactly bad happens if you owe the IRS money and file a week late? I'm guessing nothing. I just can't see the IRS going after people for seven days of interest on a $200 payment.

Heck, I've known people that just flat-out did not file taxes for a year or two. Absolutely nothing happened to them.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[sharkey]

End of January, IIRC.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[quantum bit]

On NPR they gave a figure that the TurboTax servers were processing like 40 per second.

40 tax returns per second? That's nothing! Call me when their servers can process 40 libraries of congress per second.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[sloth jr]

a) had nothing to do with DNS overloading - the caching mechanisms of most DNS zones take care of that fairly handily. DNS distributes well, and is hardly ever the cause of a DoS.
b) I do believe that Intuit knows something about their load - in fact, loads more than the armchair commentators strutting about "bigger server" or "no, MULTIPLE servers!" Intuit is not stupid, they realize well all that's riding on that last day (and February 2nd), and they build enterprise environments in which their software can run. I don't understand the notion that somehow, something can be made that won't break, especially under critical load. Yes, as an enterprise IT architect, you do as much as you can afford to do that will account for your (well-tracked and documented) previous load marks, plus a 50% margin. Idiots waiting until the last minute when the deadline was ALREADY extended I'm sure had a lot to do with how their model failed.

sloth jr

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[boingo82]

Last year, I claimed 9 exemptions and still got $5800 back.
You obviously do not have children, and/or do not know about EIC.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[gfxguy]

I do have two kids, and I'm getting back $200. I owe the state $100.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[pla]

What exactly bad happens if you owe the IRS money and file a week late? I'm guessing nothing.

I tend to agree, though considering how miserable the IRS can make our lives, I don't think I'd want to push that one.

Now, if I used TurboTax (which I don't - A trained chimp could copy-and-paste the correct numbers from a W2 and a few 1099s onto a 1040, for a typical no-frills middle-class-or-below taxpayer) and the situation described in the FP occurred - I'd probaby say "screw it" and drop a printout in a mailbox on the way to work the next day rather than rush off to the post office at midnight. ;-)

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[gfxguy]

I would agree with you if it were offered as a program for people who've had problems budgeting by themselves, however the fact that you have to pay penalties if you opt NOT to pay your taxes in advance ("withholdings") is proof that it's merely an advance on your presumed reliability.

It's just another one of those government scams they get away with that, if ANY other business tried something like it they'd be charged with violation of RICO laws. It's just like the Social Security pyramid scheme. The crap we let our government get away with is incredible.

It's also not so much these days to help people budget - the government doesn't care that they might be putting you out at the end of the year, it's a way to hide how much of your money they are taking. How many people, when asked how much they had to pay in taxes, actually say "I didn't have to pay anything! I actually got a refund!"

Make April 15th just another day!!!

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[boingo82]

Regardless, your statement, "We all owe at the end of the year," is incorrect - my tax rate last year was negative 8.5%. This year it will be negative again.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[gfxguy]

Yeah, I guess I was expecting most slashdotters to actually have decent paying jobs.

It's my humble opinion that people who don't pay taxes shouldn't be allowed to elect the people that decide how to spend our tax dollars, otherwise the politicians use their power to buy votes. But then that's just me.

And yes, I know you'll probably take my comment as highly inflamatory, but I think you ought to think about it for a while.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Baricom]

Actually, strangely enough, the deadline was April 17 this year.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[boingo82]

It took me 6 years to work up to that wage, and that was a management position. It is a decent job in this city. I actually made more than the median income (for females or for males) here, and my husband will be doing better than the median where we move. Of course this is a city where you can expect $9-10 an hour with a bachelor's degree, but I digress...

I'm not offended, honestly. I think you need to think about what you're saying more than I do. We do pay taxes. Just not income taxes. We pay sales taxes and property taxes just like anyone else. And really, most couples in their 20s with kids will be at the lower end of the economic scale. Statistically, households headed by people 25 and under have the lowest per capita income. Following your rules, most retired people, and most young families, would no longer be eligible to vote. What you're not taking into account is that most young families and retired folks will pay plenty of income tax, just at other phases of their lives. And honestly, don't blame me, I am not the one who set the EITC cutoffs. I just qualify. You're nearing the richest phase of your life, statistically, with 20+ years of on-the-job-experience and/or education behind you. You're going to, on average, be in a very different income bracket than I.

We earn enough on one income to own a small house, a paid-off car, with no consumer debt. Our kids are not, and have never been, in day-care. Are we supposed to put the kids with a sitter so we can work two jobs just to pay income tax? It wouldn't work - the child-care cost would offset the additional income and we'd be back at square one, only there'd be someone else raising our kids. We're living responsibly and setting up patterns - such as 401K contributions - that will ensure we're at a more comfortable (and tax-paying) bracket eventually. IMO, that's more constructive in the long run than focusing on income outright. Smart spending and smart investing will benefit us (and the government, and the economy) no matter what tax bracket we're in.

I also take slight issue with your assumption that I (and others like me) would only vote for programs that amounted in handouts for us. I have not ever voted for that. I've voted solidly Libertarian, except last Senate election I voted for the Green party candidate because he was the only one in favor of gay marriage. I have my principles. I don't vote only for things that benefit me in the short term, as I know that my economic situation won't always be what it is.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[TheoMurpse]

you'd better have a stout server.

Or a stout series of servers

Or a series of stouts.

Or the Soviet Russia joke hidden somewhere in that exchange.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

You're kinda missing the point. The 'services' they provide could EASILY be provided by the free market.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[gfxguy]

Actually, I've thought a lot about what I was saying. We didn't put our kids in daycare either (preschool, half day, but for their benefit, not ours). I really appreciate that.

But one thing you should realize is that seniors and young families are the biggest recipients of tax dollars, which is exactly what I was saying. You may vote yourself less money, but you must realize that you are in the minority. And if your tax was truly negative over eight percent, then even with sales tax and property tax you're probably near the breaking even point.

But even then I wasn't implying local elections. You should be able to vote for your governer, and it's probably in your state's constitution that it's your "right" to do so. But it's not in the U.S. constitution that it's your right to vote for president. In fact, even if you vote for president, you're really not voting for president, are you? You're voting for electors. It's up to the states to decide how they choose electors, they all just have chosen to use the popular vote.

It was also originally up to the states to decide who would represent the state in the federal government, not the electorate. The governer would choose two senators. That's the way it still should be, so even if you pay taxes you shouldn't get that vote. Then it comes down to your representative. Your representative is paid for by federal tax dollars, and his expenditures come from federal tax dollars. If you're not paying your representative's salaray, or for the expenses incurred from the bills he signs, it's hard for me to believe that you should have any say about it.

But also keep this in mind - your attitude is the exception to the rule. There are vast numbers of people in special interest groups who leach off the government and vote only to increase their own benefit. Seniors are warned, for example, in just about every single election, that republicans will take away their social security. When democrats say they want to role back the tax cuts "for the rich" to make them "pay their fair share," she's doing exactly the same thing - she's appealing to people who recieve more from the government than the the government takes from them.

There's too much to talk about here, but you surely understood my original post - if you are someone who actually pays taxes (I should have prefixed it), then you should never be getting a refund back at the end of the year. And the whole system of withholding is a scam... you ask people how much money they make in a paycheck, and they can tell you what they "take home," you ask them what they had to pay in taxes when the file their return, and they say "nothing! I'm actually getting a refund!" And they're happy about it. The whole system is geared to make people oblivious to what they are actually paying, as well as advancing the money to the government. If people had to cut their own checks to pay their tax "burden", we'd see a vastly different make up of our politicians - you might actually see a lot more libertarians.

For what it's worth, although I doubt I'll ever see it pass, I'm still pushing for the Fair Tax.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[networkBoy]

No, they can not.
Some can, sure, and that's the bloat our government has built. There are some services that a free market would be a disaster for. Granted my example is a state level example but here:
There was a time when fire departments were independent. There were times when more than one unit would show up to a fire and end up arguing who's fire it was to fight. While they were arguing, the fire continued to burn. Other times, because the fire was in a poor area, who likely couldn't pay, the response would be much slower.

In another example: (not from the US)
A person died in the hospital while in Central America. They died because the doctor wouldn't provide services without a guarantee of payment. While a family member rushed to the bank, the patient expired from a relatively simple to fix, but horrifically painful problem: Appendicitis.

Do you really want to bring these kinds of issues (back) to the US? Takes pay the firefighters and hospitals when the individual can not. Taxes pay for a police force that (at least in theory) is less prone to corruption than a private force would be. Taxes pay for a standing armed forces *(arguable, though the coast guard and boarder patrol at least are requisite).

Taxes and government are required. Not at the level they are today, but they are required at a more basic level. Our founding fathers were not idiots. (I would argue they were advanced aliens from another place, sent here to build our country).

-nB

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[GoRK]

I guess that's fine if you want to sit on the phone for two and a half months pestering them about their late 1099's.

It's really not a lot of work to re-file a 1040 if you are using tax software. Save your original, load it back up, make the change, and re-file it.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[GoRK]

Well this is outright false and on top of that it is stupid. First and foremost if you are owed a refund, you're just giving the IRS an interest free loan. Secondly, if you wait too long (3 years) without filing anything, you can never get your money back. Even if you take the 5 minutes to file a 1040EZ that lets them keep all of your money you at least get 10 years to reclaim it with a proper filing.

Now, in very rare cases it might be that you would be entitled to a refund due to having had some of your earnings withheld but also not required to file because you made only, say, $400 the entire year, but you'd still be dumb to let the IRS keep your money.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[jcnnghm]

Given the title of the topic, only fools wait until the last minute, my implication was you don't have to file by the due date, if you are owed a refund. It does make sense to forget about the deadline if, like me, you own a company, you've paid up your estimated tax, and they only owe you about $100.

The thing is, to get the $100, I'd have to spend about 10 hours going over the accounting again. So, every three years, I do all the work at once since most of the effort is duplicated anyway, and file then. It takes about 12 hours once, rather than 10 hours three times. I'm not too concerned about the $300, in the 18 hours I save I'll make a lot more than that anyway. Not everything is cut and dry, or easy.

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

You're not thinking hard enough. I'm not going to repeat myself over and over to debate the point with you, but google "anarcho-capitalist" and educate yourself.

for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[otacon]

schlep : to drag or haul (an object); to make a tedious journey (from Yiddish shlepn; cf. German schleppen)

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[Anonymous Coward]

I wondered what the heck he was trying to say there.

I think a better word is "went".

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[gEvil (beta)]

I think a better word is "went".

Ahhh, but the key here is the 'tedious journey' part, which is not conveyed at all if he simply said "I went to the post office."

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[elrous0]

...and pronounced like someone with pneumonia would pronounce "slept"

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[EricTheGreen]

Actually, the word I was using last night was "goniffs"....

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[justkarl]

I haven't heard the word "schlepping" used in a complete sentence since "Requiem for a Dream".

Re:for those of us that done speak Yiddish

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just me but the beauty of Yiddish is that every word sounds like it should. There's a natural connection there because the language expresses itself in an obvious way such that you almost don't even have to be told the meaning of the word to understand what it means because it's just kinda obvious.

same as in real life

[192939495969798999]

line backs up at post office, line backs up with turbotax. Do they have some kinda guarantee about "if you file by x, even if our systems are down, you get credit?" I doubt it, they must've anticipated this very scenario!

Re:same as in real life

[Ctrl-Z]

In real life, and online, you can get much better results by filing a day earlier.

Re:same as in real life

[tha_mink]

In real life, and online, you can get much better results by filing a day earlier. Not true with Turbo Tax, they were melted on Monday too. The meltdown's been reported on the boards since Monday morning.

Re:same as in real life

[bhalter80]

This is why I did my taxes with TaxCut in February as soon as the documents were available then as I owed money waited until Saturday to mail my return. That way there were no 4/15 surprises over how much was owed, any technical problems could be avoided and the line at the post office was fairly short. Its called planning folks its not news that taxes are due within a couple of days of 4/15. I could understand it if you were new to the country, or just started working for the first time and this is a new process for you but why do people who should know better insist on waiting until the 11th hour to even calculate the amount they are getting back or paying?

Re:same as in real life

[plover]

The big central post office in our downtown stays open past midnight with postal workers collecting refunds from a long stream of past-last-minute filers. They play the stupid stopped-clock game, claiming as long as you were in line before midnight they'll postmark it on the proper day.

I'd rather they just empty the mailbox at midnight. They should post a sign saying, "It's after 12:00. You are too late. I hope your penalty from this year reminds you to file on time next year."

Re:same as in real life

[hawg2k]

I did my taxes in February. There were multiple times in January and February where I just gave up and came back later, due to unresponsiveness.

Even if it's unreasonable to expect any company to keep up with the last minute demand, considering my experince WAY before the last minute, I think they need look into this.

If it wasn't for the fact that my bank (State Farm) has had a deal with them for two years now, where I get to use it, and electronically file, for free because I'm a customer, I'd be using TaxCut. I've always liked it better anyway.

Re:same as in real life

[ryanov]

That may be true, but there's also the option of dropping them into the mailbox. I personally have never seen a line at a mailbox, but luckily there are a few to choose from in most places.

Re:same as in real life

[fermion]

Ah, but the post office scales up in anticipation of the tax event. Surprising, seeing how it is a inefficient government agency and TurboTax is a part of the agile hight tech private sector. Went to the post office last night, they had IRS form pickups on the major arteries to the post office, as well as frequent pickups at all post office mail boxes. I was around there after 8 and the lines were not bad at all.

The turbotax thing was most likely a business decision. Buying the extra connectivity and servers was likely simply deemed to be not cost effective. Unlike the IRS and Post Office, turbotax is not going to get angry calls from legislators who are looking for any excuse to cut the budget.

Re:same as in real life

[Deadstick]

Do they have some kinda guarantee about "if you file by x, even if our systems are down, you get credit?" I doubt it

TFA says the IRS has agreed to give the filers a mulligan.

rj

Melt down

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it melted down big time last night. I tried for 4 hours to file, with no luck. I expect Intuit is going to get sued big-time over this. Lots of angry folks on the turbotax message board last night.

Re:Melt down

[aegisalpha]

Their message board was up? I think reading it will be much more entertaining than the comments here!

Re:Melt down

[LordKronos]

Well, hopefully while they are at it they sue themselves for procrastination.

Re:Melt down

[Maximum Prophet]

Nope, they just worked it out with the IRS so that people could file late.

I know people just assume that the IRS would be unreasonable, but Tax software takes so much of the load and expense off the IRS that they will do anything cost free to get people to use eFiling. Intuit might give people a refund off of the cost of eFiling if they paid extra. (in the form of a coupon for next year)

You could try to sue, but Intuit and the IRS are being so reasonable that I don't think you could win.

Re:Melt down

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right... procrastinate and then sue for your procrastination. It's the stupid American way.

Another great reason

[old_skul]

....to file for an extension. Or, better yet, file in February as soon as all the necessary paperwork comes in. Perhaps this is the gods' way of paying back Intuit for some of their indiscretions with our personal data (and software activation) a couple of years back.

Re:Another great reason

[LordKronos]

Perhaps this is the gods' way of paying back Intuit...

Paying them back by giving them so many customers they can't keep up? As a business owner, I'll gladly take some of that "punishment".

Re:Another great reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this is the gods' way of paying back Intuit for some of their indiscretions with our personal data (and software activation) a couple of years back.

Which gods? The little green ones in your wallet? Thos gods are the US' national religion, you know.

As a Hog Farmer

[ReidMaynard]

I shipped my 15% (30 hogs) early, to avoid problems just like this

Re:As a Hog Farmer

[UbuntuDupe]

So they're taxing the World of Warcraft pig farms already?

Re:As a Hog Farmer

[adyus]

You should have just sent them through the tubes...

IRS did offer an extended deadline for some

[Anonymous Coward]

For people in the recent storms, IRS is allowing an additional 48 hours. Also, the TurboTax site says they're working with the IRS so people have their returns counted as on-time.

I'm just glad I did my taxes weeks ago when the system worked, and when it was cheaper.

Turbotax Issues

[mwilliamson]

I had royal problems when I got to the very last step on turbotax, right where you click to submit to the IRS. After a good 15 second wait, I got an error about being overloaded, and to try again later. What really sucked is that I couldn't start from that point again, but instead had to re-visit the last bunch of questions I had already answered. Being their Website is so format heavy, each screen took a good 10-15 seconds to draw on this 1.8 Ghz box, so the entire process was quite annoying. After 3 tries and some minor sheet-rock damage, I had to print the whole damn thing out and drive across town to our main post office. To add insult to injury, turbotax took my money before this last step was available. This sucks. I got ripped off, and I wont't get my tax refund in the usual week and 1/2 since I had to mail it. (at least a got a refund though...albeit little bitty)

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Applekid]

"(at least a got a refund though...albeit little bitty)"

Because someone has to say it:

Getting a refund compared to having to pay is bad. The government collected too much in taxes (well, more than they are required to by law). This money was denied to you throughout the year. Money which could have been earning interest, used for investments, hell, eating out a few more nights a month.

You get your refund back interest-free from the gov. It's really no different than if you left a $20 in your coat pocket during the winter only to find it the next year. Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.

Then again, there are penalties imposed if you fix your W-4 (and other forms) so that they don't withhold anything and you have to pay all your tax once a year. I think that's too bad.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Paulrothrock]

For the love of god! You've had four and half months to do your damn taxes! Why are you waiting if you were expecting a refund?!?

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, you could do like I do and (a) have 2 kids, (b) own a house (aka a mortgage), and (c) give at least 10% of your income to charity, and then, with itemized deductions, (d) end up with taxes low enough that, due to the REFUNDABLE Child Tax Credit, you GET PAID to be a US Taxpayer. My federal withholding was $0.00 last year, yet I got a $1300 refund this year. Got $1200 last year too... Oh... I filed (electronically) in February too, got my "refund" in March.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that you have to pay 90% of what you owed the last year in order to prevent penalties. That is unless you are absolutely sure you will owe less.

Ideally if you make the same amount or more than the previous year you should pay 90% of what you owed last year and nothing more. Be prepared to pay the difference at the end. No penalties though.

It's so tricky if you don't know what your income will be. I'm self-employed and constantly struggle with my quarterly payments because my income can vary a lot. I very often pay way too much or way too little. Most often I say screw it and just pay the penalties at the end (although I think the penalties may add up if you do that too many years in a row). Is there any simple software that will help me with this?

