TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)

At Costco TurboTax with Business (or something like that) costs around $79.99 + tax. It has Schedule C [0]. Next time you want to buy TurboTax maybe buy it from Costco - $200 for your usage scenario looks like over-payment.

[0] It also has other things such as RSUs, stock sales, real estate, cash distributions from businesses, etc... For personal taxes I do not see why anyone would pay a tax accountant as opposed to using TurboTax.

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Haven't filed mine yet for 2024, I did a bunch of side gig work eg. driving door dash, uber eats, donating plasma... been put off by that (having to track every mile). Also I usually end up owing too.

I think the worst thing I had to do was write a FIFO calculator to go through my thousands of tiny crypto transactions back in early 2020s thankfully I don't screw around with that anymore (especially when I got rekt and lost $4K)

> whose employer uses a broker that doesn't do cost basis correctly for RSUs, I was very surprised TurboTax was able to import the supplement and adjust it correctly for me.

Approximately zero brokers do this, because RSU are still noncovered shares.

> Even without RSUs, I usually have hundreds of transactions across multiple brokers.

As a corollary, "hundreds of transactions" of covered shares collapsed into one summary line.

RSU is a pain though to enter. Technically you can enter a summary line and send in a 1099 to the IRS (last year was the first year that could be done electronically, so, fingers crossed it actually works correctly).

Or they're over 65 or something?

Did you not read the article, at all?

I think the state fee for freetaxusa is something like $30 IIRC. It was small enough where I didn't even bother looking into whether it goes to the state or the software vendor. That's the cost of a casual lunch for one at 2025 prices.

They truly do simple 1040s for free, even though they are indeed not a charity.

I mean I've paid like $18 to efile my state taxes but they haven't taken any of my refund and I get it direct deposited from the IRS.

What tax complexities exist for low income people that would cause $200 fees?

Businesses typically do need to file. Individuals may have to report some of the deductables they want to claim.

E.g. in Finland employers deduct taxes directly from salaries. Also some capital gains taxes are directly deducted by banks etc, or at least the income is reported to the tax office. Yearly the tax office sends a prefilled report based on these. If you are fine with it, you don't have to do anything. If you want to add e.g. deductions, you add them on the tax office's website and it calculates the new report.

I've been getting taxable incomes for 25 years or so and I have never had to do any tax reporting.

They don’t. You are liable for the full tax on earnings. It’s up to you to record any deductions or take credits to reduce it.

That's not a problem. You won't get into trouble for not declaring a deduction (in my jurisdiction, anyway).

They don't know your business income either of course and you do have to declare that, but most people have only income as an employee and they do know that figure, so most people don't need to "file" anything here. It's all automatic.

Over here it functions as follows:

When you're buying an item you declare you need an invoice on it and punch in your tax id.

Later, when you're filling your monthly taxes, you include that invoice in an XML file (plenty of generators available along with the free government-issued one), sign it with your digital ID and send that to the Ministry of Finance servers (MF servers for short). The MF servers then compare your entry to what all the people that sold you stuff entered.

This exists largely to prevent VAT manipulation, but at the same time gives all involved parties a clear, regular indicator that everything is fine in terms of taxes.

I'm a contractor and do this little dance every month using an accounting SaaS.

The overwhelming majority of any country takes a standard deduction and has no need for itemization of things the government would not know.

If you don't fall in that bucket or run a business, you tell them those things and send back the corrections form.

That's a special case and in most countries people are regular employees.

Gemini says 90% of the American workforce are employees.

Yes, and that corporations have the same rights as people, but can’t face the same consequences.

The fines for wrongdoing are so tiny the incentives are to always do bad stuff and just pay the fines - that’s how to maximize profit and there’s no downside.

Except when it comes time to speak in private with other people, speak for other people so they may obtain privacy, speak for sex work, speak for drugs, speak at banks, speak to people in other countries, refuse to speak to government, etc. Then it's very serious Money which has Very Important Regulations. Regulations which always seem to burden regular individuals while facilitating business as usual for those with power who can grease the system.

