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Intuit, Maker of Turbotax, Lobbies Against Simplified Tax Filings
McGruber (1417641) writes "Return-free filing might allow tens of millions of Americans to file their taxes for free and in minutes. Under proposals authored by several federal lawmakers, it would be voluntary, using information the government already receives from banks and employers and that taxpayers could adjust. The concept has been endorsed by Presidents Obama and Reagan and is already a reality in some parts of Europe. Sounds great, except to Intuit, maker of Turbotax: last year, Intuit spent more than $2.6 million on lobbying, some of it to lobby on four bills related to the issue, federal lobbying records show."
How will they survive if we make taxes simpler! Just like all those ditch diggers if we gave them shovels instead of spoons.
It's downright embarrassing how little money it even takes to buy the government. Intuit makes a couple billion dollars a year. The lobbying spend, $2.6 million, is about eight hours' worth of revenues.
And this surprised who exactly?
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
On the one hand, filing Return-free filing would be a nice option...on the other, I like that people have to take the time to notice how much money Uncle Sam is taking.
... more at 11!
Simplified tax filings (ie, tax authorities tell you what they think you owe, so you don't inadvertently misfile and get penalized for it or worse, get an audit notification on what could have been sorted out before the filing date) - this is what other countries do, and I hear it's really awesome. Found it here:
I hope Intuit's lobbying doesn't screw this up. This is one Obama promise I'd like to see implemented.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
These assholes have been at this for decades. During the Clinton administration, in the early years of the Web, as the government was moving to online and Gore was still talking of the "superinformation highway", there was a vision of everyone filing their taxes online, which only makes sense. I mean, collecting taxes is what the IRS does, and they had been transferring paper forms into their computers by hand. So online filing would have been a HUGE convenience thing for American citizens as well as a big labor (and therefore $) saver for taxpayers. Not to mention energy savings, paper savings, etc etc.
Enter Intuit. I remember there was a huge lobbying campaign from the tax preperation industry, and some back and forth power broking, y'know-- the power of the free market blah blah-- the result being that the IRS web stuff was scrapped, but for people who were middle/class->poor, Intuit and other tax preparer companies would put out a "free" version of their software. The only thing is, apparently they didn't have to ACTUALLY make this fact widely known to anyone.
During the Bush administration this was the status quo, although if I remember right, the income threshhold kept going down and and down, with more and more people forced to pay for the software...
And so now we're where we are. Why Americans need to prop up this shitty industry with an Intuit Tax is beyond me. Where is our "public option"?
Anyway, if you meet the income threshhold, the free software is still out there and though it still has a yearly income limit, anyone can use it to get a tax extension.
That's quite a trick! Seeing as Ronald Reagan has been dead for ten years, was a Ouija board involved?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
If you want to talk overall economic health, taxation does not really impact it since all those tax dollars just go strait back into the economy anyway.
As for 'every corner', this is actually rather important. When you focus all your tax burden on some particular metric it tends to skew who pays and who does not further and further. By spreading it around it starts to better represent actual movement of money in the economy rather then specific types of transactions.
but only to outsource technical and engineering jobs. Heaven forbid if we automate away accountants and bureaucracy. THEN technology is taking jobs away!
Mostly random stuff.
This is not news. No surprise here.
I once read that a third of all tax credit dollars earmarked for the poor go to H&R Block. This must be where another third goes. This is no different from the record companies fighting tooth and nail to prevent their old business model from dying. It's no surprise that it's happening - it's sad that it's working.
Here in Norway we have had this system for ten or more years. Super easy for most with just paychecks and a mortage. Highly recommended! And if you want or need you can still do it the old fashion way. Also highly recommended is checking your yearly totals agains the simplified report. Computers occasionally make a mess.
Depends... They're saying that poor people wouldn't get deductions and tax credits if they did this...
So... that's a credible point.
That said, if poor people did this then the form itself might get reformed enough to account for that without the complexity... perhaps by lowering the fucking taxes.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
But if I suddenly start getting hundreds back a paycheck that I'm now losing, I may go buy something an stimulate the economy.
Can't have any of that.... then I may be able to afford more upper class things which will annoy some upper class person.
The tax joke is to keep you from becomming self sufficient.... Otherwise I'd just save enough for a house and basic operating costs then stop working and enjoy what I've purchased.
Taxes are there ot make sure I have to go back to work.
Even if my house is paid off, I owe thousands a year in property taxes. Even if my land is mine, I owe taxes on it. Even if I bought solar equipment to avoid needing electricity or gas, I still cannot stop working and just enjoy what I have....
Taxes make sure I cannot stock pile any amount of things as a middle-class citizen and avoid working. I must work until retirement and cannot retire early without a bunch of extra penalties on the money that is already mine.