I fucking hate the way the tax system works. It's too complicated and I waste too much time on it.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[mwilliamson]

I sometimes do a little contract work so have my employer withold some extra to offset it. The amount I do is variable, so I'm happy to get close to "breaking even", on either side. This year I got $400 back. A couple years ago I had to pay $600. ...close nuff!

Re:Turbotax Issues

[mwilliamson]

Dude, $480...lets say I can manage %10. That's 48/12, or $4/month over the span of 3 months. We're talking about a $12 difference. If I expected a significant refund I'd of had a little more motivation.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Zenaku]

That's all true, but I'd still rather get a refund every year than owe. The amount of interest that I would earn by having that money in my pocket throughout the year is not significant. In reality, it is non-existent, because (and here I'm just being honest with myself) I'd only end up pissing it away on small luxuries. The amount of extra money in my pocket each paycheck would only be enough to make me dine out more, upgrade my cable package, or buy a new ipod or something.

And then when my tax bill came at last, it would feel like a hardship.

This is because each time I get paid, I pay my mortgage and bills, transfer a fixed amount into my various savings and investment accounts, and consider whatever is left to be mine to play with.

By getting a refund at tax time, I may have missed out on the interest, but the "found" money is large enough that I won't be inclined to waste it -- I'll make a major purchase, pay off a loan, or -- now that the amount is big enough to mean something to me -- put it into an interest-bearing account or investment.

Plus, the fact that I'm getting a refund is motivation to file in February, and avoid this whole April 15th mess.

So yeah, giving the government an interest-free loan is mathematically foolish -- but when you take psychology into account it can be better than owing them.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[LordKronos]

What really sucked is that I couldn't start from that point again, but instead had to re-visit the last bunch of questions I had already answered.

In the past, I've always used tax programs from other companies. This year, I decided to give TurboTax online a try since I got it free (fed and state, + both efiles) as a State Farm customers. What you've mentioned was my biggest complaint about their software. You can't jump to exactly the point you want to.

If you own a business, then the entire section for business questions is a single bullet point. After I filled out my entire return, I remembered a couple of business expenses that I forgot to include. So, after I figured out my adjusted figures, I went to change them in TurboTax. But since the entire business section is a single bullet point, you have to go through that entire Q&A process again. Now, even though that wastes a bunch of time and gets annoying, it wouldn't be so bad if you just clicked "Next...Next...Next" and left the boxes at their default values. However, in some parts of the process there are no "Next" buttons. You are presented with "Yes" and "No" buttons, so now you have to read the text to see WHAT is being asked, then remember what your answer is supposed to be. I experienced this problem in several other (non business related) sections of the program.

My second complaint is that they make it so hard for you to see the forms that are being generated...you have to actual go and "print" a PDF copy of your entire return. What would be ideal is if you could view any form at any time during the process. A number of years ago, one of their competitors (though I don't recall which one) also had a very nice option where you could view the form, click on a field, and then jump to where in the Q&A process that value came from. If it was a calculated value, they told you what it was calculated from and you could then jump to any of those items.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[UbuntuDupe]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that you have to pay 90% of what you owed the last year in order to prevent penalties.

I'd like to know as well. I'll have to check when I get home, but this year I owed them about $800, which I believe was more than 10% of what I should have paid them total over last year, and TurboTax didn't list any penalty line. Of course, in my case, it was a W-2 job, so my employer chose the deduction based on an IRS-approved formula and on what I told them.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I claim two exemptions on my W-4 and then only one on my return. Has been working out for me for years. Seems the more money I make the less I owe at the end. This year it was $21.

Posting anon to avoid skynet.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Good job living paycheck to paycheck, paying too much interest, and not saving for you or your kids' futures.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[vorpal22]

Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.

In my opinion, feeling good is highly underrated. If the psychological joy of getting money back on taxes outweighs the joy from interest incurred from having that money early for someone, then I don't see a problem. God knows we pay enough in entertainment costs in a year to make ourselves feel good.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[plover]

Then again, there are penalties imposed if you fix your W-4 (and other forms) so that they don't withhold anything and you have to pay all your tax once a year.

IANATA, but if you're that concerned you can file estimated taxes on a quarterly basis without penalty. At least that way you have up to three months of earning power with your money before you hand it over.

Because someone has to say it:

Ahh, but you're not looking at the big picture. I wouldn't berate anyone for a $100 refund. I'd congratulate him on good planning, because he really didn't overpay by too much. The lost opportunity cost of his $100 over an entire year (to be generous, let's say $10.00) is definitely not worth the headache of setting up anything more complex.

To set up a quarterly filing structure and calculate everything to the gnat's eyelash would cost me many hundreds of dollars worth of my time (or hundreds of dollars worth of accounting expense.) To me, it's simply not economical to be that accurate. Plus, if I structure my filing to pay right on the very edge to squeeze out those last pennies of profit, I run the very real risk of running short and incurring a penalty, perhaps due to circumstances beyond my control (witness this very story.) But any penalty for any reason will more than offset any gains I may have made by reinvesting the overage.

And don't forget that investment is not without cost, such as transaction fees. Not that I'd call my broker and ask him to buy $100 worth of stock and to take the $9.00 transaction fee out of the $100, but I do have to figure the cost of the transaction into the amount of profit any trade will make.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[kooshvt]

After 3 tries and some minor sheet-rock damage, I had to print the whole damn thing out and drive across town to our main post office. To add insult to injury, turbotax took my money before this last step was available. This sucks. I got ripped off, and I wont't get my tax refund in the usual week and 1/2 since I had to mail it. (at least a got a refund though...albeit little bitty)

You do realize that if you are getting a refund, you have up to three years to file your return. The April 15th deadline does not apply. I believe states have their own refund deadline policies. They do not fine you for not giving you your money back soon enough, but they won't hold it for you forever.

From irs.gov:

There is no penalty for failure to file a tax return if a refund is due. But by waiting too long to file, you can lose your refund. In order to receive a refund, the return must be filed within 3 years of the due date.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[krbvroc1]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that you have to pay 90% of what you owed the last year in order to prevent penalties. That is unless you are absolutely sure you will owe less. It is 100% for most filers, and 110% for certain high income filers. If your income is uncertain, as long as you pay four equal installments equal to 100% (or 110%) of what your taxes liability was the PREVIOUS year, you will not be penalized.

The 90% you are thinking is something else, but may apply. You avoid the penalty if your paid 90% of what you owe THIS year. The 100% (and 110%) applies to LAST years taxes.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Lugae]

People always look at me like I'm crazy when I explain that between state taxes and federal refunds I break almost exactly even. They think that it's the worst thing in the world that I don't get a refund. Fact is, I consider breaking even to be about the best scenario I could be in. Only better thing would be if I got back $1 fron each (I'd give them $2 to not have to mail in a check).

Re:Turbotax Issues

[soft_guy]

It's really no different than if you left a $20 in your coat pocket during the winter only to find it the next year. Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket. What is the point of money if not to make me FEEL GOOD? I got a refund this year and I was happy about it. Having an extra $20 a week throughout the year might be nice too, but having a nice chunk all at once is also nice.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I filed on a 1.2GHz notebook running Windows XP, running the first mobile Radeon chip. I really didn't have any problems performance problems, though I should have if the problem is as bad as you suggest. But I finished my work on Friday.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[AK Marc]

Getting a refund compared to having to pay is bad.

No, it's not. The amount I would have made in interest is trivial. The trouble it would have caused if I had to pay what I was refunded would have caused great hardship. It's like an insurance payment. I let them take out a little to much to make sure I don't have to pay back extra later. I feel good getting the lump sum, and the interest it would have earned is negligable. So it works out well for everyone.

You sound like you hate the idea on an emotional level (aka, you hate the government), rather than examining it rationally. Because people are naturally risk-averse, it is expected that they will want refunds for safety.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[npsimons]

In my opinion, feeling good is highly underrated. If the psychological joy of getting money back on taxes outweighs the joy from interest incurred from having that money early for someone, then I don't see a problem. God knows we pay enough in entertainment costs in a year to make ourselves feel good.

Too true. I'm usually of the mind of "refunds are just an interest free loan to the government" so when I found out my wife and I owed a signifigant (to us) chunk of change, I looked at it as a positive. I had that money stuffed in a couple of different investment vehicles, making interest! My wife, on the other hand, actually started crying a bit because we weren't getting a return we could stick into savings. The moral of the story? I now have my withholding fixed so that I not only have the proper deductions (that was why we didn't pay enough taxes) and a little extra is pulled out of my paycheck too. What's a couple of percentage points in interest between a husband and wife? Besides, I can also take the positive view of withholding in that it is forced savings. Not that I usually have any problems saving. But if it keeps my wife happy . . .

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, thanks. Yeah, that's the part that sucks for me because some years I may make only 25% of the previous year and it would be impossible to pay 100%. Then sometimes I'll get a huge payment right at the end of the year as other companies are trying to clear their books. I have tried to annualize my taxes myself but it seemed impossibly hard.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[That's Unpossible!]

Uhhh you're already ahead by putting money into savings from each paycheck. Why not calculate what you really owe the government more closely, and put THAT extra money into savings each month as well?

The real reason we're still having the government take money out of each paycheck (even though this idea was only enacted due to WW2) is because they know there would be much more pressure to reduce taxes if people actually had to cut a check each year for the full amount. Most people don't even know how much money they're paying in taxes! They only know "how much I GET from the government!"

Re:Turbotax Issues

[PMuse]

On the one hand: Getting a refund compared to having to pay is bad. . . . This money was denied to you throughout the year.

On the other hand: In the years when I get a refund, it never causes a crisis in my April (and May and June) cash flow. When I owe, however . . . Let's just say that the few bucks of interest I might have made is not worth the risk of a cash flow crisis. Set me up for that modest refund every time!

Re:Turbotax Issues

[b0s0z0ku]

You avoid the penalty if your paid 90% of what you owe THIS year.

Technically more than 90% OR under $1000 is fine.

-b.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[CronoCloud]

It's too complicated and I waste too much time on it.

It's complicated for you because your circumstances are complicated. You have the benefit of being your own boss, having a more complex tax situation is one of the drawbacks of that.

My situation is simple so I get to use the 1040EZ.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Zenaku]

Why not calculate what you really owe the government more closely, and put THAT extra money into savings each month as well?

Aren't you asking me what I just explained?

Look, the amount of interest I could earn on that extra money over the course of a year is peanuts. If I was inclined to do so, I could sit down and figure out exactly how much deductible mortgage interest I'd be paying over the course of the year, decide up-front how much money to give to charity, make some educated guesses about how my investments will perform, and then adjust my W-4 accordingly, and devote the difference specifically to be saved instead of spent.

But what do I get for my trouble? Enough interest after a year to finance an appetizer or two at my local T.G.I. Fridays? Hell, for the time it would take me to estimate my tax liability that carefully, I could work a couple of extra billable hours and net more money than I'd gain by doing all this fastidious number-crunching.

It's like this -- Every day when I get home and change out of my work attire, I empty my pocket change into a big jar on my nightstand. This jar is not magical in any way, and thus it is not interest-bearing. Sure, it would make more financial sense if I walked to the bank every night and deposited this pocket change into a savings account (it's down the block, so gasoline is not an issue), but I don't. I wait until the jar is full, when it's worth my time and energy to do something with it.

The situation with my tax refund differs only in that the amount involved is bigger -- in the same way that a bacterium is bigger than a quark.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[ahecht]

TurboTax does let you directly edit and view your forms. It's in one of the menus at the top (there are actually two options: "View Forms" which shows you all available forms, and "View my Return" which shows you just the forms in your return). You can even edit the forms and it will update the calculations in real time.

Re:Turbotax Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, just because it's not hard for you means there is no problem!

Rock on blessed ignorance!

refund

[phynodedotnet]

So should they get their $50 (or whatever) online filing fee returned? That's a rip off. LMAO at Intuit.

Re:refund

[will_die]

Don't know about turbo tax but since it is quicken they may charge you. However with TaxCut they only charge you for electronic filing once it has been accepted by the IRS. I initially electroniclly filed with TaxCut and the IRS rejected it because some of the forms given to me differed in addresses, so it was easier to mail it all in, and I was not charged any money for my try.

Re:refund

[springbox]

TurboTax doesn't charge for filing online; you only have to pay for the software that you used.

Re:refund

[Anonymous Coward]

WRONG, turbo tax charges 15.99 for federal and state electronic filing each, and if choose to take that fee out of your refund for federal they take ANOTHER $30 bucks to process the refund to remove that fee.

Procrastinators, will they ever learn?

[tehSpork]

I work for a public library and am always surprised at the number of people who wait until the day before taxes are due to even obtain the tax forms, much less spend the time filling them out. The other thing that amazes me is that we have a gigantic impossible to miss bright yellow sign in the middle of the building announcing where the tax forms are and most of these people still make the trek to the circulation desk to ask where the forms are. Perhaps there is some correlation here.

This story does explain the two separate people asking me about why TurboTax wasn't accepting their return though. It sure as heck beats the BOFH Excuse of the day. :)

Re:Procrastinators, will they ever learn?

[virtual_mps]

The other thing that amazes me is that we have a gigantic impossible to miss bright yellow sign in the middle of the building announcing where the tax forms are and most of these people still make the trek to the circulation desk to ask where the forms are. My library puts the forms between the inner and outer doors, so you have to trip over them on the way in. Probably cuts the number of questions in half. :-D

Re:Procrastinators, will they ever learn?

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Perhaps we should contract the chimpanzees to help us with this crisis.

Re:Procrastinators, will they ever learn?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am on the other boat. I filed my taxes early, but found out that one of my mutual fund companies has been the procrastinators. At the end of the day, I'll have to file an adjustment. Essentially if all of the companies delayed sending in their tax receipts until the last day, then there is really only a 2 weeks for me to file my taxes.

Up here in Canada, efiling taxes is free. I used a free tax package this year. The government site process the filing. I also filed my adjustment for last year's taxes using the government's webpage and got a refund+interest. They pay me more than my bank. :(

Why Wait?

[Paulrothrock]

Why not do your taxes in the first couple weeks of January? All your information is fresh in your mind, and you've still got plenty of time. If you owe money, wait to file until the last minute, so all you've got to do is come home from work and click a couple buttons. If you're getting a return, file immediately. I did that this year and got my return in less than a week.

Why people procrastinate on something like this is ridiculous. If the average American put half the time into doing their taxes as they did watching TV, they'd have these things filed before the first weekend of the year. This isn't to say that there doesn't need to be reforms, (John Edwards's proposal to have the IRS mail the forms pre-filled is genius, in my opinion) but a lot of the problems people have with taxes is their own stupidity.

Re:Why Wait?

[Texodore]

Our W-2 (report of what we made - required when filing the return) doesn't arrive until Jan. 31st or a little after. The earliest most of us can do our taxes is early in February. And if you're like me and your former company filed an amended W-2, you get to wait a bit longer or file an amended return.

But yeah, that's still 2 and a half months.

Re:Why Wait?

[TheRealFixer]

Why not do your taxes in the first couple weeks of January?

Because most companies wait until the very last possible moment to send their W-2's out.

Re:Why Wait?

[PhoenixFlare]

Because most companies wait until the very last possible moment to send their W-2's out.

And the "last possible moment" still gives 2 months or so of time. After working phone support for Intuit during tax season (NEVER. AGAIN.) a few years ago, I can't say I have any sympathy for the procrastinators.

Re:Why Wait?

[will_die]

I usally don't get my W-2 until late January then it takes until lat Feburary for the other forms to get in. I fill out the forms (electronicly) then wait for revisions to various forms which then require I make changes to the tax forms. So come start of April I have had a few revisions and I figure most are stable and then I submit my taxes.

Re:Why Wait?

[TheRealFixer]

Oh, I agree. My taxes were done the day after I got the W-2 in the mail. Just responding to the argument about doing them the first couple weeks in January.

Re:Why Wait?

[Rob the Bold]

I can't say I have any sympathy for the procrastinators.

If you really filed that early, you might investigate amending your return to claim the phone tax credit. A number of changes to the tax code weren't really in place in January. This was the year of the procrastinator, not the pig -- thanks to congress and the IRS.

Re:Why Wait?

[springbox]

Because it's painfully boring and somewhat lengthy (especially the double checking.)

Re:Why Wait?

[Thyamine]

I guess the reverse of this is why do it early? You get no benefit out of having it done early unless for some reason you can't sleep at night knowing that it still needs to be done. Do we get some sort of bonus for having it done early? Perhaps I'm missing some 10% money back thing the government is doing, but I waited until this weekend, spent maybe an hour using TurboTax's website, and I was done. Local taxes I had to do by hand, and spent maybe 10 minutes. And yes, I did get money back, so it wasn't like I was worried about having to pay. Perhaps it's because I don't have anything crazy going on with investments or buying/revamping/selling real estate, but why all the rush to get it done so early?

Re:Why Wait?

[Paulrothrock]

I fill out all the forms I can and then, as I get information, I enter it and file it. Once I get all my W-2s and my interest statements from my credit union and 401(k), I e-file my taxes. I was done by the third week of January this year.

What I don't understand is why companies need to file the W-2s. Doesn't the government already have all this information? Why can't they send you a statement?

Re:Why Wait?

[maxume]

Some people are bizarrely driven to go ahead and ask for money that is there for the asking. It comes down to "Why not file asap?".

why last minute

[PureCreditor]

*every* year on tax filing deadline, either there's a super long line at the Post Office, or the e-filing sites are overloaded. can't people file a bit earlier? even a week ago would've been much better.

the earlier you get your refund, the more interest it can accrue in your savings account as opposed to an interest-free loan to Uncle Sam...

no webserver is expected to survive if you way overload it. you can't really blame Intuit/Turbotax on this one.

Re:why last minute

[Harlockjds]

>the earlier you get your refund, the more interest it can accrue in your savings account as opposed to an interest-free loan to Uncle Sam...

assuming you get a refund, personally i like to wait as long as possible before paying the government (which means i didn't give them a interest-free loan like most americans).

But even I'm smart enough to file a few days ahead of the final day

Re:why last minute

[tha_mink]

*every* year on tax filing deadline, either there's a super long line at the Post Office, or the e-filing sites are overloaded. can't people file a bit earlier? even a week ago would've been much better. Post office lines are one thing. Being a company that sells e-file service with no capacity to actually um...efile...is a whole different matter. If you don't get a refund and want to wait to give your money away till the last possible moment and there's a company who claims you can, why wouldn't you. Plus, if you tried to file on Turbo Tax's website last night, they never even posted a warning that they were experiencing problems. With the size of their company, one would think they'd be able to handle the load that they KNEW was coming. They sold over 10 million copies of the standalone product, plus based on last year's numbers, they KNEW what the volume would be like on their site. There is no excuse for not being prepared for the load. Plus, at the very least, they should have posted warnings all over their site so anyone coming to the site would know about the problems.