FWIW I think the "money is speech" is actually a bit of a distraction. What we really need is wholesale reform to corporate/LLC law. Corpos are not mere groups of people exercising their individual rights, but government-created liability shields. Thus it makes perfect sense to regulate them to prevent obvious mechanisms of harm that leave others holding the bag. The vaunted "man in the arena" needing minimal regulation can actually get into that arena with a sole proprietorship or general partnership. (which is exactly where most small businesses actually are, regardless of any LLC filings)

What, never heard the term "money talks" before?

Does the IRS know:

- how much of the year your wife are kids are living with you? - whether you took college courses? - how much you put into your IRA? - which purchases count as medical expenses? - the cost basis of the stock you sold?

There's no such thing as a 1040-ez.

Which forms does the IRS get when you separate from your spouse and the kids (aka dependents) move out, too?

Does the IRS get a form when a child is born or dies?

You could say, yes, the IRS should keep tabs on all this life activity, but that seems pretty gross.

Yes, this argument is all about the tension between ease of filing and the complexity of the tax code.

It really has very little to do with TurboTax lobbying, but that’s a framing that sells.

I personally have a problem with "benchmark against however much money you want to extract from small businesses"... So a hard NO from me.

My favorite part about Norquist and the starve the beast folks is the utter hypocrisy of their silence in the face of Trump's tariffs.

So much for the "drown the government in the bathtub" talk - turns out it was always just about the rich not paying more.

Eh the problem is when they dont catch mistakes for several years, and then come after you for like 80 grand at once, and then when you cant pay it threaten to seize your assets

I've always heard that consumption taxes are regressive because poor people consume 100%+ of their income while rich people consume e.g. 1% of their income.

Because that would incentivize sitting on money, and the economy works better when people spend money.

Back when the federal government was constrained to that permitted within the 10th amendment, the average person paid taxes almost exclusively through indirect tariffs, property taxes, and some levies (effectively sales tax) on purchased goods. But back then the non-wartime spend of the federal government was like 2-4% of GDP

I don't follow you or the GP - all of these (and more) are taxed. I'm in Alberta, Canada where we pay property (land) tax, personal income tax, corporate income tax, consumption tax, payroll tax, wealth tax, estate transfer tax, mineral taxes (often in-kind), and (until recently) a direct carbon tax. And that's not nearly all of them. I can't imagine the US is much different.

> that is politically infeasible in a capitalist democracy.

It’s more accurate to say it it’s politically infeasible in our capitalist oligarchy.

Just because this is the way our society works now, we shouldn’t be duped into thinking this is the natural order of things. It’s not. A democratic society with a free market economy could work very differently.

Yes! And the closer you look, the more you notice that "both sides" have their pet things that are obviously worth complicating the tax code to do. What most of us want is just for the other half of the people to give up all their favorite complications, so that our "worth it" half would be manageable. Which is why the complexity only grows.

It's a political challenge, not a technical one. There are constituencies that reap concentrated benefits from the current system (e.g., tax-filing services) while imposing disperse costs on everyone else. Also, there are those who believe that the IRS is out to get them, so filing your own taxes is more trustworthy than going with a government-issued pre-filled default. And that going through the motions makes the pain of paying taxes more salient, so you're more likely to complain about it.

If you look at it as a practical or technical challenge, you're addressing the wrong question.

Not to mention the almost 5K local income tax jurisdictions in the US https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/state/local-income-ta...

I have read several articles suggesting that the US does this more than most other countries, has a more complicated tax code as a result, and that is one reason why the US doesn't have more automated collection like most other countries.

But I don't have the articles at hand, and don't feel like an internet debate today, left as an exersize to the reader!