It's a big scam. Income tax alone steals shitloads of my money. I make $4800 every two weeks before taxes. My after tax amount is $2810. If we killed income tax, I'd have *$4000 A MONTH* just sitting there.
I could surely save enough money to retire in my 30's if I had an extra 4,000 dollars a month to save. In 5 years that's $240,000 or more than the average persons retirement account.... IN FIVE YEARS.
Can you imagine how well off I'd be if I could do that for 10 years while also living on 2810 every two weeks? Taxes make sure I cannot do that.
It would not be hard to make it clear to people how much "The Man" is taking.
You'd think so but I'm an accountant and I do our company payroll. You would be *amazed* at how seldom many people look at their paycheck, particularly if it is direct deposit. I get asked all the time how much vacation people have left even though it is printed right on our paystubs every two weeks.
That said, I'd have no problem in principle with some sort of reasonable (yeah I know...) automatic payment system. The devil is in the details and to do it you can't have too many special tax exemptions. (or the government has to know WAY more about you than you probably want them to) There is however a pretty substantial portion of the population that has very simple tax returns so why not automate it where it makes sense?
Not to make this political but I'm pretty sure the republicans would bitch about it being another government intrusion and the democrats would bitch about lost tax collector jobs or something else that misses the big picture so we'll keep doing things the same stupid way we have for the last 80 years even though it makes very little sense to anyone and costs a fortune in the process.
That, and their customer support is really awful (the actual software is mediocre). It doesn't handle moving states to change jobs very well. It kept trying to slap me with an entire year's worth of taxes for one state. Customer support was non-existent (see numerous Intuit fora).
I can pay my taxes for free with a check mailed in, or pay $30-$90 to pay it electronically through a "clearing house" and Intuit also get's a cut.
got to Hell Intuit. Go straight to hell.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've hated Intuit for years. They are bottom feeders.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
a story I heard on NPR not too long ago. The head of the Government Printing Office was talking about how their headcount was less than half what it was 20 years ago due to heavier use of digital forms. She mentioned how few copies of the federal budget they print every year and so on.
All of this sounds great because she's helping to keep costs down while increasing the availability of government documents to he masses. Who would think that's a bad thing?
The paper industry. They had the head of an umbrella group for the paper and forestry groups who cautioned about moving too fast to go digital, how some people still liked paper forms and so on.
So the next time you hear someone say the government doesn't create jobs, ask them why private industry is up in arms every time the government tries to cut costs by not purchasing things. In this case, the literal tons of paper that used to be used to print government documents or, as in the case of Intuit, all the work they would no longer have to do if the tax filings were simplified.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is just one more thing Intuit does to hurt taxpayers. The biggest and craziest is that where you can e-file your federal return for around $5, most states charge $20, because Intuit sued them for unfair competition when states came out with online 2D barcoded returns. Intuit wasn't upset if a taxpayer filled out a regular PDF and mailed it in, but evidently since the 2D bar coded ones saved states revenue and they encouraged them, they felt it cut into their profits and sued. Evidently the courts agreed and now, you must pay extra to e-file a state return so Intuit can get their cut, even though you aren't using their software.
If people were smart, they would use one of the alternatives to Turbo-Tax, e-file their federal return and mail in their state return. That way, Intuit doesn't get a dime of unearned money.
but only to outsource technical and engineering jobs. Heaven forbid if we automate away accountants and bureaucracy. THEN technology is taking jobs away!
I actually happen to be both an accountant and an engineer and actively practice both in my day job. I would LOVE to automate a lot of the paperwork shuffling I do as an accountant. Want to make a fortune? Come up with an EDI type system that doesn't cost an arm and leg and allows businesses to exchange invoices, delivery information, order acknowledgements, etc automatically between businesses of any size and that integrates with existing accounting systems. Start with Quickbooks and Sage. I probably spend 10-15 hours a week needlessly shuffling paperwork because email and the post office is the only standard way to exchange documents with every business. So does every other accountant in the known universe.
If you are a software engineer and want to hack back on administration and bureaucracy, I'll be happy to tell you the use cases and cost targets and whatever else I know. I'm not a programmer myself but there IS a huge opportunity for automation in accounting. Companies will trip over themselves trying to save a buck if there is a way to automate the paperwork that makes sense.
It's shit like this why I don't think corporations should have "free speech". Humans have free speech, corporations are not humans and should not have the same bloody rights.
For instance:
Because when corporate money is equated with free speech, they can afford to have their speech heard more than anyone else.
And when they can astro-turf and get op-ed pieces written by people who think this is an assault on tax-payers, they just cloud the issue.