Re:why last minute

[Maximum Prophet]

no webserver is expected to survive if you way overload it. you can't really blame Intuit/Turbotax on this one.

I do size load estimation for Unix servers for a living. Yes, I can blame Intuit for this one. They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache all the returns, then feed them to their servers a few at a time. Their software could have even done encryption so that Google wouldn't have access to the actual data. There are ways to handle super large peak loads.

Re:why last minute

[PureCreditor]

load-balancing using Google as a backup-solution isn't a business plan. Do you see NYSE or Nasdaq contract out to Google if there are huge moves in the market ? Do you see Visa and Mastercard contract out to Google if everyone is swiping during winter shopping season ?

Re:why last minute

[maxume]

And yet people use Akamai.

Re:why last minute

[Maximum Prophet]

Google was just an example of a huge company that provides data collection and crunching services. Substitute your favorite computer services company if you'd like, and yes, large non-computer companies do contract out for computing services during crunch time.

FedEx pays IBM beaucoup bucks to keep a data center ready just in case their main center is destroyed by a tornado or the New Madrid fault. (at least they did a few years ago) One has to imagine that IBM sells the computing services to others with the understanding that if FedEx needs them, they get them.

Unfortunatly for the NYSE, wild swings in stock prices happen so unpredictably, and are over so soon, that this kind of outsourcing doesn't really make sense. I don't know what Visa and MasterCard do. I'm sure they have to deal with peak loads and have a plan in place either inhouse or out.

Re:why last minute

[Anonymous Coward]

cache all the returns, then feed them to their servers a few at a time

Bad long term idea in the tax business. We sometimes actually do something like this in-house when necessary, just let people transmit in returns, but not giving them any acks back, processing them later. The problem is that people have to get their acks back, and if they don't they get a little testy... For good reason too. If you efile, you expect your refund to be with you sometime in the next couple weeks. If you went with this solution, we would have equalized our load all year round, and efiled people's returns 6 months after they transmitted just to help the load out.

Keep in mind that these peak loads are for several weeks at a time, and that all the returns need to be processed and sent within a short period, regardless of load. If they don't get sent within a day or so, you're as good as dead in the water.

It's so unfair

[Aaron_Pike]

If only there were some way to file in March, or even February. But that could only happen if employers had a deadline to send out W-2 forms by like the end of January.

Re:It's so unfair

[jellomizer]

As someone who always files in February. I can say it is a lot less stress. Then waiting the last minute. I can take weeks gathering all my papers going threw my expenses and logging what I think I can deduct. Then I go to the financial advisor who actually does the tax work (which is far less hassle then Turbo Tax) because I give them all the paper work and they fill it out and give you advice like My Computer isn't tax detuctable if you did then it would be a Red Flag for an Audit. Then by April I have already gotten the Refund check and/or paid my due taxes. Now with all this hassle seems light years away from me.

Re:It's so unfair

[Rob the Bold]

If only there were some way to file in March, or even February. But that could only happen if employers had a deadline to send out W-2 forms by like the end of January.

I know you're being sarcastic, and I don't mean to harsh your mellow, but 1099s are not necessarily ready by the end of January. And even if they are, it's good practice to wait a while to see if they get updated. Easier to procrastinate than to file twice (once the original return, once for the amended return). I've gotten restated 1099s in April -- after I'd filed my 1040. And that made me a sad panda.

Re:It's so unfair

[Name Anonymous]

If one is using ta software, sometime in early February one should enter all the data into the ta software and have all the paperwork in a file folder. When one is fairly certain they are getting no more updates (to the forms or the software) then they should go through the taxx stuff again and file (or wait if they owe money).

Re:It's so unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, certain tax forms (such as certain Schedule K-1 forms) do not have to be sent to individuals until the end of March. I didn't have all the necessary forms to file my taxes until the first week of April.

Re:It's so unfair

[kindbud]

They don't even do that anymore. My employer sent us all a link 1st week of January to a fracking website run by the paycheck processor where we could print out our own W-2 forms. Bunch of n00bs. Did they really think we'd print this shit out at home on our own paper?

Re:It's so unfair

[no haters]

I had the exact same issue. The company issuing the Schedule K-1 form was running so late they FAXED it to me on March 31st. I could not complete my taxes until then. Granted I still sent them in a week ago, but aside from the K-1, my forms are fairly simple. If someone had large and varied investments/personal business assets to go through it could be a serious time constraint.

Netcraft confirms

[ceeam]

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.turb otax.com

May it be related to moving from Solaris to Linux last summer?

[/me hides]

Re:Netcraft confirms

[__aaanwh8370]

TurboTax.com does not host the online TurboTax application - that's the brochure-ware for turbotax. Those servers also do not host Intuit's electronic filing services (which are hosted indenpendently from turbo tax online as well).

The TurboTax web app is hosted @ www.turbotaxonline.com and still runs on Solaris (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.turb otaxonline.com)

Re:Netcraft confirms

[Anonymous Coward]

For the fanboys out there, I'm sorry to say the operating system is irrelevant. I've seen bad webapps screw up pretty much every OS out there. Solaris as an OS is actually very good if used well, just like many other OSes. Just my 2 cents.

Re:Yet another reason...

[Opportunist]

Damn right.

I did mine already last year!

Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[cyberkahn]

I used Turbo Tax for the last time this year. This was my second year and in retrospect it is just not worth it. Over $60 for the software, then it's I think $30 dollars to e-file, which I didn't do (certified mail). The total cost of software plus all the hours of my personal time to me it just isn't worth it. I am going to pay to have someone do it for me next year.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[CastrTroy]

Wow, that's expensive. I'm using uFile in Canada, and it's $16 to fill in your return, and submit it electronically. All inclusive.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[Enuratique]

While I can see your point/frustrations, my Dad turned me on to TurboTax this year. His strategy is to keep his eyes peeled on the weekend adverts for TurboTax Basic version (usually gets it around $15 at CostCo). He's been using it for 8 years now so all the tedious boilerplate information gets imported from last year's .tax file (assuming you back those up from year to year). So then it's as simple as inputing the information from this year's W2, preparing any financial investment numbers for capital gains taxes (I use Fidelity Investments as my broker and I was able to suck that information off the Intertubes - no typing or calculation necessary), and itemizing deductions (since I'm not a major property owner, I took the standard deduction right off the bat). All told, it took 15 minutes to do my Federal tax return. Oh, and we send it via the mail so no rapage on the eFile fee.

The state taxes are easy enough to do on your own that I don't feel it's worth getting the Deluxe version of TurboTax.

A good use of $15 if you ask me.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[Sax Maniac]

That's why you should use TaxAct, which is either free for printing, or someting like $9 with one e-file. TurboTax and TaxCut have slowly ratcheted up the price over the years and not gotten any better.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[wolfemi1]

Well, whatever you do, don't go to Jackson Hewitt or H&R Block. I had the experience of going to JH last year, and I kid you not, they just have a "tax preparer" (who is not an accountant) use what amounts to a copy of TurboTax to do your return. And then they charge you $150.

If you're going to get your taxes done by someone, I would recommend a local small business/CPA, as they will likely actually KNOW tax codes and be able to suggest things you might otherwise miss.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[shabble]

Wow, that's expensive. I'm using uFile in Canada, and it's $16 to fill in your return, and submit it electronically. All inclusive.

In the UK if[1] you have to file a tax return, the government provide free online software as a viable alternative to the list of reccommended software at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/efiling/sa_efiling/soft_dev .htm (some of which is also free.)

[1] Not everyone has to file a return - in fact the government is trying to reduce the amount of tax return 'paperwork' they need, unusually.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[CastrTroy]

Our tax applications are usually free for those who make under $25000. I wish there was a free solution offered by the government, even if it was just webforms that looked like the paper forms. I chose to go with uFile this year because I picked up a wife and kid, and I wasn't familiar with the extra paperwork. In earlier years I just did it on paper, and it wasn't that hard. I only wish there was way to submit it online without paying some third party corporation.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[PlatyPaul]

$60 is a bit of a ripoff.

Incidentally, though it flies in the face of the license for the software, it is possible to install TurboTax on any number of machines, including those which you do not own, and use it concurrently on all of them. Clearly, they intended people to use this "feature" for multiple filings or data transfer in the same household, but doesn't this seem like a ridiculously pirate-able situation?

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[Reziac]

Here in the States, if you go to IRS.GOV, the very first link on the page is to the "free e-file" info (http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00. html) or you can go directly to http://www.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp?ck.

Generally if you made under $52k you can get free federal tax-prep and efiling, and about half the states are in on the free prep/efile thing too. Some companies have restrictions based on your age, why I have no idea.

Note: you MUST go from the IRS site to the free efiling site to get the cheap/free rate. If you just go directly to the tax-prep site without going to IRS.GOV first, some will charge you the full regular price.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[bongk]

Wow that is very expensive.

I've been using TaxAct since like 2001. I spend $19.95 to download the federal and one state module, and the $19.95 includes one free Federal electronic filing. And I think it would have been under an additional $10 to file my State online as well (I'm too cheap though, so I mailed it.)

I've heard that they audit a higher percentage of electronically filed returns, presumably because its easier/the cost per audit is cheaper for an electronically filed return, but I don't know if any of that is true.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[salimma]

Wow, I paid just over $30 to file using TaxAct online. They even have an option where you don't pay in advance, but let them take their cut from the refund.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[CronoCloud]

Some companies have restrictions based on your age, why I have no idea.

It's part of the deal the IRS made with the tax prep people. Originally, the IRS wanted to release their own software and alllow everyone to file for free using free software/website. But the tax prep companies got wind of it and did their whole "private sector is better than the gubment" and bribed Congress to stop them and the IRS is now forbidden from doing their own software or offering their own free filing service.

Then the tax prep companies could keep making lots of money to do something that saves the government money. I remember at one time to e-file (in the early days) you had to pay $200. Well that pissed the IRS off and after finger pointing and whatnot, "some" people get to file free, but only by going through the IRS website and getting redirected to the tax preparers website. as you posted. So the IRS at least gets some people (senior citizens and low wage folks) free e-filing and the tax preparers still get to make money of the more well off folks they scare with their ads (If you let us do your taxes you'll be less likely to get audited and you'll get more money)

I wish that law would get repealed so the IRS could put HR block out of business. Government hatred bankrolled by corporations.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[Reziac]

Ah yes, I'd forgotten the backstory on this. I totally agree -- the gov't should have said tough shit, it's not *our* job to make customers for you. Offer value-added services, such as accepting liability for mistakes, if you want folks' business.

But in most cases the young and elderly do NOT get free filing -- the free-file-eligible age range is usually from 20 to 57 (with the upper age limit varying from 50 to 70) and if you're older or younger than that, you have to pay. So the people LEAST likely to make a good income are most likely to be required to pay for efiling -- WTF??!

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[Matthew Bafford]

Wow, I paid just over $30 to file using TaxAct online. They even have an option where you don't pay in advance, but let them take their cut from the refund.

$13 for me - and that was just for the state efile (federal was free).

The option to deduct the file cost from refund option was not a good deal as it required you to allow the intermediate for your refund (HSBC, I think?) to skim another $10 off of the refund amount.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[CronoCloud]

But in most cases the young and elderly do NOT get free filing -- the free-file-eligible age range is usually from 20 to 57 (with the upper age limit varying from 50 to 70) and if you're older or younger than that, you have to pay.

Ahh, the lower limit is probably due to students being claimed on their parents returns on not making enough money to have to file. The upper limit is probably due to some states having free tax services for senior citizens. Looooong before Illinois offered e-filing or before that phone filing they offered free tax services for older folks. They could take their forms and info down to a location and get them done.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[rmcd]

Perhaps you weren't a user several years ago when Intuit restricted Turbo Tax use to a single machine. They got hell for it. I wrote a letter to the CEO complaining about it and got a phone call from Intuit! Here was Intuit's take on the situation (a statement in May 2003 from Intuit):

"All in all, this was a solid tax season for us," said Bennett. "We grew faster than the industry and were successful in driving customers to new, higher-end offerings, though product activation didn't perform as we'd expected. Intuit has a long heritage of doing right by customers, and some of our customers didn't have the great experience they expect from Intuit. In addition, we didn't get the revenue and profit growth we expected. Therefore, we've decided to discontinue product activation next season." Bennett noted that next year, the company would include in-product technology to unlock marketing and trial versions of TurboTax products.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[Reziac]

Ah. Tho rather an assumption about the elderly -- frex, here you can get free tax service, but you have to be 65 or older. Leaves rather a gap for most people!

Guess I need to change my birthday so I'll go directly from 52 to 65 ;)

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[aap]

I use the online version of TurboTax, which works fine in Linux (though it complains a bit), and for federal-only it cost about $20 total with efile. I do the state ones on paper because I don't feel like paying $60 extra for two states.

Re:Turbo Tax: Pain in the rear

[nolife]

I have been using TaxAct for years as well. It is only $9 something more for the State e-file like you stated. I did it because I was too lazy to mail it.

I wanted to use the online version this year which is even cheaper but they do not support importing previous years information from the download version into the online version.

Re:for those of us that "done" speak Yiddish

[UbuntuDupe]

I think the only one who done speak Yiddish is Colin Powell.

Yes, that joke is horribly offensive, but it makes up for it by being really funny.

SMS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I delivered my taxes here in Norway a couple of days ago.
First a piece of paper arrived with the government's estimate of my taxes.
Then I sent them an SMS from my phone letting them know their estimate was correct.

And thats that. Simple, efficient.

Re:SMS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to move to Norway!

Re:SMS ?

[siriuskase]

I don't know why the IRS doesn't just send a bill to American taxpayers. It's been suggested. They have enough information to do this for most taxpayers. Instead, we all have to do the paperwork, send it in, and they check the bottom line with their own calculations. Why not the other way around? I guess a lot of people would just pay without verifying or they might not notifiy the IRS of an error that would cost them money.

Obligatory Simpson's Quote

[CastrTroy]

Would you look at those morons... I paid my taxes over a year ago!

Re:Obligatory Simpson's Quote

[LordKronos]

Thank you!! For once, someone that gets the Homer quote right (other than the added "Would you", but I'll overlook that because it's not crucial to proper presentation of the quote).

I keep seeing people say something like - Homer: I paid my taxes last year.

Saying it that way just doesn't convey the humor of Homer not realizing you have to pay EVERY year.

Re:Obligatory Simpson's Quote

[CastrTroy]

I can't take all the credit, I just Googled and copied the quote from somewhere else, and I couldn't remember the exact wording myself. I agree that the extra "look at those morons" is needed, especially when you take it out of the context of what's going on in the show. It also works really well for this situation, with all those morons filing on the last minute.

Not Completely.

[hal2814]

The E-File portion of TurboTax melted down. The rest of it worked just fine. I printed out my return and mailed it off from the post office in my area that stays open late on tax day. I even made a last-minute adjustment (found a receipt for a charitable contribution I forgot about) before I printed it off. Given that there's at least one post office in most areas that stayed open until midnight on tax day, there should've still been options better than hoping Intuit got their act together before midnight.

A lack of planning on your part....

[DaveV1.0]

Maybe they should not have waited until the last minute. I finished my taxes and got my refund over a month ago. There is absolutely no excuse for waiting until the last minute to file.

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[Notquitecajun]

Except when I have to pay the government money. No thanks, but that little bit of interest is MINE. And there's a handy place to put my mail... MY MAILBOX.

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[Anonymous Coward]

You and 100 other people were just itching to preach this. How's about this for an excuse: you don't know me, fuck you! If you pay for a service it better well work.

The customer is always right: Intuit should at least refund people if the fucking e-file service doesn't work and/or isn't timely. It's speed/reliability/ease of use their customers pay for. When they actually decide to file doesn't enter into it... unless it's a truly unreasonable margin, and 1 day (or even 4 hours) is not an unreasonable margin for something that takes 10 minutes for most people. A deadline is a deadline: that works in both directions, shithead. Shove your comment straight up your ass.

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[otis wildflower]

There is absolutely no excuse for waiting until the last minute to file.

You're wrong.

If you owe extra $$$, it pays to hold onto that money until the last possible moment. In theory, it's earning interest up until the IRS cashes the check.

In my case, it was just sheer procrastination and dread because I owed $$$ to 2 states + the fed.

Grrrr.

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[greg1104]

There is absolutely no excuse for waiting until the last minute to file.

It's widely recognized that being lost in the gigantic mass of filers who put their returns in at the last minute reduces your chances of being selected for an audit. Unless you're getting a fat refund check (in which case you're a different class of idiot), anyone who sends their return in even a day before the deadline is being foolish.

For example, a random web search quickly finds "5 ways to avoid an audit": if you are concerned about a potential audit, never file until the last minute. It won't hurt and can only decrease your chances of being selected.. You'll find similar advice in most tax recommendations if you read up on the subject a bit.

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[DaveV1.0]

Funny, but from what I understand from the IRS most audits are triggered by computer. Being part of the last minute rush doesn't help at all. A few are triggered by strange claims, but even then, those are flagged by computer.

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[DaveV1.0]

Unless your tax bill is in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, it pays less than $5.00 to keep the money.

Don't spend it in one place, ok?

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[greg1104]

Conventional wisdom is that there is a yearly quota for returns to audit, and once it's reached they stop asking the computer for more. You can read about it any number of places; here are three sources:

http://schmidtwestergard.com/articles/filinglate.h tm
http://ezinearticles.com/?Practical-Tips-For-Avoid ing-an-IRS-Audit&id=456566
http://www.totaltaxsolutions.com/avoid-audit.htm

Generally, the later you file, the better off you are--as long as you pay the right amount on April 15th.

Re:A lack of planning on your part....

[Anonymous Coward]

Double eff you, because they ARE refunding me. Guess Intuit disagrees with you too.

For next year...

[Avatar8]

Will Intuit learn their lesson and strengthen their servers and network for next year's last minute rush? Given their track record of quality, I seriously doubt it.

Will the procrastinators learn their lesson and file at least a day early? Heck no. They even had two extra days this year. If paying the taxes is the issue, that's what an extension is for.

I am a horrible procrastinator myself, but I guess my greed overpowers that. My taxes were done, returned and spent in February. Woot! New PC!