I've always wondered if I could file some kind of freedom of information act request to get the IRS's opinion of what my taxes should be; and/or to get the source code to the IRS's program to calculate what their opinion of my taxes should be.

---

That being said, my Dad worked for a few years at the IRS part-time before he finally retired. He loved it. (My Dad is one of those people who enjoys taxes and finds them soothing.) I concluded that the IRS is a white-collar make-work program. It also leaks a lot of confidential social information, because he got to see all kinds of tax returns from all slices of economic status.

The issue is the government doesn't and shouldn't know every possible detail of your life so if you're in a complex tax situation (most people aren't and can just take the standard deduction) you'd still need to do the preparations. But for the vast majority of people the government does already know what you're taxes should be because you're just taking the standard deduction which 87% of people did in 2018 and that number has grown slightly since then. [0]

For more complex cases where you have more deduction and income sources the government doesn't really know all the individual setups you may or may not qualify for and they only audit a small percentage of filers every year.

The reason it's been blocked is a mess of ideological and economic. Ideological from people who interested that want to make taxes more annoying so people are generally more anti tax and then they get elected and make cuts to the top percentages/businesses permanent while the tax cuts for the majority of citizens are temporary. This sets up a debt crisis when those 'temporary' cuts are also extended they can use to leverage for government cuts. On the economic side there's a huge amount of money made each year by preparing taxes for people too intimidated by the complexity to DIY it. So they ally with the generically antitax side to keep their business going.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-tax-stats-at-a-...

They can determine your taxes are "fishy" and then demand further documentation. Say you declared you sold a car and profited, but seemingly under-reported the sale price. They'd show up and demand to see the bill-of-sale, maybe contact the buyer, etc. How would the government know ahead of time what price you sold the car for?

In many countries for the majority of the population they can and do determine how much tax should be paid, and many people don’t have to file tax returns.

What makes you think the government can determine that your taxes are wrong?

Except for all those above-the-line deductions and credits that apply even if you take the standard deduction. Like the new tip tax credit and senior tax credit recently added to our already incredibly complicated tax code.

ELSTER is available but it is extremely complicated to use. Not even my Tax advisor uses it directly. You must be the first person I’ve heard that uses it directly.

For me not worth to use it having extremely good tools like the offering from WISO.

In my opinion a complicated tax law is a direct attack from the State against low and middle income population. If you have low income and poor education you will not be able to make use of the tax law to increase your available income, something that high income citizens do daily.

In this case we have to thank the free market to provide really easy tools for less than €30 so middle and low income citizens can start at least to take advantage of the tax law.

I’ve lived in multiple countries and always did my tax report myself. And the German situation is so blatantly designed, compared to other countries, to benefit only a very small portion of the population.

Not only that, If the amount of man/hours that the whole country of Germany spends doing taxes would be spent on productivity gains or just normal work, the country would become immediately the richest country in the world. Instead, it’s just wasted effort and work.

The IRS actually knows everything, too. They just make you tell them what they already know.

> Receiving government assistance? Some kinds are taxable, some aren’t.

One would think that the government should know what government assistance you're getting. In any case, taxable benefits get reported to the IRS automatically on form 1099-G.

> Moved states? You have multiple state filings now.

Arguably irrelevant. You can change how filings work federally without changing how state filings work. Perfect is the enemy of good, etc.

> Got married? divorced? Splitting custody or property? Special tax forms to fill.

Sure. Sometimes you have life events that happen where you'll need to make adjustments. Such possible events can be mentioned in the letter / email you get from the IRS, with details as to how to adjust the filing. This is typically how it's been done in other countries with automatic filing.

> Native American? Veteran with disability? Senior? Student with loans? Bankruptcy? Freelance income? Etc.

Income typically gets reported to the IRS on a 1099 or a W-2.

Loan interest gets reported to the IRS on 1098-E, so the deduction could be automatically calculated.