It should also be illegal for politicians to accept any personal or financial benefit from lobbyists ... because all it does it cause them to be sold to the highest bidder.
My bet? This would be a net benefit for tax-payers, and this is just buggy whip makers entrenching into law their business model. And all of those politicians who like to talk about free markets are full of shit .. the only free market here is how much the politicians get paid.
Whatever court decision decided that corporations are people too was garbage.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ehhhhhhhh.. it's not that simple. The government can allocate wealth well or badly, it can waste a significant amount of money by overpaying, by giving a supplier more than the least they would be willing to accept -- classic economic rent. Suppliers win premium prices through lobbying.
It cuts both easy though, lobbying can cause the government to waste money, or cause the government to force everyone else to waste money, just as Intuit has basically carved out an entire industry for itself as the IRS's middleman, while if the IRS were to simply pre-fill people's returns itself most people would save a little bundle every year on tax prep.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
If you want to talk overall economic health, taxation does not really impact it since all those tax dollars just go strait back into the economy anyway.
Please remove this falsehood from your economic system. If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy. The entire premise of capitalism is that money that gets invested into useful purposes (production equipment, invention, entropy-reducing services) multiplies the value of that money over time. All spending is not created equal (so far from it)! Hanging fiber optics on poles and getting drunk are not equally beneficial!
it tends to skew who pays and who does not
Everybody pays. The producers add their tax burden to the cost of goods. The study from Harvard econ. sets the price of goods as 22% higher (average) than they would otherwise be without the income tax. When that single mother is buying a $3 loaf of bread for her kids' school lunch, more than fifty cents of that is going straight to pay the income taxes of the people in the supply chain. That's why it's the most regressive tax possible. People can only pretend that it's progressive if they completely ignore second order effects and beyond.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
2015 Tax Form
Line 1 Enter the amount of money you grossed last year....____
Line 2 Divide the amount in line 1 by 10 and write it here... ____
Send in the amount written in line 2
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
To Intuit and others? I.e. pay these companies directly for each 'free' return submitted. They've pretty much got the process in place and it's not like these types of websites are a government (sorry) core competency.
"If you want to talk overall economic health, taxation does not really impact it since all those tax dollars just go strait back into the economy anyway."
Cool. Since taxation doesn't impact the economy, let's just raise income tax to 100% and have employers send it direct to the government.
Middle class? More like nearly rich.
Posting anon just in case. I worked in the Tax Software Industry for about 12 years. Started out small, and was -fortunately- on the receiving end of a buyout before the dot-com bubble burst. Intuit bought us. I probably had my head buried in the sand for quite some time, but I found out after a while that the Tax Software Industry is incredibly cut-throat and extraordinarily competitive. I think it makes Microsoft look like a saint. The main target for our particular software are the mom-n-pop shops you see on the streets - "Get your refund in 30 minutes" and "Buy a car with your tax refund", etc. They target the gullible and poor because while they do get a quick refund, they usually get about 50% of what their actual refund would be. The beneficiaries of these are: 1) the preparer, 2) the banks giving the loan since that's actually what it is, and 3) the software company providing the service. It's an astonishingly profitable and lucrative business model. Spread this out over millions of gullible taxpayers and many millions are made in a matter of a couple months.
This seems like a great reason to write your congress critters. This is absolutely rediculous. Taxes are the MOST stressful time of the year for ALL AMERICANS.
Who does Intuit think they are? I use Turbotax every year, but I'd certainly be all for the simplification of this abusesive process!
That depends on what the money is spent on. If the money is spent on something that brings a greater benefit than the cost, it helps the economy. Taxing yourself to buy a car doesn't automatically hurt your household economy--it depends on how much you spent on the car and how much income your car will bring.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
So the next time you hear someone say the government doesn't create jobs
The government absolutely creates jobs. Lots of them. The government is something like 20-30% of the economy and a similar portion of the jobs. This is true for most of the governments on earth and it's actually not a bad thing. Remember that government jobs include things like the military, police, fire, teachers and the like which are all necessary and useful functions. Some amount of administration is useful too. Many important and necessary private businesses make their money contracting for necessary services to governments. Governments definitely create jobs and many of them are even worth creating.
The problem is that the government doesn't generally have a good way to prune back services that are no longer required and doesn't tend to be exposed to market forces forcing it to be efficient. It also means that those who are doing well with the status quo will try to keep it, even when that doesn't make economic sense.
It all boils down to rent-seeking behaviour, i.e. using political connections to basically steal what isn't yours. Intuit has form here.
There are three kinds of ways of making money. Wages, profit and rent.