I also learned a few years back that Turbo Tax is no better than most of the other products out there, free or otherwise. I've been using http://www.taxact.com/ for the past three years. I usually do the download, but I tried the web version for my mother-in-law's taxes. Very smooth, quick, painless and best of all, completely free. I did my mother-in-law's taxes Sunday, 4/15. That's the latest I've ever filed a return. Guess I'm getting sloppy like the unwashed masses.

Re:For next year...

[hal2814]

"If paying the taxes is the issue, that's what an extension is for."

You've never filed an extension, have you? The money is due on tax day whether or not you file an extension. When you are filing the extension, you are asked what you expect to owe and you are expected to enclose that amount. If you don't include enough, you pay a penalty and taxes on what you didn't include.

As long as flooding the system at the last minute decreases the likelihood of getting an audit, anyone strongly looking to avoid an audit will do so. I'm an audit target myself so I made darn sure to wait until the last minute but I didn't file an extension like I usually do because I overpaid on my tax witholdings last year so the IRS owes me money.

"I also learned a few years back that Turbo Tax is no better than most of the other products out there, free or otherwise."

It's really not. I still use it because I have a complicated tax return and all of my info from last year is moved over into the next year's return. So far I haven't seen a product that's worth it for me to move my info into a new system vs. just keeping the TurboTax stuff I already have in place.

Re:For next year...

[qwijibo]

An extension does nothing for your ability to pay or not pay the taxes due. If you want to procrastinate on filing, you need to either pay everything you might owe, or know you're definitely getting a refund.

I owed this year, so I filed last week. Doing everything a full week+ early means everything is a ghost town that will be a nightmare come the deadline.

Re:For next year...

[stefanlasiewski]

My taxes were done, returned and spent in February.

I would have done my taxes in January if possible. However, we were still waiting for some required tax paperwork in mid-March, and the paperwork was incomplete. Is there a deadline for when employers, investment firms, banks, etc. mail the required tax documents to individuals?

We still managed to file on time, but it's still stressful waiting for someone else.

Re:For next year...

[mandolin]

1099 and W2 deadlines (when they must be mailed, not when you must receive them) are both January 31st. You can google for stuff like that.

If you don't get it by February 14th, I would call the parties in question.

Re:For next year...

[Avatar8]

You're right. All I know about an extension is what I read on the tax forms, so obviously I translated incorrectly. :-)

I've always paid or been refunded well before 4/15. It's the one thing I conquer my procrastination about.

I'm not certain what designates someone an "audit target." To me that's always been taboo, sort of like traffic laws: either follow the laws or pay the price. When I hear "audit" that tells me someone made a mistake or deliberately tried to hide something. I guess there is some gray area, but again I'm ignorant of any such complications or dealings.

I figure most people delay because they have to pay so they postpone it until the last minute. I'd personally rather get it over with, deal with it and adjust my W4 so it doesn't happen again. The ultimate goal is to strike the balance where no money exchanges hands at tax time.

Re:For next year...

[hal2814]

In my case, I've been told that I'm an audit target because I have a legitimate W2 with $0 income. You can't even e-file if you have a W-2 with $0 income. The W-2 is from a short term disability payout. The amount of the payout has to be reported but it's not technically income so Box 1 is a zero while some of the other boxes have dollar amounts in them.

"The ultimate goal is to strike the balance where no money exchanges hands at tax time."

Indeed.

Re:For next year...

[barzok]

Will Intuit learn their lesson and strengthen their servers and network for next year's last minute rush? Given their track record of quality, I seriously doubt it.

Most Quicken users could/should have seen it coming. Any day the Dow changes by a large amount, or the markets are otherwise extremely busy, the servers that Quicken uses for downloading quotes, etc. quit.

Why should we expect any less from Turbotax?

Glad I filed early...with TaxCut.

Excellent Sir!

[arcite]

A quote from an eps. when the simpsons was still funny.

This is Lesson 1 in "SaaS for Dummies."

[ErichTheRed]

If you're a service provider making money hosting software (or a feature of your software) over the net, put as much capacity as you think you'll need in place, then put in the ability to add more immediately to account for things like this.

There are limits to this, but it's a basic fact of hosted apps. All of your customers might actually want to use your software at once. At any given time. Therefore, if you have your salespeople signing up a few million more customers, it's time to plow some of the profits back into the infrastructure.

I would guess most of these SaaS companies (NetSuite, Salesforce.com, etc.) have the same greedy mentality..."No one could possibly hit the app all at once, over and over again. Let's not listen to our IT guys. Request for servers and bandwidth denied."

I'm not surprised Intuit got burned. They practically have the lock on the financial software market, and know it. Quicken for all its faults is a good product, and MS Money is awful. TurboTax is great (when it works.) However, I've been a user of Quicken for years, and every new release has more gimmicky features, while basic things like data integrity aren't looked after. Support has been going downhill for years, but you need to keep buying the software every year because it makes it so easy to take care of your finances.

Re:This is Lesson 1 in "SaaS for Dummies."

[Anonymous Coward]

Support has been going downhill for years, but you need to keep buying the software every year because it makes it so easy to take care of your finances.

Bah! Buy it every year? I don't think so. Don't use the gimmicky features and you can use a single version nearly indefinitely. I've used Quicken for 14 years as a glorified check register for all of my bank and credit accounts, and my loans. I manually enter everything, and I write checks by hand. I have an accountant who trades me my tax work for a tuneup of his computer every year before tax season starts, so I don't even need to mess with TurboTax. In all that time, I've only upgraded twice.

I used Quicken 93 until I had to upgrade to 2000 due to Y2K issues in 93. I used 2000 until I moved from OS 9 to OS X, then I upgraded to 2003 because I wanted an OS X native version. I've been using that ever since. Hell, 2006 came free with my MacBook, but 2003 works so well for me that I haven't even considered upgrading.

I will never use Intuit's gimmicky features as long as they pull shit like disabling transaction download capability on perfectly functional older versions just because they want you to pay them again. And as a Mac user I'm doubly keen on not giving Intuit more money, considering the Mac version of Quicken STILL does not have 100% feature parity with the Windows version. I will damned sure not pay for the privilege of being shortchanged.

Re:This is Lesson 1 in "SaaS for Dummies."

[Doctor Faustus]

Online banking is not a gimmicky feature; it's the whole point of the thing. How many people used Quicken before that was available, compared to now?

Designed DOS attacks...

[Etherwalk]

systems like this which need to survive under massive data spikes ought to be designed to handle them--meaning that the software, rather than simply timing out after fifteen seconds, out to be acting more-or-less like TCP/IP: use exponential backoff. If it can't connect in 15 seconds, wait 30 and try again, then wait 60, then 120, etc... up to some maximum timeout value. The spacing gives turbotax's servers a chance to keep up (by spreading out the submissions over a longer period of time) and keeps the user from having to click "retry" for the next two hours.

They're still in a bad way if their servers can't handle the crunch before the deadline passes, but it would be better than the way it is now.

How many TT customers

[hansoloaf]

How many TT customers feel comforted knowing TT spearheaded to kill legislation to allow us to eFile directly to IRS for free?

Re:How many TT customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Your tax-software dollars at work.

Started well before tuesday...

[Temkin]

I filed monday morning. I'm still waiting for my confirmation. I'm going to have to call the IRS to find out if it was actually transmitted. You have to admit, it's a neat loophole. The government isn't alllowed to entrap you, so they get a corperation to do it for them, and reap the penalty rewards. Hey we gotta pay for GW's spending somehow, right?

I'm not going to be a guinea pig for their e-file fantasies/experments. If I pay a cent in penalties, the IRS will get paper from me for a decade.

Re:Started well before tuesday...

[AndreAtlan]

Lets see... They over charge you by 1 penny, yet you will spend how much exactly in paper, time, and stamps over a decade to recover?

how about this: Mail me $100, imagine getting yourself kicked in the ass really hard, and you'll end up better off than your previous plan.

w

Re:Started well before tuesday...

[Temkin]

Very funny. Stamp & paper costs are trivial. I spent more last night at Sonic than I have on stamps & paper over the last year. My point is they're pushing e-file to save themselves money in data entry. But it if turns out to cost me more frustration and penalties, I'll stick with paper.

From their site...

[chrisbro]

Intuit's support says:

Update, 6:30am, April 18: Outstanding issues with our servers have been resolved and we are currently processing all customers' returns and requests for status checks at a normal rate. As we mentioned earlier, we are working with the IRS this morning to ensure that returns will be considered as timely filed even if transmitted to us past midnight.

We encourage customers to continue trying to e-file; if you have been unable to successfully transmit, please try again.

If you have transmitted your return more than once and you use our desktop version of TurboTax, rest assured that you will be charged for electronic filing fees only once. Fees are charged only once per primary social security number. Also, if you are paying your taxes via direct debit or via credit card, your taxes will be withdrawn from your account only once despite multiple transmissions.

haha stupide people

[geekoid]

I did my taxes a year ago!

or

"I pay the Homer tax, let the bear pay the bear tax."

Extended IRS deadline for East Coast Filers

[mumbaiyaa]

Procastinators rejoice!
The IRS website says:

R-2007-89, April 16, 2007 WASHINGTON -- Victims of the major storm affecting several Northeastern states on Monday, April 16 will have two additional days to file their tax returns beyond the April 17 tax deadline, the Internal Revenue Service announced today. Taxpayers directly impacted by the storm have until midnight April 19 to meet their tax filing obligations without incurring late filing and payment penalties.

The wisdom of Homer Simpson

[UnknowingFool]

Homer Simpson: "Look at all those fools running around at the last minute. I did mine last year."
Lisa Simpson: "Dad, you have to file your taxes every year."
[Homer scream]

Re:Yet another reason...

[Waffle Iron]

.. to not wait until the last minute to do your taxes.

Exactly. I always wait until the last minute, then file a form 4868 instead.

E-File is a scam for the consumer

[necro81]

My objection to E-Filing is that I have to pay for it. To E-File my federal and state returns, generated by software running locally on my computer, would have cost me about $30 above the cost of the software. Why? It is not the IRS that charges this fee, E-Filing saves them money and they'd be happier if everyone does it. It is the tax preparation company that generates this fee.

It was a sweetheart deal made in some back room years ago - the IRS will not accept E-Filings from private citizens except via a tax preparation company, who is able (even encouraged, I'd say) to collect a fee for shifting the bits around. This is not limited to just tax software, brick-and-mortar tax firms do this, too. While I could understand the IRS not wanting to deal with every improperly filled-out e-filing from your average Joe, I heavily object to them not accepting a return created with a qualified tax preparation software package, all so that a private company can gouge me.

When that sweetheart deal was made a few years ago, the various groups decided to throw a bone to us poor plebians: free online E-Filing. If your adjusted gross income is less than a certain amount, about $52k/housheold I think, then you are entitled to E-file your federal taxes for free using a variety of online services. TurboTax's online software is one such place. For reasons which I think are shared here on slashdot, I refuse on principle to do my taxes through some company online. This year, I fell just outside the AGI cutoff anyway, but not by much.

This year I helped a friend prepare his taxes using TurboTax. His AGI was below the limit for free e-filing. And yet, for some reason, the copy of TurboTax running on his computer never mentioned he was entitled to it. It would only e-file for an additional fee. You would think that, since he had already paid for this software, which is basically the same tax-crunching software that runs Intuit's online service, Intuit would be more willing to e-file his taxes than the taxes from someone who only visited their website and didn't pay for anything. This is not the case, however. The line I (eventually, after an hour) got from their tech support line (in Bangalore) was that anyone who actually purchased the software must have so much money that they'd never qualify for free e-filing. I look at it more along the lines of: shucks, you were such a sucker for buying this software in the first place, surely you'll be enough of a sucker to pay us even more.

I don't use TurboTax anymore.

Re:E-File is a scam for the consumer

[The Mad Debugger]

I found TaxAct a few years ago (http://www.taxact.com), on a link from the IRS website. They have a completely free option for filing the federal return, create nice PDFs of your documents when you're done, and work well with Safari and Firefox. Their state filing costs like $13, which I generally pay after I'm done doing the free federal, but you don't have to. They also nag you a bit here and there about upgrading to their "deluxe" product, but if you ignore that, you can truly file your federal return through them for free.

Re:E-File is a scam for the consumer

[CronoCloud]

It's not really a sweetheart deal, more of a deal with the devil. The IRS wanted to offer free software and e-filing to everyone through their own software that they developed. But the tax preparers got wind of it and lobbied congress to pass a law forbidding the IRS from offering free tax services.

But the IRS wanted at least some people to free file and eventually negotated the deal.

The states are under no such restrictions, so here in Illinois if you free file your federal, and they offer to file the state form for a fee, you can ignore the vultures and just go to the state website.

Why do we wait?

[YGingras]

I simply can't find a rational explanation to the great satisfaction that we get from waiting till the very last hour. Why is that? It must be something hardwired in our DNA because it is wide spread in the population. It happens all the time: if we can postpone, we do. Why didn't we find a miracle cure to this chronic procrastination? Why individuals without the chronic procrastination syndrome didn't outperm all the others in the gene pool? What kind of evolutionary benefit do we get from procrastination? I imagine a remote ancestor talking to a fellow neanderthal: why hurry for this dangerous mammoth hunt when we can sit back and enjoy procreation?

Re:Why do we wait?

[(H)elix1]

I simply can't find a rational explanation to the great satisfaction that we get from waiting till the very last hour.

I wait to file any time I owe more money in taxes. When I do file, I also send it in snail mail. When they refund my money I file a couple months early.

Re:Why do we wait?

[Temkin]

The amount of schandenfreude exhibited in all these "serves you right for waiting until the last minute" is mind boggling. There's any number of reasons why you might have to wait. Maybe your paperwork was wrong/late/lost/etc... Some people's taxes are quite a bit more complex than the usual 1040EZ "Enter your W-2 wages in box 1, take standard single zero deduction and lookup taxes in table".

Re:Why do we wait?

[Maximum Prophet]

Fast forward to the time of warfare. The brave dudes ran ahead, got killed in a spectacular fashion, had songs written about them, while the procrastinators went home and had more offspring. After about 6000 years of this, procrastination looks pretty good.

Re:Why do we wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your paperwork is late or your taxes are complex, maybe you should've done something about it earlier than the very last day, hmm?

Re:Why do we wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if we didn't, what would the evening news live shot action reporters have to do on the night of April 17?

Re:Why do we wait?

[Doctor Faustus]

Judging by how I work vs. how my coworkers work, non-procrastinators also tend to make decisions with inadequate information.

Free options

[dazedNconfuzed]

Most tax prep software companies provide a FREE method. It's not well-advertised (obviously), and doesn't come with any bells or whistles, and may not cover some of the more obscure tax issues (may even be limited to 1040EZ), but is free and functional. Online filing can be free too.

'course, most people just pay for the first thing they can find.

CAN blame Intuit, was Re:why last minute

[morningstar8]

> you can't really blame Intuit/Turbotax on this one

I disagree. Saying this is like saying that engineers building a bridge "can't really be blamed" for a bridge failing during a traffic jam caused by heavy traffic. How long has Intuit been in the business of e-filing? You can't tell me they weren't aware that they might get a good deal of their filing at the last minute.

Any designer for TurboTax's e-filing mechanism simply must take the last-minute push into account. Any less is incompetence at best.

IANAL; is this an example of negligence?

Re:CAN blame Intuit, was Re:why last minute

[PureCreditor]

"bridge failing during a traffic jam" is a bad analogy.

do highways planners create interstate highways for regular traffic patterns (4-lanes each way), or try to accomodate for peak summer travel period and end up with excess capacity for the rest of the year?

if any road should be able to handle peak loads smoothly, then Lincoln Tunnel needs to be 10-lanes each way.

Renamed to SnailTax

[Anonymous Coward]

Since this incident, TurbboTax has been renamed as SnailTax, which was a more appropriate term.

TaxAct Online

[dbfruth]

I have been using TaxAct http://www.taxact.com/ online for years now and never have had a problem. It costs a fraction of the price that Intuit wants, and in my opinion is just as good. Plus the online version works with Windows, Mac and Linux.

2-day Extension

[flamingnight]

If you were affected by the storm that hit parts of the East Coast over the weekend, the IRS has granted a 2-day tax extension. Just write "April 16 Storm" on your return.

SlashTax Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then again, there are penalties imposed if you fix your W-4 (and other forms) so that they don't withhold anything and you have to pay all your tax once a year. I think that's too bad."

And this is stated in the tax code were?

Re:SlashTax Issues

[hal2814]

"And this is stated in the tax code were?"

There are several rules regarding underpayment but the one the most general one is:

Topic 306 - Penalty for Underpayment of Estimated Tax

You can find it on irs.gov. Now if you fix your taxes so that they don't withhold anything and pay estimated taxes quarterly I think you're ok. As lousy as our tax code is, irs.gov is actually a decent site.

Reason to do it yourself

[alexhmit01]

The first year we were married, my wife and I did our taxes by hand. We were in Mass at the time, and Federal took about 2 hours to do, State about 4 (Mass has HORRID forms). The reason we did it by hand was to understand the taxes. We all understand the theory (this is taxed at X%, this at Y%, this is deductible, this isn't), but until you go through the process, you don't really understand the 2% thresholds and how those affect deductions, AMT, etc.

After that one painful year that seared in how things worked, we switched to TurboTax (online once, which was a mistake, on the computer after that). All told it probably takes 1-2 hours to do, plus $35 for the software and e-filing. Would it be more cost effective to pay someone to do it? Sure. Would they catch stuff that we miss for deductions... MAYBE... I use Quicken so my deductions are pretty easy to track.

Why do I do it? Because by doing your own taxes, you notice credits/deductions that you don't qualify for but could easily. For example, this year I got a small credit for putting in my new AC, but there are a WHOLE BUNCH of energy improvement credits that I wouldn't have known about without doing my taxes. Since we are renovating our house all the time, there is no way I'll ever NOT spend enough on the energy efficiencies to get the credit. If November rolls around and I haven't earned the $300 for energy improvement, I'll go buy something small, because with the government kicking in the money, you can be sure that I'll take the free house upgrade... paying $200 for a $500 new window is a no brainer.

The reason to do your own taxes... if you own a business and have an accountant that you work with throughout the year and they advise you on tax matters, then go ahead, let them file the return (just spend an hour reviewing it -- find deductions/credits you get in one year to always get, etc.), but if you were just going to walk into H&R block and get no advice (other than them selling you services), then keep doing it yourself...