Presumably the IRS would know if you previously filed a tax exemption and could assume that hasn't changed if it's based on things like having registered membership in a federally recognized tribe. Even if you haven't filed that exemption before, presumably the government would know that you registered the membership.

The government knows your birth date so presumably they'd be able to calculate when you become a senior, where that's relevant.

Bankruptcy is one of those special cases that I'd expect would be an exception case where you'd need to adjust the filing (and your trustee would probably help with that).

Most people don't have special cases that require changes. The IRS already has a shockingly large amount of data on people. I encourage you to try getting your tax transcript some time[1], it should be illuminating.

1. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/get-transcript

Most of those are another line on the form and read instructions. Some like moving states is hard but people don't do that often.

Sad part is, when I started working, this was normal. My father showed me how to do it. I did it for a few years and then TurboTax came along and I used that for free. Then they rug pulled me into a deluxe one year because I had 1099 income and ever since I’ve been jailed into paying if I want to use them. 1099 or not.

That's what I do. It's really not very difficult if you don't have a complicated income situation. Even with some self-employment I found it straightforward. Once you've done one year, subsequent years are very similar (but read the bulletins that talk about "what's new this year" because there are always differences.

The spreadsheet downloadable at https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home (no affiliation) is helpful to avoid math errors and get the entries from the various schedules into the proper place on the main forms.

I have done this a few times, but for me it takes several hours and I always am worried I have made a mistake. If you have simple investments you can still run into confusing things that are very hard to follow.

> You can also just not file your taxes, if you don't owe anything (and as I said, jobs always err on the side of overpaying) they won't bother you

From the IRS website:

>Who must file >Most U.S. citizens or permanent residents who work in the U.S. have to file a tax return. >Generally, you need to file if: > Your income is over the filing requirement > You have over $400 in net earnings from self-employment (side jobs or other independent work) > You had other situations that require you to file

Not sure if your intent was to discourage filing, but it read that way to me.

>and while it is not hard, it definitely looks intimidating and takes time to understand, especially the deductions.

Even this is overselling it.

Most people have ZERO deductions to deal with. You put in your W2 pay, you take the standard deduction, and you file and get your money back.

Next time you use something like turbotax, download the forms it generates and look at them. There's zero complexity. Turbotax doesn't do anything. It's literally filling in 14 rows of numbers that come directly from your W2.

Hell, turbotax purposely runs fake animations and makes you waste a ton of time saying "Oh we are looking for all these deductions" but it's all a lie. None of the animations actually do anything. Most of the deductions it is supposedly checking for would Never apply to someone with a normal job. They want you to think it's complicated. They will ask you questions they know the answer to just to waste your time. Every single year, TurboTax asks me if I'm eligible for the earned income tax credit, and every single year, TurboTax knows from the previous questions that I cannot possibly be eligible. They ask me anyway, because it seems like a complicated credit so it makes taxes seem more complicated.

Taxes could take less than 15 minutes for nearly all Americans. Turbotax's bullshit, even disregarding the stupid tax they are charging the whole country just to copy some numbers from column a to column b literally wastes everyone's time every year.

People who insist that taxes are complicated are flat out wrong. If you run a small business, you absolutely have the choice to just file extremely simple taxes and pay a higher tax rate. It is a choice to attempt to take every possible deduction. Each and every one of those deductions is a handout to business owners. They bitch and moan about how bad taxes are, but their taxes are complicated so that they can make more profit.

Guess what? Nobody forces you to run a business, which again, is a handout to capital owners. A few hundred dollars in permits or registration every year is a perfectly valid cost to enable you to take advantage of the insane benefit of "you can literally cause hundreds of deaths but as long as you weren't obviously grossly negligent you are in the clear". Nobody forced you to attempt to take every single handout offered every single year. Nobody forced you to be your own boss, to own capital, to profit off of the labor of others.