Earning wages and profit is moral and efficient (the latter is debatable, depending if you're a leftie or not). But rent is not moral. Rent is about not growing the economic pie, it's about depriving other people of their share of the existing pie. Profit is made by business entrepreneurs, and absent monopolistic conditions, increases efficiency across the board. Rent, as made by political entrepreneurs (e.g. lobbyists), is inefficient and immoral.
The conversation needs to move towards stigmatising and or banning rent-seeking behaviour for the good of all. If the case is made right, the Left, the Right and libertarians can get behind this.
I've spouted it a hundred times, here's #101:
Intuit's QuickBooks package is in desperate need of competition. It's thoroughly entrenched in the accounting industry such that the interface is nonsensically-antiquated. Yet, it's become one of those industry standards that Intuit refuses to modernize it or introduce any kind of improvements for fear it will alienate the armies of accountants that have been compelled to learn it.
If google were to launch a cloud-based bookkeeping app, this would be a tremendous benefit to small business owners worldwide.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
To find out that a company is engaged in "rent seeking". This is totally novel, not done by other industries or companies.
Slimy? Sure. But when so much of the GDP is controlled by government, and government can be bought (I mean lobbied, really!), it is a good investment for many companies. Rate of return on dollars invested can be vast...
Wow, I didn't think anyone would fall for that 10% Amazon scam.
Unless you're spending money at Amazon every day, its definitely not worth it.
And god forbid they actually lose talking points by actually accomplishing something they've said they'd like to do.
What they want to do is stay in power. They'll change some things if they get the chance but that's a second order effect. What they really want to do is whatever will keep them in power and they will sell their soul to do it. They'll say whatever they think gives them the best chance to retain power and get re-elected but what they actually do is what shows you their real goals.
Simplified filing is meant to be just that. Simple. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way for a tax-payer to file.
A new service from Intuit would offer, for free, to calculate, but not file your taxes. It would then compare the results to the "simplified filing" scenario. If it's in the tax-payers advantage to have Intuit file, Intuit can do so for a fee.
Intuit will lose out on lots of cases where a person's tax scenario really IS that simple... but they'll still have plenty of money to get in the middle of.
No, the entire premise of capitalism is people own stuff. Period.
There is an assumption people might invest in useful stuff and make rational decisions in their own best interests. The reality is not quite the same.
When billionaires buy multi-million dollar yachts and diamond crusted iPhones you get to see why kings periodically get their heads chopped off.
And, if you didn't have a government to take taxes and do the things the public needs, your society would be a shitty place to live, and would be the most brutally Darwinistic thing you can imagine. So those 22% lower costs would be offset by a society which is many many times the worse to live in.
This fictional, utopian tax free society would be not nearly as good as its proponents claim it would be.
If you model your economic system on the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, you will not like the results.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Whatever court decision decided that corporations are people too was garbage.
That would primarily be the Citizens United v FEC court decision of 2010, and further backed up by the recent McCutcheon decision of 2014, though of course other little laws and regulations contribute.
If you would like to do something about it, I would encourage you to join a group such as the WolfPAC and Move to Amend. A couple state legislatures (California and Vermont, I believe) have *already* passed bills calling for a constitutional convention to propose a new constitutional amendment that puts into law that corporations do not have the rights of people, and there is similar pending legislation in many other states. Call/write your state congressmen today and get it done, and we can put this nonsense behind us. It is not impossible, it has been done in past history and is already starting to happen now; I'm sure you haven't heard it on the news, but it is happening. Get involved in making history!
Of course they don't want to make it simple, it would destroy their business. A friend who was a CFO at the time use to refer to Intuit as "The Devil" in the way they were always putting themselves into your business and then holding you hostage later. The tax industry produces nothing of value and should be replaced and the billions of dollars and millions of people put to better use. It wouldn't be hard. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion the huge tax industry works to get some of it back based on rules so lengthy, complex, and open to interpretation that no one person can understand them all anymore let alone apply them fairly. If you can afford the guns you can shoot your way out but for everyone else you just keep paying out. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a business that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special and refund all year long and then all have all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. Everyone would have to keep all these records for years just in case. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today and the industry that thrives off of it. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone, just the memory of how ridiculous it used to be.
The problem with your tax form is that actually calculating the amount of income you had last year is actually pretty complicated for a pretty big portion of the population, particularly the wealthier folks. Seriously. 90% of the tax code not devoted to various tax exemptions is basically devoted to defining income. Why? Because it is not trivial or easy. There are countless corner cases and sources of income and financial instruments and other things to complicate what you income is. We could simplify the tax form quite a bit by eliminating most of the special tax exemptions but you will NEVER get a tax form as simple as the one you propose. It simply is not as easy as you make it sound.
Quite true, there is no guarantee that the money will flow in useful ways.