Alex

Re:Reason to do it yourself

[Peter Mork]

In regards to the "free house upgrade," be sure you read the fine print. On line 4 of form 5695, you multiply expenses related to "qualified energy efficiency improvements" (line 3) by 10%. As soon as I heard about the credit (in the newspaper), I ran out and made "free" upgrades. It was quite a surprise to learn that free really means 10% off.

Re:Reason to do it yourself

[alexhmit01]

There are a few different credits. The appliance one was the first $300, others are 10% credit. However, if I had known that, maybe I would have bought my kitchen appliances over a few years... :) But if you didn't fill our form 5695, you wouldn't have known that. That's my point.

EULA

[Wisconsingod]

TurboTax online has a few key points in their EULA that will protect thiem from these fiascos.

to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, intuit and its suppliers are not liable for any indirect, special, incidental, exemplary or consequential damages or for damages relating to loss of business, telecommunication failures, loss, corruption, security or theft of data, viruses, spyware, loss of profits or investment, tax positions taken by you, inability to file your return, or the like, whether based in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability, product liability or otherwise, even if intuit or its suppliers have been advised of the possibility of such damages and even if a remedy set forth herein is found to have failed of its essential purpose.

the software and services are provided "as-is" and, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, intuit, its affiliates, licensors, participating financial institutions, third-party content or service providers, retailers, distributors, dealers and suppliers (collectively, "suppliers") disclaim all guarantees and warranties, express or implied, regarding the software or services, including any warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, title, merchantability, and non-infringement. intuit does not warrant that software or services are secure, free from bugs, viruses, interruption, errors, or other program limitations or my personal favorite, don't buy the software until you print clause....

you may use the software without charge up to the point you decide to print or electronically file your tax return. printing or electronically filing your return reflects your satisfaction with software, at which time you will be required to pay or register for the product.

Re:EULA

[pclminion]

A company can put anything they feel like in their EULA. It does nothing to stop a person from suing anyway (you're just going to have a harder time winning).

Never attribute to greed....

[camperdave]

What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill?

Never attribute to greed what can adequately be explained by stupidity. People are not waiting until the last day to save the interest. People are waiting until the last day because they are lazy. Doing taxes is an unpleasant chore for most people, and if there is any reason to delay it ("Hey, Friends is on.") they will.

Re:Never attribute to greed....

[Toonol]

People are not waiting until the last day to save the interest. People are waiting until the last day because they are lazy

Don't forget, there's a large number of people that wait until the last day to file simply out of a vague hostility to the government.

*Raises Hand*

Re:ATTN: SWITCHEURS!

[JonathanR]

Is there anything in the slashcode that allows users to submit regex's to filter/block repeated troll/spam posts like this?

Web-based apps

[Khelder]

But, but, web-based applications are The Future(TM)!

Must be part of Lacerte's problem

[SpoonerNash]

I'm a CPA. We use Lacerte tax prep software. Lacerte was bought by Intuit several years back, much to my sadness (I hate Intuit), and it has been going down hill since. I started having problems getting returns and extensions e-filed yesterday morning. Usually I send them individually as each one is ready to go. They started not going through to Lacerte/Intuit and I was getting status on returns set to transmission failure. Big pain in my ass. I started to leave the communications manager open and repeatedly sending, getting a return through now and then. Sometime in the afternoon they must have changed a time out setting and my end would try a lot longer and more returns and extensions got through. Then it became a problem of getting acceptance notification back from IRS. Returns and extensions had a status of sent to IRS until this morning when almost all received accepted status. Until then I was concerning with any that would have a reject and need to be resolved. So far all good. But the e-filing experience was less than good with Lacerte this year, and it must be because of the tie-in with Intuit servers. The drawback of e-filing: used to be after the final post office run the drinking could start. Now you have to watch for rejects.

Because of tax laws:

[guibaby]

There are only two categories of tax payers. There are people who can fill out a 1040ez. These people can file on the phone or online for free. Then there are those that should hire a tax professional to do their taxes. I did my own taxes for years. I used Tax Cut and Turbo Tax. They are both fine product. But neither is a substitute for a knowledgeable, tax accountant. Notice I said accountant. Don't waste your money on someone who took a three day class. Yes, accountants aren't cheap. Mine cost me $160 to $180 a year. On average he saves me $1500.
Yes, I think it is criminal that the tax code is so complex. But if you can't beat 'em, find someone who can.

Re:Because of tax laws:

[maxume]

I have ~$10 of income a year that is attributable to an S-Corp. There are decent reasons for this, and it precludes filing a 1040EZ(because it goes on Schedule D). I have no reason to itemize. Should I hire an accountant?

Re:Because of tax laws:

[guibaby]

I don't know, you should talk it over with your accountant.

What are the rules for filing ?

[tumutbound]

Not a US taxpayer so excuse the question.
I'm assuming the tax year ends December 31st and filing deadline is April 18th?
DO you get any special dispensation if you have your taxes done on your behalf by an accountant/tax agent?

Here (Australia), tax year ends June 30th and returns must be in by October 31st. If your tax return is submitted by an accountant/tax agent, you have until May 31st the following year.

Seems much more civilised.

Re:What are the rules for filing ?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Not a US taxpayer so excuse the question.
I'm assuming the tax year ends December 31st and filing deadline is April 18th?
DO you get any special dispensation if you have your taxes done on your behalf by an accountant/tax agent?

The tax year ends on December 31, with the odd exception that you can, in theory, still make IRA contributions for the previous tax year from January 1 until the filing deadline, if you characterize them as such. For example, you can make an IRA contribution in February for the previous tax year, assuming that you haven't reached the limit for contributions for that tax year. Once you turn in your tax return, you shouldn't make any more IRA contributions for the previous tax year as the amount you contribute can affect your taxes. The filing deadline is actually April 15, but because the US Postal Service isn't open on Sundays, the government decided to give us 2 extra days instead of 1 to file our taxes.

Accountants have the ability to get special dispensation in terms of getting approved delays in filing taxes. In theory, the general public can directly apply for extensions themselves, but accountants usually do it on behalf of clients because they know the proper procedure for doing so. I have a friend who works as a court reporter and she always amazes me because her taxes are rarely done by the "No more extensions - period!" date, which is sometime in October. She is self-employed and has to keep tons of receipts for everything related to her job, so she always has an accountant do her taxes and because of pure laziness on her part, she always has her accountant file for an extension and does the taxes at the last minute.

Re:What are the rules for filing ?

[jamesoutlaw]

The filing deadline is actually April 15 of each year, however, when that date falls on a weekend, the "real" filing deadline is midnight of the first Monday after the 15th. You can deduct reasonable tax preparation fees on your return if you are itemizing deductions.

Re:What are the rules for filing ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The filing deadline is actually April 15, but because the US Postal Service isn't open on Sundays, the government decided to give us 2 extra days instead of 1 to file our taxes.

No, the extra day isn't because the IRS "decided" to give us an extra day, it's because April 16th is a legal holiday in Washington, D.C. (Emancipation Day), making taxes due on the next business day, April 17th. Those of us in the northeast have had a similar stiuation for years. Because April 16th is Patriots day in Massachusetts and Maine, anyone who has to send their taxes to Andover, MA got an extra day. I believe that this was the first time that Emancipation day fell on the 16th since becoming a legal holiday in D.C.

efiling a ripoff

[virtual_mps]

Am I really the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to pay intuit $30 to send my return electronically (which actually is cheaper for the IRS to process) rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it in the mailbox on the way to work? What am I missing here?

Re:efiling a ripoff

[Lxy]

It's all about speed. How quickly do you want your refund?

efile + direct deposit means a refund in (usually) 72 hours or less. It's almost instant money.

mailed + direct deposit means a refund in 2-3 weeks. Very acceptable, and if you're cheap like me it's a great option.

mailed + mailed check means a refund in a month or two.

Mailing a check is apparently the biggest delay. So if you, for whatever reason, efiled and want a paper check, you're wasting your money.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[virtual_mps]

It's all about speed. How quickly do you want your refund? Well, since 8 million people waited to efile until the last day, I'd guess it doesn't really matter to them, no?

efile + direct deposit means a refund in (usually) 72 hours or less. It's almost instant money.

mailed + direct deposit means a refund in 2-3 weeks. Very acceptable, and if you're cheap like me it's a great option. If you're getting back so much money that the 11 days are worth $30 in opportunity cost, you've got to work on giving less of a free loan to the government.

On further reflection, I suppose that if you don't have a printer this efile thing could make sense.

I'll also admit that I find the federal system absurd because my state (virginia) lets you file online for free. Too many lobbyists for the CPA jobs program at the federal level.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[hawaiian717]

Nope. They used to include one free e-file with TurboTax, but that stopped a couple of years ago. As long as its cheaper for me to mail in the form, that's what I'll do. It reminds me of banks that charge for online banking and debit card use, when, from what I hear, those are cheaper for the bank to process than a paper check.

Yes, I know there are other products that will let you do it for free, but TurboTax (going back to when it was still called MacinTax) has worked well for me, and I'd rather not keep my data on some company's web server. I've considered TaxCut, but their Mac support has been shaky (they dropped it completely one year, and in years prior some state versions were available for Windows but not Mac) and I'd rather support a company that shows a little more dedication to my platform of choice.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[pclminion]

Am I really the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to pay intuit $30 to send my return electronically (which actually is cheaper for the IRS to process)

What does the cost to the IRS have to do with it? Are you just bitching because somebody somewhere is saving money and that person isn't you?

Personally, I think it's worth a little bit of money to be able to get my refund weeks sooner than I otherwise would. But I guess you think that all conveniences should be free.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[StormReaver]

"Am I really the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to pay intuit $30 to send my return electronically..."

I did my taxes myself, and got a bottom line in which I owed the IRS a couple hundred dollars. I then did my taxes through Intuit's web site (I run Linux) and got a refund of $600. The same thing happened on my state return. Giving Intuit a few bucks seemed a rather petty expense compared to the benefits received.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[virtual_mps]

What does the cost to the IRS have to do with it? Are you just bitching because somebody somewhere is saving money and that person isn't you? Well, you see, I pay for the IRS's processing costs. As a taxpayer I'd like those costs to go down. OTOH, I don't see why I should give some company money for taking the data from me and giving it to the IRS. As I said in another post, my state manages to handle that without the middleman. You asked me a silly rhetorical question, so I'll ask you a question in return: do you enjoy giving a company money to boost their profit margin just because their lobbyists made it impossible for people to send their data to the IRS without a middleman?

Re:efiling a ripoff

[virtual_mps]

"I did my taxes myself, and got a bottom line in which I owed the IRS a couple hundred dollars. I then did my taxes through Intuit's web site (I run Linux) and got a refund of $600. The same thing happened on my state return. Giving Intuit a few bucks seemed a rather petty expense compared to the benefits received. I think you've missed the point. Intuit charges one price for the software to calculate your tax. They charge an additional amount to then submit the data electronically. You get the same refund either way, it's just a question of whether you pay for a stamp to mail it or pay intuit to email it. (Now they've been running a promo where you can efile for free if you use the online version, but there's no way I'd trust their web site with my data.)

Re:efiling a ripoff

[CMan20]

I totally agree this is a rip off. I will never e-file as long as it costs more than mailing a paper form in. If the IRS had any intelligence, it would encourage electronic submission since it would greatly cut down on their data entry expenses. When I feel really annoyed about it all I have even been known to use tax software to prepare my forms and then hand-write the forms that I actually submit. When the IRS stops being such a vindictive pick on the little guy agency, then maybe I won't feel so frustrated.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[deets]

To get my money back, yes. It should be free.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[pclminion]

do you enjoy giving a company money to boost their profit margin just because their lobbyists made it impossible for people to send their data to the IRS without a middleman?

I enjoy getting my refund faster. I see no relevance in the fact that some company derives profit from this. What the hell do I care about that?

Re:efiling a ripoff

[virtual_mps]

do you enjoy giving a company money to boost their profit margin just because their lobbyists made it impossible for people to send their data to the IRS without a middleman?

I enjoy getting my refund faster. I see no relevance in the fact that some company derives profit from this. What the hell do I care about that? Am I not explaining this well, or are you dense? There is no reason, other than lobbying by the tax preparation industry, that you couldn't send your return directly to the IRS without the middle man. Intuit isn't giving you the money faster, the IRS is--but you're paying Intuit. If you don't care that your tax dollars were used to spec the efile system but you can't use it without giving money to someone who lobbied for the privilege of collecting your money, well, all I can say is that you're a good little consumer.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[pclminion]

If you don't care that your tax dollars were used to spec the efile system but you can't use it without giving money to someone who lobbied for the privilege of collecting your money, well, all I can say is that you're a good little consumer.

Look, if the system could be made more efficient by changing certain laws, I'm all for it. Where do I sign? Until such time, I'd rather save my energy.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[Anonymous Coward]

go somewhere that charges less.

i used to use turbotax when it was cheap, but i switched to taxactonline.com a few year's back.

it costs me $15.95 total, that's both federal and state, including e-filing, phone support, everything i might need.

yes, i could save the money by doing it all by hand, but to me the ease of doing it with a computer (esp. copying all of the federal info to the state, and copying last year's info to this year's helps too) is easily worth the $16. plus, with all of the questions it asks you and advice about various tax related things, i've probably saved in taxes a lot more than i've spent on the software, by having it make me aware of some deduction or credit that i otherwise might have missed.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[CronoCloud]

sigh, how many times am I going to say this:

The IRS wanted everyone to free file. They even made the software to do so themselves, then the tax preparers got wind of it and lobbied Congress to prevent hte IRS from offering free tax preparation software and services.

They later made a deal with the tax prepares to offer free filing but only through them. Dont' blame the IRS, blame Intuit, HR Block, Jackson Hewitt etc.

The states are under no such restrictions, I guess the tax preparers didn't get around to buying them off.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[CMan20]

Although what you say is true, it is irrelevant to me because filing taxes is not a choice I have. Rather the IRS legally requires me to file taxes and thus, if I choose to file electronically, I am by law required to pay $16.95 or whatever it is. Now if the IRS chose to eat this cost as a cost of saving themselves on their internal data entry costs, then I would be ok with it. If the best contractor deal they can find (because of lobbyists or not) that can construct a one time software project with yearly recurring data center costs for 5 billion dollars a year ($17 * 300 million us citizens?), that is not my problem and it frustrates me.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[barzok]

efile + direct deposit means a refund in (usually) 72 hours or less. It's almost instant money.

Was it that quick for you this year? I filed electronically via TaxCut, sent the final data in on a Sunday. Not that Friday but the one after (almost 2 weeks later), I got the direct deposit from the Feds.

My state refund took another 2 weeks to appear after that.

The delay was not with TaxCut, as I got the confirmation that the IRS had received & accepted my filing within 24 hours of submitting.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[Frumious Wombat]

How far do you trust your local PO to correctly transmit packets (mail) under load? Peace of mind is worth something.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[virtual_mps]

How far do you trust your local PO to correctly transmit packets (mail) under load? Peace of mind is worth something. Pretty far. I can't remember them ever losing a tax return of mine, or anyone else that I know.

Re:efiling a ripoff

[Frumious Wombat]

Ask them to transfer their employees to my local branch. I've spent too much time on the phone trying to track down where bills sent during busy times of the year went.

Re:Happens all of the time

[Psykechan]

Where I used to work, we hosted an employee's personal site (approved my his manager) that would use hardly any bandwidth at least most of the time.

This site was for listing up-to-the-minute stats and choices for the NFL draft, something that only happens once a year. During the draft this site was our biggest bandwidth consumer and if it wasn't throttled it easily would impact our customer's sites. This taught us the need to plan for peak usage and not just average usage when designing infrastructure. I'm pretty sure that Intuit's problem was very similar

I have a friend who used to do sysadmin work for an acounting firm. He would disappear from the face of the earth around tax time sometimes sleeping at the office. Any technical problem they had needed to be fixed just before it occured. If Intuit can't have their network up and running for the mid April deadline then they need to find someone who will, or their customers will.

This is no different from web stores on black Friday.

Yuh Huh...

[Greyfox]

And here's how most companies do load estimation:

Peak Load Estimation Guy: You need 300 xeon class servers on optical fibre to handle the load!
Peak Load Estimation Guy's Manager to His Boss: Yeah we'll be fine with a 486 on DSL!

Later...

CEO to Public: There's no way we could have foreseen the huge spike in traffic that caused our servers to melt down.

Re:Yuh Huh...

[ehiris]

If performance could relate so much to strictly hardware dollars, it would be very nice but unfortunately there's a lot more that goes into having good performance than lots of hardware.

Most companies cut major corners around testing processes, monitoring tools, skilled tuning workforce, and so on. I'm sure their budget for performance tuning pales in comparison with security budgets which are mostly there to deal with exaggerated threats.

Don't people realize...

[cucumberjones]

that you don't have to file a return at all if you are expecting a refund? If for some reason you don't have it done by the "deadline", just wait a little and file it later.

Preferential Treatment by IRS

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like Intuit gets a lot of preferential treatment by the IRS. When they messed up actual calculations a couple of years ago the IRS forgave any penalties to the people affected and now it looks like they will do the same for late fillers. I wonder if they give these same breaks to average joes or only when a mega-corp calls them.

Re:Preferential Treatment by IRS

[pease1]

They always have, at least since the early 1990's. A lot of the reason for the current US tax code system to exist is to support the tax prep. industry. Any move to a flat or sales tax system would destroy the industry. The industry lobbies our congress critters hard to avoid this.

Re:Yet another reason...

[markjo]

... to not wait until the last minute to do your taxes. Aww, come on. Everyone knows that if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.

What was different this year

[Anonymous Coward]

The load this year should have been roughly the same as last year, right? I doubt it was a big-time screwup on the order of "we have half the servers we needed", unless Turbotax doubled their user base in a year, which sounds unlikely.

Re:What was different this year

[Anonymous Coward]

"The load this year should have been roughly the same as last year, right? I doubt it was a big-time screwup on the order of 'we have half the servers we needed", unless Turbotax doubled their user base in a year, which sounds unlikely."

Actually, the same happened last year. And the year before. And the year before that. There should have been stories on /. about that. They just don't buy additional servers because that'd cost money. It's not as if they'd have to reimburse the penalties the taxpayer has to pay because they can't file in time due to the breakdown. If they had to, it would be uncapitalistic and thus unamerican - after all, it would be damaging the business and especially unfair as the tax payer screwed up himself by waiting so long, he shouldn't be allowed to shift the blame on the company.