Such entitlement. These same people will turn around and cry about "freeloaders" and "welfare queens" and "handouts"

I don’t know why assume that in every country in the world that is free. In my European country until 15 years ago or so you had to hire someone to do your taxes for you, and currently the free method only works for the most simple tax filing. In fact what you get is called a “draft” of your tax filings because you’re supposed to make sure it’s okay, and it’s your responsibility if you miss something or if the draft is wrong.

And obviously the draft usually assumes that you will have to pay more tax, since there’s a perverse incentive given it’s the government who fills it for you.

Australia has a progressive tax structure, right? If you have multiple income sources how does each source know the proper withholdings? How do they know what deductions you'll be eligible for or are wanting to take?

Yes, but tax filers have potential civil and criminal liability risk if they make a mistake.

Presumably much less if one pays more than the IRS calculates is owed.

Essentially both the IRS and tax filers verify correctness of the tax filer's return and the tax filer can be prosecuted if they make a mistake according to the IRS.

That only works if all of your income comes from your employer, and is thus reported directly to the financial authorities and subject to withholding.

It is not that rare at all for Europeans to have other sources of income, and thus to have to file their own taxes.

No, they would know exactly what they know now. Employers already report your earnings to both the federal and state IRS agencies and pay your withholdings automatically adjusted for your dependencies. So a simple form that says you made X and claimed Y dependencies. Click submit to confirm…

That would be simple enough for most people (1 job, 1 home, maybe some kids) and it doesn’t require the government to know anything additional.

In that most common scenario no tax accounting service should be needed. Honestly a 1040 isn’t that complicated in that scenario either, but is still too difficult for a good number of people and it’s just unnecessary.

How exactly? Currently, you report your earnings, your employers report what they've paid you, and banks report specific transactions. How does simplifying/eliminating the deduction process (which is all that an accountant is doing) give the government more info about you?

Businesses paying people already file copies of the W-2s and 1099s that they send to their employees with the IRS, meaning that, for a very large chunk of Americans, the IRS already knows everything needed to fill out their tax forms.

Having lived in both the US and several European countries, America is already the privacy nightmare because all your data is with corporations who can do absolutely anything with it. European-style effortless automatic tax filing certainly wouldn’t make it any worse.

(Also it’s rather ironic that people who think like you have been voting for the party which is currently enabling Palantir to build Chinese-style surveillance in America. But as long as the data is owned by billionaires and they promise to only use it against the “others”, I guess it’s fine.)

Yes, and this includes the US!

When people say they are “paying their taxes”, really what they’re doing is checking whether the automatic tax deduction out of each paycheck was properly calculated over the whole year, and whether any special circumstances make them eligible for a refund (or whether they’ve had other income they need to pay tax on).

Every country I've ever lived in you had to prep and submit your own taxes. Never heard of that system.

This is exactly how it works in the US, too.

The reason this topic continually comes up is that people in the US are stupid and bad at math, and the IRS is very heavy-handed and issues penalties for minor tax errors, so people are afraid to interact with the process without a trusted intermediary.

Which one?

During the Cold War, one criticism of socialists/communists was that they were taking orders from Moscow. Likewise, Catholics were presumed to be taking orders from Rome.

> Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing

During the later 1800s, many "charity hospitals" would abduct children of Catholic women and then sell them as orphans that other people could adopt. The Klu Klux Klan would also attack Catholics - not just burning crosses and lynching black people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Train https://orphantraindepot.org/history/opposition-to-the-orpha...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...

> Not only were Irish immigrants viewed as interlopers by many white Americans (an irony, considering the historical treatment of Native Americans), but these immigrants were Catholics in a primarily Protestant land. It was a religious difference that widened the divide, as did the fact that many Irish immigrants didn't speak English. As strange as may it may sound today, Irish immigrants were not considered "white" and were sometimes referred to "negroes turned inside out."

https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/when-iri...

The history site covers how people perceive the value of work has changed over the centuries.