We create jobs, not eliminate them. This "simplify the tax code" nonsense just can't be done without taking this artificially complex system that so many morons have mastered and make a living with - and turning it into negative job creation! If I were a rich guy, I'd create 10 jobs - I'd have 10 guys run circles around my house every day. They'd feel like they were doing work for sure, and I'd pay them, so that would feel like work. This is the US economy. You can't just eliminate these jobs... The stuff that used to make this country great has been completely circumvented. Let's all pump money into GM instead of letting it go, and creating a vacuum by which some novel and innovative company could come along and do something spectacular (tesla?). Hey - dial up connections became useless once cable modems came along - but wait, how is AOL going to continue to make it's money? Let's confuse the shit out of all the morons that run the courts and see if we can find a meaningless way to keep that model alive (they almost did).
'productive' is highly subjective. A minority of our economy is actually tied to necessities and infrastructure, most of it is tied up in things that have value but are otherwise frivolous. Which gets into the high level concepts of what objectives and metrics we want to optimize for.
Ok, so then let us move that tax onto sales instead. Oh wait, the person still ends up paying 22% higher costs on items then they would be tax free except now the tax burden is skewed towards the transfer of material goods rather then services. Since the middle and upper class spend a significant amount of their income on intangibles this puts an even higher burden on the lower class yet again, only this time the tax code can not build in exceptions for people at the lower rungs thus it falls on them even more.
Pure sales based systems have been done before, they were extremely regressive and abandoned.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And when the IRS inevitably discovers they messed up on the "return-free" return they generated for you five years ago, who is liable for the resulting penalties and interest? Because I'm betting it's not going to be the IRS.
I've used it for the last 10 years and it's great. 5 minutes online at the SII (the equivalent of the IRS) and I'm done. I did it a week ago and I will get my tax return deposited to my checking account on the first week of may. Cheers, Jaime
It's the fucking paperwork and receipt saving that goes with it. Frankly, I'd be willing to pay more to not even have to think about it.
Here is another example - Food Stamps (aka SNAP) and Agriculture policy. You might think food stamps exist to help the poor, but you'd be wrong. Food stamps are part of the AGRICULTURE spending bill, not the health and human services bill. The idea is to stimulate buying of "surplus" agricultural produce by subsidizing poor people who can't aford to buy it. But the dirty secret is that the agrculture policy of price supports both stimulates over-production for some crops and under-production for others while keeping prices high and making food LESS affordable for the poor. With food stamps the agribusinness interests can now sell the 'surplus' created by the price supports (government money) at artificially high prices to the poor (with government money), all the while with the political overhead cover of helping "family-farmers" and the "hungry children".
but...but...money is free speech! So, the more money you have the more speech you have. It's simple!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
WTF? For some reason (the Slashdot CSS?), the ordered list tag is not creating numbers in front of the list items. Not even bullets are created; the dashes were added by me.
The more centralized and consolidated the political power, the less people found at the very top of the pyramid, and therefore the less it will cost to bribe that power, in terms of both monetary value and effort. The pyramid of power becomes more hierarchical and authoritative with consolidation, not less, and this makes bribing the "entire pyramid" (by proxy of the top) both easier and more lucrative. The US federal government has been moving in the direction of centralization and consolidation for well over a century, and this is merely the natural result.
Another way to look at this is that "lobbying" (bribery) is naturally proportional to the size and scope of the power pyramid. The bigger it grows, the more bribery, simply because there are more powers to buy. The smaller it shrinks (hypothetically speaking of course, as governments never willingly rescind power), the less bribery, simply because there is less "fruit" on the "tree".
"If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy."
What about the most massive boondoggle project in history: World War II?
Massive increase in government spending, massing increase in government debt and massive increase in taxes all to build highly specialized equipment, ship it over seas and where it gets blown up.
The result: decades of economic growth and prosperity ending only with the rise of neo-Liberalism.
The government should not give a whit about Intuit, but rather should address whether the idea saves tax payers money and helps them. The answer is yes for a lot of people. Capitalism sucks already mostly, so this company's whining about losing money is just that -- whining. Lobbying of any kind should be illegal. Full stop. No one gets to lobby. Ever. Period. It should be illegal for anyone to donate to anyone politically. Politics has become about the money, not actually becoming a good politician and serving. End the BS or forever suffer the indignities of living under politicians who only seek money and re-election to further their own agendas and those who line their pockets.
"That depends on what the money is spent on."
No, it depends on what I would have spent the money on if someone didn't steal it from me. When I lived in the UK, I worked out that the government was getting about sixty pence of every extra pound my employer paid me. At that point, offers of increased salary stopped providing any incentive for me to work harder, since I was just working for Tony Blair.