How does one call that? Sarcasm or something?

Re:ATTN: SWITCHEURS!

[sconeu]

If the name "Clarus" means nothing to you, GTFO.

Yo, Troll,

If you don't know how to spell "Claris", GTFO.

40 TPS?

[Slashdot Parent]

40 TPS is nothing. I've worked on systems that required 600 TPS and achieved 1500 TPS.

Intuit should be hanging their heads in shame.

Re:40 TPS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously since we're in the same business, though on a different level.

I think they're talking about *returns* per second. Not transactions per second..... 40 returns per second means 144,000 per hour. I'm sure it didn't sustain for the whole day, but based on what we see, you can expect that kind of load for quite a few hours straight. We were doing 60-100 TPS with somewhere around 10-20K returns per hour, and that was with heavy contention.

Personally, I laugh at them and hope that we get some customers because of this, but I can also sympathize. We were having a few problems at the end of this year as well, as was several other of our competitors. It can get pretty rough. I mean, how do you realistically scale for a system that has everything happen in a small time frame without breaking the bank? Keep in mind that your development cycle pretty much *has* to be yearly, and everything has to be ready exactly on time, or your company goes down the tubes.

You can do all sorts of load testing, I know we do, but we still failed to account for every single variable at the end of season. Load is high, and data distribution is constantly changing. We did great last year and for most of this year, we had anticipated all the right problems, and put out any of the other fires that come up fairly quickly. Just got burned with the last couple weeks' load. (the "normal" load curve changed on us this year, there was a shift to a lot more returns later on than in previous years)

Add to that the normal budgetary constraints and development tie ups and yeah, you run into this sort of thing. You can't get the apps fixed, but you can't get enough money in the budget for the necessary hardware and software. So then what do you do?

So we got burned too, but got everything fixed enough in time. We learned that since last year was good, we had relaxed too much on the performance tuning, but now that's taking a higher priority than some of the stuff marketing wants to add. We'll be a hell of a lot better prepared for next year and I'll bet these guys will be too.

Re:40 TPS?

[walt-sjc]

A transaction is different that a tax return. A return may contain hundreds of different pieces if information, and then connect to the IRS servers to actually submit the return.

In other words, apples and oranges.

If you are talking about database transactions, performance depends on what the transaction IS. It's one thing to process 1500 TPS where your transaction consists of updating a single column in one row, completely another if it updates dozens of tables with triggers and stored procedures.

Re:40 TPS?

[Slashdot Parent]

A transaction is different that a tax return.

I am well aware of this, but I agree that my understanding of this point was not conveyed in my original post.

A return may contain hundreds of different pieces if information, and then connect to the IRS servers to actually submit the return.

The client's system was also a financial system. While I can't comment on the amount of "work" that goes into grabbing someone's 1040EZ from the TurboTax client software, transforming it, and the submitting it to the IRS, I can definitely assure you that the amount of "work" that went into this client's processing was nontrivial.

And yes, I realize that I am being vague. I'd like to have them hire me again in the future, and that entails keeping my mouth shut sometimes. Perhaps you will decide not to believe me as a result. Perhaps I don't care.

It's one thing to process 1500 TPS where your transaction consists of updating a single column in one row

Obviously I would have never made such a comment if that was what I was referring to. Let's give a little credit here.

My humble point of view

[mmalove]

They procrastinated, and it backfired.

If you wait till the last minute to go to an airport, you'll miss your plane.
If you wait till the last minute to file your taxes - wait a minute, get this: you'll miss the deadline.

I've been waiting for this day...

[gsn]

Darn kids these days! Back in my day we filled out our returns by hand and put them in envelopes and mailed them at the post office! You ain't suffered enough until you print out your Pub 519 and use the arcane knowledge therein (on page 66) along with your Pub 970 to figure out that you've got to subtract the wages from your 1042-S (that you have instead of a 1099-MIS because kids these days are morons) reported under income code 15 from box 2 of your 1098-T along with box 5 and then report this amount along with a 1040A on Form 8863. Stamp them dammit. With stamps! That you lick on the back! And walk to the post office! In rain! LAST MONTH! All you young whipper-snappers and your new fangled ephiling and Pentiyumms or whatchamacallit. Oh and GERT ORF MY LAWN!

(23 year old grad student from India who is a resident according to the Substantial Presence Test - see Pub 519 for details - ducks)

Obligatory Simpsons Quote

[skwang]

Would you look at those morons... I paid my taxes over a year ago!

--Homer

Re:ATTN: SWITCHEURS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, sconeu,

If you don't know the difference between Claris (a half-baked spinoff) and Clarus (the Dogcow), GTFO.

I can't believe I'm replying to a reply to a troll.

Calculating the Missing Interest on Refunds

[ghotihed]

I've heard that argument about the interest you earn by investing versus the interest the government fails to pay when it delivers your refund. That's all well and good, but have you ever bothered to work out how much money that actually is?

Let's start out by assuming you have a "typical" job that does the usual withholding and mails you a W-2. Now, let's say you have things set up so that you receive $1,000 in a refund. How much money did you lose because you didn't invest it?

Well, you didn't have that $1,000 all at once. You would have accumulated it over the last year. That means you really only received $38.46 every two weeks. Now, let's go ahead and drop that into a standard savings account that gets 1% interest per year (sure, you could probably do a little better if you work hard enough, but let's leave it here for now). Let's also do that for the other $38.46 we get the other paydays of the year.

That means that the interest on that first deposit will receive the full 1% for the year, which comes out to $0.38. The next deposit will receive only twenty-five twenty-sixth of that interest payment. The next one after that only twenty-four twenty-sixth, and so on. Adding all of that up and doing the math means that you will have something like $5.19 extra at the end of the year.

Wow! What a sum! What could you possibly buy with that amount of cash? "Welcome to McDonald's, can I take your order, please?"

Of course, this doesn't take into account compound interest, but that's not going to make that big a difference on such a small sum.

So, how much is your peace of mind worth? When it comes to tax season, do you want to have to pay the government money, or do you want to get a little back? Larger amounts of refund make for larger amounts of missed interest. The question becomes one of balancing your desire to make a payment versus how much you're willing to part with so that you don't need to do that.

Me

This is why I file as early as possible

[apnu]

I get all of my tax stuff from work, school and everywhere else by the end of January and get my return by early to mid February. File early folks an you won't have this problem.

The reason they miss them...

[Belial6]

The reason they miss the sign is because of the number of unneeded signs in the world. We have learned to ignore paper with words on it unless we assume it pertains to us. Really, it is the only way to function in modern society. The reason that they go to the circulation desk is because they assume the same thing that I do. That the circulation desk is there to answer questions. They assumed that the circulation desk was there before they ever entered. They may even already know where it is, and also make the assumption that the circulation desk knows where the forms are.

You should be asking instead

[Shivetya]

why in the hell is the tax code so complicated we need computer programs to sort it out?

the real problem is the tax system and the fact that Congress does nothing to simplify it.

Re:You should be asking instead

[Kelbear]

Answer to this problem is more complicated than the tax code itself.

All those little tax breaks in case of _________ have a reason because some people weren't supposed to be affected by certain taxes, plus the extra tax in case of __________ also have reasons. These odd situations have valid pros and cons for having a rule setup for them. And it all just adds up. Sorta like feature bloat. It's trying to do to many things at once and gets complicated by the details until the system as a whole is dragged down.

Thankfully mine were quite simple, only took about 2-3 hours tops. But it must be horrifyingly burdensome for others. What I don't get, is why do I have to go through turbo-tax and it's like, instead of straight to the government?

Re:You should be asking instead

[wayne1932]

quote---why do I have to go through turbo-tax and it's like, instead of straight to the government?=---unquote

This is my opinion exactly. I sent them my return and a check for $24. Why should I double (almost) my outlay so that I can be square with the gov't when I do it for the cost of a 39 cent stamp? When I can efile with the IRS without someone else raking off a few of my dollars in the process, I will use the service, until then the post office gets my trade.

Just my opinion and my two cents worth.

Re:You should be asking instead

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not worth it for you. Last year I moved, paid state taxes in 3 states, collected and remitted sales tax, filed a schedule C, filed a home office deduction for both residences, single-year depreciation schedule, itemized deductions, and a Lifetime Learning Credit for my wife. My federal return's page count ran to somewhere in the mid 20s. I also wrote checks to 1 state and the IRS for thousands of dollars, while receiving refunds from the two other states.

I was happy to pay an accountant much, much more than $16.95 for dealing with it, and since my return weighed more than 16 ounces, my time it would have taken to stand in line at the post office was well worth the e-filing fee.

Re:You should be asking instead

[Epi-man]

why in the hell is the tax code so complicated we need computer programs to sort it out?

the real problem is the tax system and the fact that Congress does nothing to simplify it. I don't think that is the real problem. The real problem is that Congress keeps thinking it needs to find more ways to spend your money. Imagine if they actually just lived within the resources they had, then they wouldn't need to keep finding new ways to start other revenue streams, which would not need exceptions, etc...

Re:You should be asking instead

[Maltheus]

The tax code is as complicated as it is for three reasons. One reason is so that anyone rich enough to afford tax lawyers and accounts can avoid paying. A second reason is to collect as much personal data on you as they can (since you have to provide just about everything to do you taxes). The third reason is so that the government will always have something to charge you with (or just make your life hell) if you ever get out of line.

I remember some study where something like 6 out of 10 IRS accountants, preparing the same tax return, came out with different results. For anything but the most simple tax returns, you've probably made a mistake somewhere. Talk to any outspoken conservative who was audited during the Clinton administration or an outspoken liberal who was audited during the Bush administration and you'll start to understand why things are so complicated. The more complicated the law, the more powerful are those in charge.

YADDOS

[bugnuts]

Update, 6:30am, April 18: Outstanding issues with our servers have been resolved and we are currently processing all customers' returns and requests for status checks at a normal rate. As we mentioned earlier, we are working with the IRS this morning to ensure that returns will be considered as timely filed even if transmitted to us past midnight. So not only did their servers get slammed on tax day, but as soon as they think they've recovered, we subjected the servers to the slashdot effect, too!

Stupid should hurt...

[Glove d'OJ]

Stupid should hurt. Last night, for a lot of people, it looks like it did.

All of your tax information should be available from producers (i.e., people for whom you did work / from whom you gained interest, etc.) by mid to late January. Why wait the 90+ days to file at the last minute?

The IRS has a word for people like this...

Re:Stupid should hurt...

[BCW2]

It's not stupid. If I have a return coming I file in Feb. normally e-file. If I have to pay I don't e-file I mail it in on the last possible day. Why give them money any sooner than required it's not like you get interest for this years taxes by sending it early? The reason I mail a payment is that if I have to pay, they have to deal with the heaping pile of paper, make them earn it by sorting through all the crap they require, instead of the simple e-file version.

If we thought half of our money was being spent wisely, we wouldn't complain nearly as much about taxes!

Re:Stupid should hurt...

[azadrozny]

I would tend to agree. I assume that most of the people who wait tend to owe the gov't money. But waiting until the last day because you want to save a few pennies in interest, or because you want to stick it to them is just silly. Think of the amount of money you will have to pay in penalities because you e-filed one minute after Midnight, or your car broke down on the way to the post office.

Simplified tax system

[soft_guy]

Since you want a simplified tax system, just send us all your money. You didn't need it anyway. Thanks a lot. Congress

Re:Simplified tax system

[ryanov]

I personally would prefer that the government be the recipient of my W2 and let THEM do my taxes. They know how much they think I owe, and they're going to fuck me if I get it wrong... why not eliminate me from the process?

Re:Simplified tax system

[That's Unpossible!]

Why not eliminate THEM from the process entirely, and go with a federal sales tax like Fair Tax?

Re:Simplified tax system

[mattatwork]

There's more to it then your W2's.... You could have other deductions from charitable giving or whatever...and do you really want them to decide if you get the standard deduction or itemized deduction? If you get it wrong when they audit you, it's only based on a relative short period of tax filings. Handing all the responsability to the IRS would mean their audits could look into a longer period of time and result in greater fines/jail time.

There's the risk of abuse (hence the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998) of the system like the potential for the IRS to keep a database of all e-filed forms and to systematically look through people with similiar earnings like yours and see who is making more from their returns or paying less then normal amount to the Gov't and audit them. Supposidly this is illegal....

In terms of e-filing, my stepfather is a CPA, so I get my taxes done free and let him pay a few thousand dollars on Peachtree accounting software. I like the assurance that a real accountant, not just some basic tax software, took a look at my filings....

Re:Simplified tax system

[AJWM]

It's been done -- well, something like that, anyway. Decades ago I once had a (seasonal) job as a keypunch operator for Revenue Canada (Canada's IRS equivalent), encoding tax returns. I opened up one and it's full of papers, receipts and forms with a note on the front "I can't figure this out, you do it." Obviously that one got routed to special processing.

OTOH, you can be sure that "special processing" doesn't go out of their way to make sure you've taken every deduction you've got coming to you. If you're paying a mortgage (in the US, I don't recall the rules in Canada) it's almost certainly worthwhile itemizing the mortgage interest instead of taking the standard deduction. (This is not tax advice, IANAL or tax accountant, your mileage may vary, etc.)

Re:Simplified tax system

[monkeydo]

Because a sales tax is the equivalent of a wage tax, and much more regressive than our current income tax. It's also not magical as Neil Boortz would have you believe.

Re:Simplified tax system

[boingo82]

I keep hearing that, but every year my mortgage interest comes nowhere near my standard deduction. Apparently I need to buy a better house.

Hooray for web-based apps....

[BarnabyWilde]

...they're SOOOOO convenient!!!

I had the same problem

[ajdowntown]

Well, it really wasn't me, but my girlfriend. She came over my place last night at 9:30 and said, guess what she waited to do? I couldn't figure it out, but out pops her turbo tax cd. This was also her first time filing taxes for herself, so she didn't even know how to do it. Her, being one of them there independent types, would not allow me to do them for her, she wanted to learn. Come 11:00pm, she finally allows me to help after she gets too tired doing them. I finish within 15 minutes and then try to submit. I got that error saying that the tax info could not be transmitted due to server load. This, of course, freaks her out. I try and tell her not to worry, we will be able to get it through if we keep trying. For 15 minutes I try and send it in, to no avail. Every attempt gets her a little more anxious. I told her to watch the TV and let me take care of it. Only a few minutes later, at 11:35pm, the taxes were successfully transmitted, and I got a little, ahem, thank you.

Re:I had the same problem

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus christ your such a whipped little boy

Actually, TaxActOnline was completely free this yr

[Anonymous Coward]

e-file was free too with taxactonline. e-file was free for state via calfile. many other states have their own.

I paid nothing to file this year, mailed nothing, and filed using Firefox in Linux.

Though the fed should just buy own of these systems and provide it for free.

intuit are scum

[blackjackshellac]

Fsck this company, they are scum. Their tech support is shit, and their products are perpetually buggy pieces of crap which one is forced to upgrade every year for an insane amount of money. Anyway, tax filing software should be provided by the IRS or Revenue Canada, or whatever your tax collecting authority happens to be. I hate the fact that I have to pay some thrid party for tax prepartion software every goddamned year. This really pisses me off, in case you haven't realised, especially given that I have only 2 weeks to file and my return this year is going to be a nightmare, and I'm too cheap to pay an accountant 500 bucks to do my taxes.

Re:intuit are scum

[krakelohm]

You know you do not HAVE to pay anyone for tax filing software. The IRS does provide you free forms online and in most US Post Offices. You can also find some free online filing solutions (Tax Act Online I think), although you are still charged for more complicated stuff and efile.

Re:Only Fools compare estimates to hard numbers

[Locklin]

You made two off the wall estimates, both could range hugely (ie. What if Turbotax is more like ~30% of the general public?), and you ended up with a value less than half of an order of magnitude more than the servers are able to handle?

I hope you don't do this kind of estimates at your job.

ps. It is true that TurboTax should have accurate values for both of these, so they should have been ready.

Nickel-And-Dimed.....

[IHC Navistar]

$30 "Filing Fee"?

Ever notice how companies say using computers was supposed to make things cheaper and easier for people?

Just like t he credit card companies, Intuit has found a way to turn that cheapness into an expense.

Credit cad companies said that it would be very cheap to use your credit card, but they pass the buck to retailers by charging them exorbitant "Transaction Fees". Banks said the same thing, but charge fees if you use a different bank's ATM. Telephone companies said the same thing, and we all know about the zillions of fees they have. Now Intuit charges $30 dollars to take a file from one person, turn around, and hand it to the Government. If they are going to contract with a taxpayer-funded institution, they should not be allowed to nickel-and-dime the taxpayer like that when they try to pay their taxes.

I'm not big on Big Government, heavy regulation, or stacks of laws, but companies should only be allowed to charge the ACTUAL COST PER TRANSACTION, plus a reasonable convenience fee relative to the actual cost, if they are going to charge a fee. Seeing as how all of this is done electronically, the actual cost Intuit bears is probably more like a couple bucks per transaction.

In the end, TurboTax is just another fancy spreadsheet with alot of bells and whistles..... That charges $30 per use.

What happens if you efile AND mail in the return?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know? Can't seem to find the answer anywhere.

I used TaxCut which worked fine

[hf256]

Filed at 5 PM PST -- No issues and got my DCN Today.
While I prefer TurboTax for Stock Option guidance, perhaps I should stick to TaxCut in the future (I understand the tax code well enough to not really need much hand-holding)

Anyone ever take a math class?

[mackyrae]

My 8th grade math class included a section on taxes. My school's math program was weird though (6th grade major project was making blueprints of our bedrooms and then having a budget for remodeling them and using the measurements to figure out wallpaper and carpet and whatnot, and we also had to learn base-3 and binary in 6th grade), so even if yours didn't, how hard is it to read "add the quantities on lines 7, 8, 9, and 10, then write the sum on line 11," and do just that? Okay, not everyone's great with math. I don't think I'm any good with it. You might not be able to add with pencil and paper (okay, if you can't that's really bad, so maybe I should go with "you might not be able to figure out what 3.07% of 21392.97 is with pencil and paper"), but really, do you not own a calculator? You can get them at the dollar store. Why pay a large sum for tax software, a glorified calculator, when you can get a $1 calculator, or, even better, since you obviously have a computer if you're going to use software, use the calculator that's built into your OS? The most trouble I had was looking on the PA-IRS's website for a Schedule A form. There's only A/B/O, so I had to get a form with 3 parts instead of just the part I needed. Yeah, so hard. For the US-IRS? I had to click the link for a PDF of the instruction booklet to check that I was still in the 100% refund category, and not the 90% one. Oh my gosh, downloading and printing PDFs then using a calculator to add is such hard work! Gimme a break.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class?