Index of the history of the ethics of work/labor: http://workethic.coe.uga.edu/history.htm

Home page of this mini-site: http://workethic.coe.uga.edu/index.html

The Wikipedia page has lots of links and references about PWE.

> In 1998, the International Sociological Association listed this work as the fourth most important sociological book of the 20th century, after Weber's Economy and Society, C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination, and Robert K. Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure.[3] It is the eighth most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...

I lived in WA and NV and didn't notice either of these. I miss not having to deal with state taxes not to mention the 10% of my income that goes away to who knows what.

> Are the sales taxes generally higher in those states, which offset the lack of income tax?

Sales and property taxes are often higher, but this (which shifts the tax burden down the income distribution compared to progressive income taxes) usually does not fully offset the lack of income tax; the no income tax states are generally low average tax burden states (but may still have higher tax burden at low-to-moderate income.)

Depends on the state, some have higher property taxes.

Higher sales tax tends to be regressive because it doesn’t tax money you don’t spend, nor does it tax things where sales tax doesn’t apply like buying assets.

Depends on the income tax you compare with.

My state is 9%, and it kicks in at under $20K. No state has a high enough sales tax to offset that income tax.

Concrete numbers: Say you and spouse collectively make $300K. That's a bit under $30K in state income tax. On top of that you'd pay property taxes (admittedly low).

Sorry Texas, but your property + sales tax isn't that high.

Sales and/or property taxes are typically used to make up the difference. TANSTAAFL

Using AI to do your taxes seems like a quick way to get into a bunch of trouble.

Please don't allow a computer to guess, one token at a time, what you tax liability is or how to fill out the forms properly.

Most poor people don't read*

They should.

Of course, this is not to say they always are stupid or illiterate, it's again usually just another form of exploitation, they don't have (or feel they don't) time to read it.

Which is arguably explicit exploitation/enslavement - the Walmart door greeter doesn't have a difficult job, however their role doesn't allow them to do anything that would benefit themselves. I wouldn't care if they were reading their phones or a book, but noo... can't have the peasants educating themselves.

And they aren't paid enough, so when they return home, they likely don't have any time after needing to perform meal prep, taking a second job, etc.

The USA is a third world country in many respects.

~ Kerry Packer, before House of Reps Select Committee on Print Media, November 1991.

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e97kq2XflKE )

It's still largely maximising what can be pushed through unintended loopholes.

My entire life (in the US) there has been the idea floated that our tax code should be simplified to the point where filing can be done on something the size of a postcard.

We absolutely could do that, but the government has no incentive to do so. At least in the US, taxes are a form of control, a source of power for those in charge, a political chip for elections, and a mechanism to further the wealth divide. Taxes are not primarily meant to fund our government, and definitely don't include goals related to making the average person's life easier.

> If there were a 'flat' tax [...] the rich will be more willing to pay

That's just because moving from progressive-taxation to a flat-tax reduces how much they pay!

The "simplicity" of the math done by their usual accounting firm that does their taxes for them is irrelevant by comparison.

_________

To illustrate why the burden shifts, suppose the nation of Elbonia needs a constant $540 to operate, and it moves from a progressive tax to a flat tax.

    This year, progressive taxation, rising %:
        90 peasants each earn $10 and are taxed 20% -> $2 per peasant.
        10 nobles each earn $90 and are taxed 40% -> $36 per noble.
        Total collection is $540.

    Next year, flat tax, same % for all:
        90 peasants each earn $10 and are taxed 30% -> $3 per peasant.
        10 nobles each earn $90 and are taxed 30% -> $27 per noble.
        Total collection is $540.

The tax brackets are not what make taxes complicated. Knowing how to categorize different types of income is what makes taxes complicated.

The flat tax would not make tax preparation any bit easier. They only thing it would do would be to eliminate progressive taxation. In other words, the rich would pay less. The poor would pay more.

That's for personal tax returns. For businesses, the new MTD stuff is all through commercial partners.