The left love to push taxes that are supposed to prevent 'bad behaviour' by making it more expensive, but, when it comes to taxing income, they claim that it has no effect. Tax CO2 to reduce the amount of CO2 produced, but taxing income won't discourage people from increasing their income, no sir, not at all.
You sound like someone who has access to hard data that shows a causative relationship between higher taxes and reduced economic performance. Please post your data; I'd love to see it.
It's kind of refreshing how openly corrupt the US political system is, where a company can simply buy themselves a couple of politicians to push their interests and people call it "free speech".
I mean, sure those politicians maintain the pretense of representing people, but it's not like they try very hard.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
We should probably raise capital gains tax on unbacked securities (i.e. the stock market). ... Investment in start-ups and other venture behavior is useful
Simplified tax code and reduced capital gains for investors in startups? I think you've been at the maple syrup again...
I can file my taxes in two minutes on the Swedish version of the IRS on the web without the need of any special software unless you count a web browser as special.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I propose we put Tax day right before Election day. That would make for some interesting changes.
Yeah, pretty much the same here. You logon to their secure web portal, and fill all the forms online. For most people, everything is pre-filled, and you just have to OK it, which can even be done via SMS. Personally I have a more complicated setup involving income and accounts abroad + special tax exemptions, but even then I spend much less time than the Americans I know.
The fact that the taxes also include health insurance is also nice...
By the way, is it true that the US will tax a citizen living abroad based on a salary earned and spent abroad - i.e. if you moved to somewhere in the EU in your 20s, learned the language, got a job and basically setup your life here, you still have to pay US taxes on top of what you pay where you live, unless you renounce your citizenship?
Eliminate the IRS and having to file a tax return at all.
The laws can be for sale, only to the extent that the lawmakers are selling!
Every special interest should be free to lobby. The real trick is electing representatives who understand that catering to a special interest is, by definition, detrimental to the general interest. (If something is in the general interest, it's by definition not a special interest.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.
Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I will never pay some third party to do my taxes, unless it's my own choice. If any laws made, make it so I have to PAY somebody else to do it, I simply will stop filing.
"If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy."
What about the most massive boondoggle project in history: World War II?
Massive increase in government spending, massing increase in government debt and massive increase in taxes all to build highly specialized equipment, ship it over seas and where it gets blown up.
The result: decades of economic growth and prosperity ending only with the rise of neo-Liberalism.
Stop it. You are making too much sense.
Go to Taxact.com. You can e-file your federal return for free, no strings attached.
The e-filing of state returns is where they attempt to make revenue, but you're under no obligation to buy that service.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Joe Public: Yay, Ima gonna get a big check from the IRS!
Me: Wouldn't you have rather gotten that money sooner, rather than later, by reducing the amount withheld from your pay?
Joe: Huh?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
No, it would be a huge benefit to Google, and they would share your information with third parties as well as government.
But if you had nothing withheld you wouldn't be investing just the $800 you got back, you would be investing the full amount you paid in taxes as well, lets call it $10,000. At 1% return you would have gotten $100.
This is why I don't think we'll ever see tax code simplification: there are too many people making too much money with the exiting overly complex system. They have a lot of money and they want our money so they will spend gobs of greenbacks to prevent any simplification of the tax code.
Greed rules.
I once read that the amount of resources expended to simply comply with the IRS is equal to the gross state product of Iowa.
Think about it -- the entire output of a fairly prosperous state, wiped out by the overly-complex tax code!
(And that was about 20 years ago, when the tax code was less complex than it is now.)
Sure, tax simplification would be disruptive to Intuit (and also to firms that act less like vampires, like H&R Block). But no more disruptive than any other awesome efficiency-boosting development, like the invention of the LED.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
By the way, is it true that the US will tax a citizen living abroad based on a salary earned and spent abroad - i.e. if you moved to somewhere in the EU in your 20s, learned the language, got a job and basically setup your life here, you still have to pay US taxes on top of what you pay where you live, unless you renounce your citizenship?
Yes, you still have to file US taxes if you're abroad. Most of the time you owe no additional income taxes because the foreign taxes paid will count against it, but there are cases where you also have to pay the US Govt.
No reason this couldn't happen in the US but for this lobbying. The IRS already knows all your income/etc, and if you fill out the forms wrong they'll send you a letter telling you to fix it.
Please remove this falsehood from your economic system. If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy.
What about the economy of the contractors working on those projects of which you don't approve?
The entire premise of capitalism is that money that gets invested into useful purposes (production equipment, invention, entropy-reducing services) multiplies the value of that money over time.
And here I thought the premise of capitalism was private ownership of goods and interests.
All spending is not created equal (so far from it)! Hanging fiber optics on poles and getting drunk are not equally beneficial!