[WillAffleckUW]

I have a slide rule, actually.

But normally I use the big calculator known as my computer.

However, in some years I've filed six additional forms, as many people with options, investments, homes, medical expenses, kids, tuition, and other such fun things could tell you about.

Now, take your calculator and flash it's EEPROM.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class?

[mackyrae]

The problem with a slide rule for taxes is that you tend to end up with rounded numbers if it's not a very small number. The cents would get lost. Still, the forms are all just "fill in this number here" and "add those 2 lines and write the sum there." It's not hard math to do. The directions are the most confusing part (wait, is this taxable or non-taxable?), but you have to know which papers and receipts and whatnot fall into what category to do it on the computer anyway; otherwise, you'd be filling in the wrong numbers on the wrong computer lines and your computer would be calculating the wrong things.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class?

[WillAffleckUW]

I used to do my taxes manually - for 30 years. In fact, I used to do my own business taxes - in Canada, where returns are frequently 12 to 16 pages long just for individuals - manually.

I think I'll use software, since I can no longer follow instructions which aren't on the printed forms (they altered four sections of tax code that affected Washington State - the flood damage I had, the sales and local taxes I pay (we have no state, county, or city income taxes), the long distance phone tax refund, and another section I can't recall right now).

And sometimes my returns had three copies of the Schedules for stocks, bonds, and dividend transactions ... because I had so many.

Just my itemized charitable donations alone were more than 100 items this year ... I give a lot of money to people.

Not everyone has a simple return.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class?

[mackyrae]

Wow, Washington still requires keeping receipts about sales tax? That's ridiculous. Don't you have to keep all of the receipts and organize all the paper records of what you did and itemize everything anyway, though? Maybe it's because I've never bothered with trying the software method, but it seems to me that it's like having a glorified Excel spreadsheet full of equations. You still need to know what goes where and what category under which to file everything. I would think the part about figuring out what's taxable and what's not is what you'd really need assistance for. And for that, just have a long long list that you can tack up instead of lawyer-jargon-ified section 1.2.7.4 article IV type of things.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class?

[zymurgyboy]

I took a whole degree in math, but I still pay a preparer and have done so for the past 8 years.

The arithmetic (not math -- oh no, not even close) is not the problem. The problem is keeping abreast of the continual changes in tax law and my ever changing financial status (keeps going UP, thanks! Knock on wood). I'm not an accountant and IANAL. Hence, I've determined for myself that the best thing I can do is vend this task out to someone who is one or the other or both. This is not to say I'm completely clueless with respect to tax, legal and other financial considerations, but I'm hardly as clueful as someone who is neck deep in them everyday.

An even better reason for getting a real live accountant to prepare your return (or a lawyer to draw up your will) is that they have a license on the line when they are performing the service for you. That is strong incentive for them to get it right. And if they don't, there are ways to get that rectified.

In the end, it's not whether you win or lose. It's how place the blame. ;^)

For the record, my accountant (a real CPA, not H&R Block) is worth every penny I've spent on him. In addition to preparing tax returns, he's available to advise me on retirement planning, investing, and a whole host of things that software just can't do. I quite literally drop everything that will be required or useful for preparing my tax returns into a shoebox as they come in throughout the year.

1) In January, he sends a letter asking for my pile.

2) I send it once I get all of our W2s, 1099s, etc.

3) He prepares my returns and calls back to discuss them.

4) He mails them back, so I can review and sign them.

5) I stamp and mail them.

The whole process costs me a couple hundred dollars and maybe 45 minutes of my time. Having him do it for me, however, saves hours if not days of my life that I can then put to good use on things I really care about. He knows me and my family and cares about what happens to us, and I like that. He's also a really nice guy. TurboTax is cheaper, but has far less personality.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class?

[zymurgyboy]

And my accountant and his paper returns are all DRM- & Web 2.0-free. Just because something can be done electronically doesn't necessarily mean it should be done that way.

eVoting, anyone?

Re:Anyone ever take a math class?

[geekyMD]

Have you ever done real taxes? Thank you for your profoundly deep insight into the problem of filing taxes, and I'm glad that your 8th grade level ultra-simplified tax forms have qualified you to single handedly make CPAs obsolete. Calculators you say? What a concept! I think you may have missed the point of difficulty entirely.

Seriously, I'm sorry to tell you this, you're obviously bright and it will get you far, but the world is rarely a priori knowable or logically derivable.
Expertise is a beautiful and amazing thing.

Let me illustrate with a few of the simpler tax quandries I confronted this year. Since the math (sic) is so easy, please answer them. Bear in mind that I work for a company which pays me in both NY and CT, even though the job is only in CT and I only live in NY. This means that both NY and CT want a piece of the action and have variably taxed my income.

• how much do I have to amortize the amount (between CT and NY) of my US EE bond that I cashed this year given that I used the entire amount to pay for education expenses in a graduate setting?
  Please note that some of the tax law needed to answer this question is new this year.

• Is it obvious to you that as someone who lives only in NY that I must file taxes in CT as a whole year resident because my spouse has no CT income?

• would you recommend that I use the HOPE or Lifetime Learning Credit for my education expenses? They are mutually exclusive and have many many stipulations on how they must be used.

• do I qualify for the NY education credit?

My federal return was about 20 pages long this year, and I don't even have a private business. And the federal was nothing compared to working out the competition between my TWO state returns. I've done my taxes with software every year since I had to start filing and now consider myself well versed in the tax law, but this year nearly broke me. The amount of time I put into deciphering the tax code numbered in the tens of hours, and I only have about 2 hours a day that I can be awake between work and need for sleep and call disposable. It look me Weeks to figure out, and I certainly don't consider myself dimwittied. (except that I didn't cave-in and get a CPA this year) If it was just the arithmetic it would have taken me at most 20 minutes while watching TV. Gathering the paperwork took about another 60 minutes spread out across 2 months, cake walk. Its the aquisition, interpretation, and execution of new non-intuitive and sometimes conflicting knowledge that makes it fun. Just FYI. Thats what life is really about.
(answers: need more info; only if you know the tax law; lifetime learning only; no)

Money is a convention

[DragonHawk]

You are just supporting the perceived value of paper and ink that has no intrinsic value in and of itself.

Every word you wrote is absolutely true. From an economic theory standpoint, it's really quite a critical concept. As a philosophical statement, that was really quite deep and insightful (seriously). However, from a strictly pragmatic point-of-view, that is absolutely worthless.

Money is an abstraction which exists for convenience. It saves us from having to carry chickens to the gas station. Rather than being carrying chickens around, we say, here's an abstraction which we'll all agree to deal in. It's a lot easier and less messy than carrying chickens around. The first step was using tokens to represent chickens. Rather than carrying the chicken, we carried a token that represented a chicken. But it quickly became obvious that, hey, all I really care about is the value represented by the token. I don't care about the chicken (maybe I prefer beef anyway). So let's all just agree to say the token represents an abstract concept of value. Saves the trouble of keeping all those chickens around.

It's true that paying taxes "supports the perceived value" of the currency. So does any use of the currency. When I pay for my gas or Internet in US dollars rather than chickens, I'm supporting the currency. When I get paid in US dollars, I'm supporting the currency. When I browse Slashdot and look at the ends, that translates into resources used, which are paid for in US dollars, which supports the currency.

If you prefer, substitute some other tangible good, such as "cows", "cheese", or even "gold" for "chickens". It's all the same concept.

Re:Money is a convention

[Anonymous Coward]

Except in your example, the government can create chickens out of thin air and you can't. Your ideas are only true if the US has a chicken for each dollar it creates, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.

Re:Money is a convention

[SimonBelmont]

It's true that paying taxes "supports the perceived value" of the currency. So does any use of the currency. Not really. The more money people have (whether it's electronic or real paper money, and whether it's backed by gold or chickens or not), the less purchasing power a unit of currency has, everything else being equal. That's basic economics. Taking money out of circulation is entirely different from using it to buy chickens. That being said, I agree that the GP argument is worthless. It's like saying paying off your auto loan is not paying for your car but merely supporting the stability of banks. By that logic, tolls don't pay for bridges - after all, they're already built before anyone pays a toll to use them.

Re:Only Fools compare estimates to hard numbers

[Maximum Prophet]

Well, yes, that's why I gave the formula, so anyone could plug in better numbers if they had them.

In business sometimes you don't have hard numbers, so yes, you do "Just Make Them Up!" We call it a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess)

What happens is the executives either don't have the real numbers yet, or won't release them because they are a trade secret, or VP X doesn't like VP Y and is gunning for his job, so he won't give you the real numbers. So you make your best estimate and present the VPs with a paper that lists all the assumptions and formulas. If VP X knows that factor Z is really twice as high as you estimated, all he has to do is plug it in to your formula, and viola, he has the real result. Alas, since VP Y didn't give the correct number for factor W the project is still doomed, but hey, what can you do? (:-)

Another reason generalizations are bad

[BenEnglishAtHome]

As long as they owe you a refund, nothing bad happens if you file a day late.

Unless you're an IRS employee. Filing a day late, even if you're getting a refund, means you get counseled (rarely and only if you're very, very lucky), suspended (more likely) or fired (most cases). In the best case, your performance record still gets a very bright "This guy is such a screwup he can't remember the most basic thing in the world" notation. You might as well resign; your chances for advancement in the agency just went straight into the toilet.

I got my $2503 refund in, but it took 2 hours PST

[WillAffleckUW]

I had to wait for all the east coasters to stop slamming the system until somewhere around 10:30 pm after about 40 tries to upload my return.

In case you're wondering, the reason I get such a big refund is not good - I had major storm damage last Christmas Eve (flooded my condo while I was away for three days, the resulting damage means many thousands of dollars of repairs this year too). And my PI had her house hit by a four-story-tall tree ...

voters like deductions

[peter303]

They feel like they are getting more "deals" with more deductions. I perosnally like to see all deductions eliminated expect the dependents one and one tax rate for every kind of income. Then the IRS would send you a pre-filled postcard size tax return and you'd sign it or correct it.

Re:voters like deductions

[jackbird]

So charitable donations and medical expenses shouldn't be tax deductible while eliminating the EIC at the same time? That's harsh.

Re:voters like deductions

[MCZapf]

I'm with you. Get rid of all deductions. I have a feeling that deductions end up being about the same for everyone, percentagewise, anyway. Eliminate all that paperwork and just lower the overall rates. (Or, keep the rate the same and balance the budget!)

Why keep the deduction for dependents, though? Do we have a shortage of children such that we need to encourage people - through the tax system - to have dependents?

Re:voters like deductions

[jackbird]

I have a feeling that deductions end up being about the same for everyone, percentagewise, anyway.

So take your standard deduction and leave the millionaires donating significant sums to charity the hell alone.

Re:voters like deductions

[MCZapf]

Why? Will charitable giving collapse if the deduction for it goes away? I'd like to try it for a year and see.

Er..

[Digz]

..you realize that this "piece of software" is tax software, no? Methinks they probably gave them the SS# in the context of filing taxes.

Learn . Your . Lesson

[spazoid12]

Who is buying TurboTax? Don't you people remember the DRM fiasco? Did you forgive and forget? Why? You people still piss around about how evil Circuit City is because of their Divx fiasco and refuse to shop there. Why forgive Intuit but not others? There are choices... exercise your ability to vote with your dollars. Geez. Last night I was digging around for my HUD-1 statement on a house sale so that I could finish up the last bit on my taxes and file at the last possible moment in true procrastinator fashion. But, some sell-on-eBay burglars broke into the new construction houses across the street and I had to call 911, give a statement, identify the dudes, etc... took a long time. So, I ended up e-filing an extension at 11:48PM. No problems encountered. TurboTax? No, sir. I used TaxCut. Not because I like it, but because I do remember the Intuit DRM fiasco. Sure, TaxCut has its own problems (eg. Schedule A will not print correctly on an Epson printer last year, or this year), but I'm happy to avoid Intuit when I do have choices.

2 days I couldn't file

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried to file a day before the deadline, No Go - Server Busy. Tried every 10 minutes, then every hour. Tried again the next day, NO GO. Took the return to the Post Office.
Why should Intuit be able to force us to pay $17 per, bribe the Gov to NOT allow free e-file, then screw it up totally?

The trick

[oblivion95]

Whenever the TurboTax website got slow, the browser would hang. The trick was to open a new browser window, log back in, and continue. I did that about every 5 minutes last night, each time forcibly killing the hung window. It worked every time. Microsoft got several dozen bug reports from me last night.

Hardship - exactly

[cascadingstylesheet]

And then when my tax bill came at last, it would feel like a hardship.

And then you might, like, vote to have less money taken from you by the government. Can't be having that ... which is why we have withholding.

Intuit stopped the IRS from making it FREE

[Esquid]

Check it out, the IRS saves money and wants you to have FREE efile, but INTUIT lobbied and got them to allow INTUIT to rip us off - $34 to NOT deliver my return, they got my credit card but then the server never came up for me.

Realistic Interest: 5% APY in HSBC account

[KWTm]

I don't know why you're using 1%. If you deposit it into a HSBC online savings account, you get about 5%. APY, which is actual compounded interest in a year, is 5.05%; the APR, or nominal non-compounded interest, is only 4.98% or something like that. No minimum investment. No requirement other than that you have some other bank account (so you can transfer money from your usual account to your HSBC account). If you put money in, it takes about 3 days to go in (due to the Automated Clearing House system in use in the USA); if you take it out, it takes about 3 days. That's something HSBC has no control over.

If you don't like HSBC, you can try ING Direct, which gives something like 4.8% interest. No minimum investment, but when you put money in, you need to leave it for 14 days before you take it out again. Also 3 days to make the transaction. So if you have $300 in the ING account, and you put in $500, then for the next two weeks only $300 will be available to you, unlike the HSBC account where as soon as the money shows up after 3 days you can take it right out again.

Then of course you have other options like CD's (Certificates of Deposit, not the shiny discs) where you can commit to investing some minimum amount of your money for some minimum time, and get even higher interest rates than that. But 5% should be the standard of comparison for the "Do Nothing" option. (That is, if you're not earning 5% interest before taxes, you can assume you're losing money.)

Anyway, per your calculation, you'd get about $25 interest on $1000 invested throughout the year. You can estimate it like this: part of the $1000 gets the full 5% interest, and part of it gets almost no interest (depending on what time in the year you invested), so on average you get about 2.5% interest. 2.5% of $1000 is $25. It jives with your calculation of $5+ for 1% interest on $1000 evenly distributed.

If $25 doesn't matter that much to you, please write me a cheque for this amount.

Re:Realistic Interest: 5% APY in HSBC account

[ghotihed]

I don't know why you're using 1%.

Because it was easy for the example. But you're right, $25.96 from 5% is certainly better than the $5.19 from 1%. Even my bank has a simplistic 3% money market that acts just like a bank account (for all intents and purposes).

If $25 doesn't matter that much to you, please write me a cheque for this amount.

Oh, it matters to me. It matters a great deal. It's just that I'm willing to pay $26 over the course of a year in order to not stress about whether or not I'll have to pay the government. It also makes my taxes a little easier to work out, and it takes less planning. The extra hour or two it would require to be more accurate in my taxes and plan things out properly is worth more to me than that $26.

Me

Re:Actually, TaxActOnline was completely free this

[CronoCloud]

Though the fed should just buy own of these systems and provide it for free.

There is no need to for them to buy one, they had one they made themselves, they were going to release it to the wild until the tax prep companies lobbied congress to forbid them from doing so. The states are under no such restrictions, which is why things like calfile and the Illinois version of same exist.

IMHO tax preparers are vultures, producing anti-government rhetoric every year with their ads, and then making money of that

Re:Anyone ever take a math class? (Why)

[WillAffleckUW]

Technically, we have different sales taxes. My city has a total sales tax rate of 8.8 percent, but it will go up in a month. That is the city plus county plus state sales tax. We, along with I think 4 states, have no state or local income taxes, but only pay sales taxes.

Unlike you, my time is worth research dollars, and spending 10 hours doing paperwork means less time to work on scientific papers and discoveries, such as a cure for Malaria (done, will be out in around 8 years, new drug) and now research into Alzheimer's disease, Dementia, Parkinson's disease, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Post Improvised Explosive Disorder (PTED) (apparently being around 80 or more explosions may cause sheer in your brain neuron connections, hope I'm not in that category), and other fun things.

Maybe you have time to kill, but I'd like to get back into my Ph.D. program sooner rather than later, since I only have lower levels of training beyond a Bachelors.

Re:Nickel-And-Dimed..... not 30 dollars

[WillAffleckUW]

Actually, it's only $30 if you let them loan you the money to get your refund.

If you pay for the fee ahead of time (credit card or check) it is $15.

I chose to pay by credit card (on a miles card).

Re:Actually, TaxActOnline was completely free this

[homer_ca]

California went a bit farther with their ReadyReturn program. Since the tax agency has your payroll info already, they mailed tax forms that precalculated the tax for people with easy returns. Intuit lobbied to kill it, and because one of our Board of Equalization members supported it, Intuit spent $1,000,000 to run attack ads against him in the election for State Comptroller. He still won, so to hell with Intuit.

John Edwards has proposed something similar for federal taxes, and I'm expecting similar fight. I don't know what the big deal is. An EZ filer doesn't need Turbotax.

Intuit's problem caused by a software bug

[Aku Head]

I spent several hours trying to transmit my returns to the Intuit servers. At first, I would try every half hour because I thought that the server was down and would be back up soon. Then, I went to the Intuit forums. (There's some teed-off people there!) It turns out that the servers were running, just not very well. So I got a glass of wine and made a game out of hitting the transmit button over and over again until it worked. This process is slower than it should be because there is a bug in the program that makes you save your return every time. (thus erasing the time stamp of when you actually finished your return)

Most of the time, the transmission failed instantly with the dialog box asking you to try again after 4 am. However, sometimes it would completely upload my returns, pause and then fail with some truly bizarre error text. Out of the more than a hundred attempts, this occured maybe five times. The error text was different every time. In these cases I was actually putting a load on their servers. Multiply this across the whole country and you can see how this bug greatly multiplied the load on their servers.

So, although the company is trying to blame the taxpayers for their problem by filing late, I think that Intuit's software is actually to blame for the increased load.

