Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Can You Trust Online Tax Software?
An anonymous reader writes "TurboTax from Intuit and H&R Block's own tax package have been perennial mainstays for U.S. citizens trying to use software to figure out just how much they owe the country, without reading the tens of thousands of pages of IRS forms guidance. With tax season just around the corner, the new online platforms from both providers raise an interesting question: can you trust your return information any more or less to an online platform than you do to the equivalent software on your computer?"
No. No, I won't save more money than I earn at my job in a month. There's not that much more to save. And I earn a lot. Enough that I've decided not to spend my leisure time becoming a tax accountant - you know, someone whose *job* it is to know taxes. Software doesn't mean shit, it's the person using it *and* their knowledge.
I could also paint my entire house, but I don't feel like doing that either.
I don't regard spending time learning tax regulations as time well spent. And, wrong again... she didn't find the deduction using tax software, but by looking at our returns, how we work, and then interviewing us. You know, employing skills that software doesn't do well.
Other than that, your analysis was spot on.
Been doing it for years with government provided software.
Mind you it doesn't say 'cloud' every 5 words, but it submits it all online and even auto fills in a lot of your data from government databases. Not sure how long it has been available for but many many years without incident.
Oh and its free.
Thankfully, Intuit, Inc. (by a totally crazy coincidence also the maker of TurboTax(tm), a market-leading tax software solution) has been fighting to save us from communism...
So here in the Land of the Free, the IRS probably has the information it needs anyway (for fraud detection, and because Joe Worker's employer already reports it); but we can't let them destroy the free market, and capitalism itself, by making the process any easier. Instead, you just hand over your money and personal information to an 'Authorized e-File Provider' and be glad that you live in the bestest ever country on earth.
We will be rolling out a similar system for health insurance soon.
I have heard circumstances like this multiple times. It really bothers me that we have invented a tax code that is on par with the game "go" as far as its ability to be computerized. There are extremely talented individuals making a living interpreting our tax code. Those same people could be doing something far more useful to society than they are now, but we have created an entire industry that sucks them away from more useful endeavors by cobbling together a tax code that is a mashup of bribes to interest groups, bribes to voters, authoritarian interference with our individual lives, and a glass ceiling protecting the one percent. If any highschool graduate can't just sit down with a calculator and pay the *exact* amount owed, we have done something wrong.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.