Absolutely correct. The fiber being hung on the pole only benefits the telecom company, whereas getting drunk contributes toward a global supply chain supporting farmers, brewers, and bartenders. That's what you meant, right?
Everybody pays.
Yes, everybody, including the government, contractors, single mothers, and you.
The broken-window fallacy is that government spending is somehow more effective than regular spending. You seem to understand that well enough, but it seems you've missed that the inverse is also true: Government spending is no less effective than "regular" spending. All spending is a transfer of wealth, and the only difference is where it's transferred to. When you're spending money, you get to decide. When the government's spending, the legislators decide.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Taxact.com, like Turbotax, provides an online "interview" that guides you through the process, makes complying with the law much easier, and finds deductions that you might otherwise overlook. I am glad that a third party is providing that service. And I'm glad that multiple third parties are doing this, and making continuous improvements because they are competing with each other on the basis of ease-of-use and correctness-of-calculations.
If the IRS had a monopoly on providing this service, and developed it in-house, you can bet it would be as user-friendly as waiting in line at the DMV. I'm not so naive as to claim that the third-party efforts are bug-free, but they're better than the IRS would do, because what motivation would a faceless IRS bureaucrat have to fix bugs in the software?
There's also a motivation to be secure: Third-party sites can be sued if your private data leaks out, but the IRS cannot be sued.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Winter is coming.
Hmmmm, looking at your whole post and then considering your last scapegoated sentence, I'm not sure whether you would vilify or laud FDR.
"If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy."
What about the most massive boondoggle project in history: World War II?
Massive increase in government spending, massing increase in government debt and massive increase in taxes all to build highly specialized equipment, ship it over seas and where it gets blown up.
The result: decades of economic growth and prosperity ending only with the rise of neo-Liberalism.
Stop it. You are making too much sense.
You forgot the bit about only certain countries having any factories left at the end of WWII...
Middle class? More like nearly rich.
In Silicon Valley that paycheck covers rent for a 2bd apartment.
Interest free loan? If I put that money in the bank I'd end up with a few pennies. As far as I am concern the government is providing me a (very nearly) free banking service.
Interesting that you don't think a tax firm is capable of limiting their tax liability by lowering their profits...
Wait, how is the progressive income tax the "most regressive tax possible?" You're suggesting they indirectly do what sales taxes directly do. Wouldn't they be at least tied with sales taxes?
2. Send it in.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Seriously. Why are people framing this as though it's supposed to be controversial and Intuit is buying the government off?
Why SHOULDN'T they try? They have a highly lucrative business to protect. When someone in government proposes to change the rules that could dramatically affect their business why on earth aren't they entitled to do everything they can to protect their business?
Would you not protect your business by lobbying local, county, city, state or Federal government(s) if any of these entities were working on laws and/or regulations that might dramatically shorten the lifespan of your business? Or do you honestly believe you have no natural right to do that just as an individual would?
This holier-than-thou, uber-liberal "all corporations are/must be evil" fantasyland that some people live in, this bizarre belief that corporations don't have any rights to protect their business lest it be perceived as coercive or unfair is ridiculous. Simply because they have more money to content with challenges to their business and therefore MUST be evil or wrong or inherently corrupt is equally absurd. They have as much of a right to exist and thrive and be successful against constant government pressure and legal upheaval - and heaven knows being the tax/accounting business they're massively exposed to this reality - as anyone else does.
And if you don't believe the government itself exerts unimaginable coercive force against business through draconian regulatory frameworks wormed through the system with billions of taxpayer dollars - often spearheaded by liberal busybodies working at their behest of their activist masters - you're utterly delusional.
To your last point, that is entirely correct. However, taxes you pay to the EU count as an exemption from the taxes you would have to pay to the US. Thus, most Americans working regular type jobs in Europe don't actually have to pay taxes to the U.S., they just have to file the tax returns. I've heard that to renounce citizenship, you have to pay the US government a large fee which represents the future expected value of the taxes you would have paid over the rest of your life.
I'm sorry you don't like it when things improve.
If I was a typical employee I would never have to file a return.
All normal employees have their tax deducted from their wages.
If they want, they can request a Summary from the IRD and submit a return if they think they will be due a refund, but for the vast majority of earners, that's not going to be the case.
Yes - The United States and Eritrea (and some others in a more limited fashion) tax based on citizenship, with some opportunity to count foreign taxes as tax paid on income (thereby negating any US tax liability - i.e. they owe nothing but must file a return anyway).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Citizenship
I know for a fact that the Dutch tax agency experimented in the 1990s with simply put: the paper return but turned into a computer program, with some added sanity checks and obvious automation/summations, available on a 3.5" floppy disk that you mailed back; later on it allowed you to dial in directly via modem to return, later via the Internet. Free of charge, directly from the Tax Agency themselves. You could also buy commercial programs, that offered specific tax tips and more elaborate explanations.