On another subject, why do we have to pay to upload our tax returns? If it saves the IRS money, shouldn't they pay us? Why can't we just use the software and upload directly to the IRS? If the IRS claims that they can't handle the traffic, don't they get the traffic anyway? Your $16.95 per return just pays Intuit to hold on to it for a few milliseconds before retransmitting it to the IRS.

Re:Intuit's problem caused by a software bug

[Frisky070802]

I had a similar experience. I filed Sunday, but went back to check Tuesday evening, and was told it thought I had never filed. Their web site said to refile if this is encountered, so I tried, and hit the various errors you mentioned. The software should (a) never have claimed I didn't file when I did, (b) should have automatically retried until it got through, probably with some sort of backoff algorithm. Eventually I tried a backup copy of the file from when I originally efiled, and it worked this time ... or so it claimed. But I wasted about 90 minutes trying to get this all fixed. Will I ever buy turbotax again? Hardly.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class? (Why)

[mackyrae]

How is there less research involved using the software? Regardless of how you do your taxes, you have to figure out what invoices/receipts/credits/loans/etc fit into each category (because not everything counts the same way) before you can enter any data. My dad spends months just going through the stacks of paper work and organizing them so that he knows what goes where. He uses a CPA because he doesn't have time to enter numbers in a program or write them on a piece of paper, but he still has to sort all that paperwork BEFORE he can take it to the CPA. A CPA is the least-time-consuming way because you don't have to enter in any of the numbers in either a digital or analog form, but either way, you still have to organize your finances beforehand. For people with all kinds of assets, debts, investments, etc, that's still the largest time-drain. Then again, there's probably some more-expensive-than-my-dad's CPAs who will just accept a giant pile of papers and do the organizing and everything for you before doing the taxes.

Self Employed

[us7892]

And, your reference page at the IRS also has this tidbit, which applies to many slashdotters most likely. So, even if you are owed a refund, and are self employed, within 3 years you should file, or else you will lose credit for social security when you're old and wrinkled, or if you lose a hand in a copier mishap:

Self-employed persons who do not file a return will not receive credits toward Social Security retirement or disability benefits.

Re:Actually, TaxActOnline was completely free this

[CronoCloud]

I don't know what the big deal is. An EZ filer doesn't need Turbotax.

I know that, and you know that but not everyone does. Also Intuit (and others) make lots of money selling tax software every year to people who would never buy/use home accounting software because they live paycheck to paycheck.

I loathe the tax preparation companies. I filled federal free since my income is easily below the limit. You should see the PDF's the HR block site creates, they're crap, useless summary pages, a big www.pdflib.com watermark over every page that hurts legibility.

I also filed free though my states own website. Their PDF's look like actual filled out forms, much better quality.

Re:Anyone ever take a math class? (Why)

[WillAffleckUW]

my point is I can spend 10 or more hours of my time doing it manually, or use software to do it, and have that time to spend on research (what I do).

CPA's cost money.

Abstract concept of value

[DragonHawk]

Except in your example, the government can create chickens out of thin air and you can't. Your ideas are only true if the US has a chicken for each dollar it creates, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.

Since you apparently missed it the first time, let me repeat:

But it quickly became obvious that, hey, all I really care about is the value represented by the token. I don't care about the chicken (maybe I prefer beef anyway). So let's all just agree to say the token represents an abstract concept of value.

So, bzzzt, wrong, but thanks for playing. We have a lovely consolation prize: A year's supply of Tyson chicken!

USPS

[Guppy06]

"I surrendered 2 hours before the East Coast deadline and schlepped on down to the Post Office."

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a mail truck full of tax returns!

Value is always perceived

[DragonHawk]

Regardless, money supply is increasing now faster than before. How? Gov't is printing money.

Source?

So it should be clear that money just represents a perceived value, not a real value.

Value is always perceived. Take chickens and cows. Maybe we say a cow is worth ten chickens. Cool. But what happens if, say, people start valuing cows less (maybe because of all that "Mad Cow Disease" stuff in the news). Demand for cows drops somewhat; at the same time, demand for chicken increases. Maybe now I can only get nine chickens for a cow down at the local market. If we're using tokens, that would mean I can only get nine chicken tokens for one cow token.

Same concept applies if you're using a gold standard. Say we switch to the gold standard again, and one dollar is decreed to be worth 0.0014 troy oz of gold (which is about what it is worth today), and we get all that gold together and put it in a safe. Let's also say that for one dollar, I can get one chicken. So, one dollar = one chicken = 0.0014 troy oz gold.

Now say someone invents a way to turn stone into gold (the alchemist's dream). (Or, if you prefer, maybe a giant asteroid made of pure gold fragments and then the fragments hit the Earth, causing gold to start raining from the sky. Whatever reason you like -- this is an example, not a financial plan.) Now gold is everywhere. The price - the perceived value - of gold will plummet. Now, I get like a pound of gold for a chicken, because raising chickens is a pain in the ass, but gold is everywhere. Still the same gold molecules, still the same chickens, but now gold has less value.

The fundamental concept behind modern money is that the value represented by a dollar (or whatever) does not need to be pinned to a particular physical good, because the value we ascribe to something is arbitrary anyway. So we all agree instead that a dollar represents an abstract concept of value. That concept changes, of course, just like the value we assign to cows or chickens or gold changes.

See how it works, now?

Re:Value is always perceived

[gnuman99]

I already provided you the links. But in case you need a more graphical view, look at the great wikipedia,

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/81/Mone y-supply.png

Even looking at M3 vs. GDP, you can probably guess that M3 is now highest ever. Huge amount of money injected into economy to stimulate it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Us_proportionat e_m3.svg

The problem is that all this extra money is going to China (made in China!) hence their GDP growth. Inflation is deferred because of that, but how long? I guess until China and Japan start selling USD (ie. buying stuff with it)

Anyway, regarding the perceived value and real value, I know that everything is perceived value. I do not propose that fiat currencies be backed by gold or something like that (problems with that, like value of money reflecting supply of gold and not economy). The problem is that people do not understand that gov't can just print money on demand if they want to. There are consequences of doing so, but they can just print money as was done in Greenspan years. (again, see 2nd graph).

Taxes and value

[DragonHawk]

Taxes are a hold-over from when money was a commodity instead of faith.

That's the fatal flaw in your reasoning. Taxes pay for all the stuff the government does (well, taxes and loans). The reason we still have to collect taxes is that "stuff" still uses resources - people, oil, building materials, etc. - and those resources need to be paid for. The government pays for them in dollars. When I buy gas, I also pay in dollars. We've all agreed the dollar has value.

The value can change, yes. So can the value of a barrel of oil, a gallon of milk, or a troy oz of gold.

It's certainly true that printing money without regard to other factors will cause severe inflation. As a US citizen, I do hope the conspiracy nuts are wrong and that our government isn't printing money with wild abandon, because that will certainly lead to the destruction of the US dollar as a viable currency. Fortunately, conspiracy nuts usually are just conspiracy nuts.

Re:Taxes and value

[IMarvinTPA]

Read What Has Government Done to Our Money? and get back to me.

IMarv

I feel the need, the need for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Intuit learn their lesson and strengthen their servers and network for next year's last minute rush? Given their track record of quality, I seriously doubt it.

I was always a bit curious what the "turbo" in "TurboTax" meant. I thought it meant "faster", like the turbo in my car. But in fact it means "full of hot air", like the turbo in my car.

OT, but an additional comment re: dbl space

[Ayanami Rei]

Also, web browsers (by design) eat up arbitrary amounts of whitespace and turn it into a single space. So, nearly all Internet interactions (web design, comments in blogs, forum posts) there's no way to get that double space after the period to stick anyway even if you added it. Like right here. You can get the same effect using character entities to insert non-breaking spaces if that's allowed in the particular forum or whatever ( )

This exposes the fundamental flaw in

[Master of Transhuman]

thinking about the Web as a business conduit - it's utter unreliability.

And it's not unreliable because of the protocols, or the design, or the routers, or any of that.

It's unreliable because of the companies running it.

They don't get enough hardware or bandwidth to do their job. It's that simple.

And that isn't going to change.

Any company that exposes itself to the risk of running its business dependently on the Net is asking for trouble.

Sun's notion that "the network is the computer" is totally wrong and always will be wrong.

Only where YOU CONTROL the network is that statement true.

Trust another chimpanzee to do their job?

It is to laugh.

Actually, $34 - $16.95 * 2 returns

[Esquid]

Intuit charges TWICE for the service, once FED and then STATE. Ouch. Should be free, but INTUIT bought off the GOV. Call your rep. and demand they make it FREE like it is elsewhere in the World.

Don't let the facts rain on your parade, but...

[FooAtWFU]

Well, if you put the conspiracy theories aside for a moment, they stopped publishing it because

M3 does not appear to convey any additional information about economic activity that is not already embodied in M2 and has not played a role in the monetary policy process for many years.

Of course, that's what they WANT you to think!!

And no, I haven't noticed that the cost of most food items have gone up 25-50% in the past year. In fact, aside from things like Milk which fluctuate wildly, I think they've been pretty steady. Perhaps these price increases are specific to your location. Perhaps you just need to reconsider where you're shopping.

In fact, the Consumer Price Index for March 2007 (which, of course, includes groceries) was just published yesterday. It's presently at 205.352, up from 199.8 a year before- or, an increase of ~2.8%. This is practically a textbook example of a normal, low inflation rate. But don't let any facts rain on your parade.

Re:Don't let the facts rain on your parade, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, the Consumer Price Index for March 2007 (which, of course, includes groceries) was just published yesterday. It's presently at 205.352, up from 199.8 a year before- or, an increase of ~2.8%. This is practically a textbook example of a normal, low inflation rate. But don't let any facts rain on your parade.

Please read this article to see how inflation reporting is manipulated. The guy (Walter Williams) makes big bucks from reading between the lines of official reports and giving more correct figures to big companies for their forecasting needs. Google him to find a lengthly interview where he describes more cheats. BTW, the linked article states, the inflation figures are understated by about 7%.

Re:Actually, $34 - $16.95 * 2 returns

[WillAffleckUW]

We, like 4 other states, have no state income tax return. We only pay sales tax. In Washington State and other places.

Thus, I am correct.

And so are you.

About those sources...

[DragonHawk]

Even looking at M3 vs. GDP, you can probably guess that M3 is now highest ever. Huge amount of money injected into economy to stimulate it.

My understanding of the technical side of this stuff is pretty minimal. But, according to all the links you've sent so far, M3 is not about hard currency. M3 is things like large CDs, foreign deposits, Treasury securities, and so on. M3 is money locked up tight and hard to get at -- about as far from currency as you can get. So I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove by going on about "Government *prints* money" while pointing at M3 being higher. Maybe I'm mis-understanding the terminology.

If you're just trying to say that going deeper and deeper into debt is bad, well, no argument there. Be it the national debt (gee, we, the American people, each of us owe $30K on that, great) or the trade deficit (even better, money (perceived value) pouring out of this country into other countries), debt is basically economic weakness. You don't need a degree in economics to know that spending money you don't have is bad fiscal policy.

Smart people wait till later

[Krishnoid]

Thankfully, the IRS extended the automatic extension to file till October. Thus, if you're due a refund from both California and the US Gub Mit, you can file the 4868 (IRS automatic extension form) with an estimate of how much they owe you back, do absolutely nothing for California, and send in all your info sometime before October 15.

Nothing inherently wrong with fiat currency

[ccmay]

So we all agree instead that a dollar represents an abstract concept of value.

It may be abstract in some sense, but it does have a very practical value: It makes tax collectors go away if you give some of it to them, without stealing your cows or chickens, or ejecting you from your home at gunpoint, or clapping you in prison. This is a great advancement in the history of civilization.

Fiat currency does not have to be inflationary, if the government has the discipline not to increase the money supply by a greater percentage than the national economy's increase in productivity. Theoretically, it can even undergo deflation, which you might remember being discussed in worried tones about seven or eight years ago at the height of the tech bubble.

Conversely, the buying power of commodity-backed money can fluctuate wildly. Spain had dreadful inflation after conquering the gold and silver mining regions of the Americas. In the late 1800s, the question of whether to use gold or silver for backing the currency was a matter of great dispute, because with the discovery of the Comstock Lode and other great silver deposits, farmers and other debtors clamored for a silver-backed currency in full knowledge that it would be inflationary.

Gold-backed currency would not be a good idea for a modern economy. If technology increases the efficiency of gold extraction, a gold note loses value and inflation results. If the mines play out, money becomes more valuable and the nation suffers deflation, even if there is no good reason for it in the economy as a whole.

So long as the government accepts its own greenbacks for payment of taxes owed, and prudently manages the money supply, there is no need for concern about "fiat" money. The best thing we can do to ensure this is the case is to demand transparency from the Federal Reserve, and closely scrutinize the qualifications and good judgment of those persons appointed to its governing board.

-ccm

Re:ATTN: SWITCHEURS!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think Clarus is a misspelling of Claris, and then presume to challenge a real Mac user over your point of ignorance, you REALLY, REALLY need to GET. THE. FUCK. OUT. Leave our platform, you fucking switcheur. NOW.

Getting back to you

[DragonHawk]

Read What Has Government Done to Our Money? and get back to me.

Okay, I skimmed though that nice little work of ideology.

If you're expecting that to prove some point to me, well, you failed. The work as a whole appears to proceed from a number of assumptions I consider invalid. I particularly liked "Governments need only find some method of expropriating more goods without the owner's consent" in reference to taxes. In my world-view, it's a fundamental that government is always done with consent, either explicit or implicit. As the saying goes, you cannot enslave a Free Man; you can only kill him. Likewise, by definition, a community is a group of people who agree to live by a set of rules. I do not divide the world into "the government" and "everybody else". If your arguments are centered around the kind of premise, well, I'm afraid we'll have to start from fundamentals.

So, I've gotten back to you. What next?

Re:Getting back to you

[IMarvinTPA]

I think we may be near a point where we agree to disagree.

What's the point of the government taxing its people if it is law that we must accept the money for all debts and they have the ability to make as much of it as they wish?

They can take our wealth directly by taking dollars away from us or they can take our wealth away from us by devaluing the dollars we have.

I wouldn't call myself a conspiracy nut, I don't care if there is one or not; but if there is a conspiracy, that's bad. If there is not, then it is really bad. (Controlled disaster vs uncontrolled disaster.) In either case, the increasing money supply for the dollar is very bad and is obviously happening. We are destined for an economic disaster that will get the Great Depression renamed.

I've always wondered why great nations seemed to only last about 300 years, and what would save us from that milestone in our lifetime. I've worked it out to be that debased money drags a nation down and we won't be spared.

IMarv

Increasing money supply not sufficient proof

[DragonHawk]

I think we may be near a point where we agree to disagree.

I respect you for having the ability to say that. A lot of people just assume anyone that doesn't think the way they do just needs to be yelled at louder.

What's the point of the government taxing its people if it is law that we must accept the money for all debts and they have the ability to make as much of it as they wish?

If they print more money, the dollar gets devalued overall. Cash reserves everywhere -- including the government's own -- would become weaker, because one then needs more dollars per unit of anything else (commodities, goods, services, whatever). By sustaining the value of the US dollar as currency, the viability of the nation's economy is sustained, and thus the nation itself is sustained. By taking taxes in the form of US dollars we have, rather than just printing more currency, we thus protect the nation.

The point of taxation is not to decrease the wealth of the citizenry. The point is to cover the real-world costs of government operations. Goods such as food, building materials, fuel, and so on have irrefutable costs. Labor has to come from somewhere. Under some government systems, goods are simply transferred directly to the control of the government ("seized", as Mr. Rothbard puts it), and labor is in form of conscripted citizens and/or slaves (arguably just a semantic distinction anyway).

In the US, we instead pay taxes. (This paragraph describes how it should work in ideal theory; see following paragraph to get back to reality.) We work to produce good and provide services, which we trade for units of currency. We can trade currency with others to obtain our own goods and services. A certain portion of that currency is transferred to the control of the government, in the form of taxes. The government then trades that currency for goods and services, same as we do. Government operations are done to benefit the citizenry, so for wholly domestic affairs, the citizenry as a whole is no poorer. Certain individuals will be, but not the total sum. And, of course, international operations may result in decreasing the wealth of the country.

Again, the above assumes a theoretical ideal. It is far from reality. Even under a perfect government, different people are going to have different ideas about what benefits the citizenry as as whole, how much wealth should be redistributed, and so on. And of course our government is *far* from perfect. Even with the best of intentions, mistakes and bad decisions will be made. Worse, there is abuse of power and trust, which I suspect is rather more the norm than the exception these days. There are those who strive to benefit only some of the citizenry, rather than the whole. It may be their own petty interests, or it may be their "district" or "state" -- so many in Congress assume that their responsibility is to their constituents alone, rather than to the nation. I'm not sure which is worse - at least the first kind of greed is simple, easily recognized, and generally decried by others.

...the increasing money supply for the dollar is very bad...

Doesn't that assume the production of the nation's economy as a whole is constant?

For example, let's go back to chickens and chicken tokens. Let's say a nation can raise 100 chickens a year (it's a very small country). So 100 chicken tokens per year. But then someone creates a radical new chicken breed, and now the country can produce 200 chickens a year. Does that decrease the value of a chicken token? In one way, no, of course not. A chicken token is still worth one chicken. But in another way, it does decrease the value of a chicken token, because now chickens are worth less (greater supply means the value of any individual chicken is reduced).

Now, instead say they're not using chicken tokens, but tokens which represent an abstract concept of value. Sam

Re:Increasing money supply not sufficient proof

[IMarvinTPA]

I support that taxation is a form of organized robbery, but I can also understand it as a cooperative automatic donation system. The point at which it goes from one to the other is whether or not the two wolves and one sheep voted unanimously that you must pay one liver per bale of grass you aquire and eat. If it was unanimous, it is cooperative. If it is not, then it is legislated theft.

The economy is not constant as a whole, including the money system if the money is sound. Gold and silver are dug up and added to the supply just as more eggs are produced. Even so, if the money does not increase as fast as production, the price of eggs is going to go down relative the money. Thus, there is a deflationary pressure on the money, which is good for the savers of the world. (And particularly bad for borrowers.)

Just a thing to watch out for.

IMarv

Omigod! Bad news for any guy that installed it!

[aqk]

This is really gonna be bad for any Linux user that installed it!

Was it running on an Intel or an AMD?
And was, umm....

  Oh. Sorry! I thought the headline said "Turbo TUX melts down..."

    grrrr...