Even the complex cases fit into an overarching tool. Most people in the UK don't submit tax returns because they don't have any income beyond their salary. Even if you do, you then use the tool which asks you a series of questions like "do you have a student loan?" and "did you receive any dividend income?", then you have to fill in some next level detail if those are true. I'm sure there are people with weird tax arrangements that need to work outside of the wizard, but I'd wager it was less than 1 in 1000, and those people tend to have the money to pay for fancy accountants to do it for them.

This program was called IRS Direct File[1], and DOGE/the current administration killed it.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Direct_File

Because it is (or was it the time this article was written) against the law. The company that owned the tax preparation software lobby to Congress to pass a law requiring that the IRS not provide a free and easy way for people to submit their taxes.

Sometimes I think the most exceptional thing about the USA is exceptionalism.

Solutions to problems that are solved elsewhere are pushed back against, because "The USA is fundamentally different".

Other countries have states too. The UK even has a country with an entirely different legal system (Scots Law), but we still make our collection of income tax system simple.

A "complicated tax system" (if that is the root cause) is not something that is impossible to change. It is within the gift of the government(s) to change that.

The lack of appetite for change is the result of decades of lobbying for the status quo to continue.

We got pre-calculated returns as an alternative in the early 90's, by the time I got my first real job in the early 00's everyone used the pre-calculated one and just made changes as necessary. The first years I got my tax return in the mail and I think a few years I had to mail back a signed copy, but these days everything is digital and if you don't have to make any changes you don't have to do anything at all.

Back then you also had to physically deliver your tax deduction card to your employer so they could deduct tax correctly, but these days that is also digital and salary systems just fetches the current deduction card before running salary jobs every month.

It's a combination of diet and education.

If you want to understand the first, take McDonalds - you probably have one and don't think it's that bad? Imagine everything on the menu is either 10 times sweeter (sickening), or made with wilted products on the cusp of expiration, and that's "standard" food.

It's so bad, many Americans hate anything "healthy" because any time they are exposed to it, it's not much better than pigs swill. So there are many who will only eat meat, because that is harder to make taste poorly, despite being even more disease riddled (there are almost no standards for meat inspection).

So then, you are constantly sick, low energy.

And then education - suffice it to say there are many communities where it is seen as "reasonable" to believe in nonsense like "flat earth", and many struggle with basic things like addition. It's a wonder we aren't illiterate too... I suppose it's too useful to be able to read about products to buy them, so we can at least all read the adverts...(for now)

But where is the company getting the refund from?

Don't use AI for tasks where you don't have the qualifications to verify that the result is correct.

The problem is if you need to verify everything you might as well do it yourself.

I'm not convinced an AI will ever know how to distinguish a personal and business expense from a CSV dump of your credit card too.

If you're going to go down the rabbit hole of creating a CSV, you can already parse and categorize it pretty easily without AI. I've built and have been using https://github.com/nickjj/plutus for a bit now and I've gotten quarterly taxes down to less than 10 minutes.

We've taken the one task that computers are inherently good at and somehow made it worse.

I know a couple of professional accountants. They have yearly regular overtime periods. It's hard on everyone.

> The complicated tax code keeps many lawyers and accountants in business.

At least, some of the complications in these are not intentional, but result of centuries old evolution of these systems.

Maritime shipping uses centuries old systems to handle costs in shipping accidents for example. I forgot the exact name of the system, but while the method is extremely fair, it's equally complicated. The whole premise stems from "This ship has sailed because you wanted me to carry your cargo", and becomes something mind boggling.

I'm sure there are some steps taken to keep people busy, but chalking up everything to it is unfair and wrong.

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about it for years.

What's especially sad is that some major progress was made toward having a free official system just a few years ago, but now it's being torn apart.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/irs-moves-forward-with...

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2629

https://apnews.com/article/irs-direct-file-tax-returns-free-...