Why is a free, electronic version of the paper return from the IRS/CRA so much to ask for? I don't trust my demographics to these so-called "free versions" of commercial tax return software.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
"... the lowest tax bill possible."
We do both corporate and personal taxes. Paying the least amount in taxes is more being involved with all the complicated issues, not in finding "loopholes". The advertising that tax software companies does is misleading.
If the IRS were guided by technically knowledgeable people, all taxes would be done online.
Libraries would have bootable DVD copies of a version of Linux, allowing even people with malware-infected computers to do their taxes securely. Records could be saved on USB drives, or burned to a DVD from a RAM drive. If there were mistakes in the calculation of taxes, fixing the problem would be the responsibility of the IRS.
Buying tax software would then be completely unnecessary. I dislike how the tax software tries to trick people into paying more and into giving information to the tax software companies. I would like to avoid paying the full price for tax software every year, when there are very full changes in the new versions.
There would be no need for the IRS to supply new DVDs each year, because all calculations would be done by IRS computers. The IRS Linux DVDs would have holograms printed on them; any counterfeit DVDs would cause the same kind of prosecution applied to counterfeit money.
I would love to be director in charge of that effort. I love the U.S., feel really bad about the defects in government, and would like to help the government in a way that benefits everyone.
At present the enormous complexity of dealing with taxes tends to discourage people from starting new businesses.
Isn't that true for a lot of what's wrong with US laws? Someone payed to get it the way it is, either directly (campagin contributions) or indirectly (lobbying or giving cushy jobs to the politicians who voted for them when they leave politics). That's usually called corruption.
You forgot the bit about only certain countries having any factories left at the end of WWII...
Yes, just see what a horrible place Germany turned into... Losing all those factories really hurt them in the long run.
P.S. Their recovery was also paid for by the US taxpayers, and it seems they got a fairly good deal on that too.
Stefan Axelsson
Because it's the right thing to do. And heaven forbid we do the right thing. That could lead to a "gasp" functioning government.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
His stimulus during the Great Depression was good, but didn't go far enough. The New Deal was very controversial at the time, so perhaps he would have gone further if he could.
Don't get me started...
This is not a surprise. Was anybody expecting anything different?
This is part of a bigger problem. Who really benefits from the tax code? It isn't you and I, who have a W-2 and maybe a couple of 1099 or K2 income reports. It is the business guys who got Congress to create all that complexity to allow them for many exemptions you and I can't find let alone use. So Intuit trying to protect its business model that relies on the complexity of the 1040 and itemized deductions is just a side-effect of the overall complexity and exemptions for special interests, businesses, mostly to have their burden reduced. And they get that because they can go to Congress, can buy members of Congress or pay to have access to them and ask for and get favors. So a complex tax code as well as complex filing favors the powerful and the wealthy, as does a flat tax, as well.
We still need a progressive income tax, because the rich get more of a break from a flat tax than do low to moderate wadge earners, but the process could be much simpler for most people. That is disfavors Intuit is too bud, but tough, the Congress should not be asked to support a private firm's business model for no other good reason. that is no different tan if you or I defrauded the government.
I guess this is the law we're talking about? (thanks to AC below!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The article states that "For 2013, the maximum exclusion is $97,600". I happen to live near Geneva atm. (working at CERN), and the city is full of high-earners - including a quite a few resident Americans*. Maybe it's they are the one making a fuzz - apparently a bunch of them didn't do it for 50 years, and suddenly got a monster bill, which I think would be deducted directly from their accounts. Swiss banks aren't what they used to be...
I guess we also have to file tax returns for a couple of years after leaving, but not for life. The "fee for renouncing your citizenship" is also a big WTF :/
*) Which I guess also explain why we have a american-english-speaking bible-thumping far-right FM radio station. Big WTF when I found it :P
Why shouldn't I talk about valid statistics? Here is one of the many places you can find the statistics: http://www.motherjones.com/blu...
This article says Americans spent 33% of their incomes on food in 1963, and by 2009 this had dropped to only 6%.
It's called Engel's Law.
I know you're not the only person making less they did 15 years ago. There are probably millions like you, but in spite of that, Mother Jones can still point out how much more affordable food tends to be these days. Engel's Law has not been violated. Instead of writing another ad-hominem attack, you'd do better to use that time learning about Engel's Law: http://my.safaribooksonline.co...
(Hey, that author also cites milk as an example of something that is now consuming a smaller fraction of family budgets.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.