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I don't understand. Anyone? Regardless of income, regardless how complicated their taxes are, and regardless of whether they get the assistance of an individual or company to help them?
Frankly, having the companies provide the free ones (I assume these are them) sounds like a much better idea to me that relying on the IRS to develop one.
I really encourage you to read through all the bill. I started out in a similar position when I knew nothing of the bill....as I said the soundbyte is 100% incomplete/inaccurate. "Block" implies there is a service now and that's not true. The IRS offers zero products for people to do their taxes other than the forms and an instruction book.
The free ones that I linked to are pretty clear when they are free. I'm over the income maximum, so I can't use them. Maybe they upsell during the process? I don't know.
They can't....it's against the law (even before this bill). What they can do is market people to buy their product. Over 70% of the country qualifies for the free version. Less than 5% of that group actually does.
Yes. In fact someone said that in this very thread.
That'll never work from a security perspective unless you are simply creating something that does the return and prints it out then you mail it in. 1040EZ could be done in about 30 minutes...hardest part would be formatting it to the form.
We are so far behind the rest of the world about taking care of or making things easy for citizens.
I don't diagree here except for simply trusting what the US gov't puts on paper. Even if it were the 1040 EZ, you'd have to do your own just to make sure they didn't screw it up. Of course none of what we are talking about right now has anything to do with the OP and everything to do with the fact that our tax code has become the dumping ground for all the legislation our legislators don't want to legislate and pass the correct way. There isn't another tax code in the world that is asked to cover the breadth of issues ours is.
They don't have to be. You are always free to write it out on paper just like the beginning of time
If they started working on it now, they might have it done in 10 years and it might work part of the way
I don’t understand this thinking at all. The government should be trying to make our lives better. Why shouldn’t it offer us something for free instead of making us pay for it?
Because i have worked on projects like this for the govt as well as observed their lack of ability with the simplest of technologies. They attempted something like this in the early 2000s. Couldn't get even a beta out. zero confidence they'd be able to keep up year after year
I know you’re just trying to be difficult but the “something” in my sentence was referring to an online tax form that can be efiled.It doesn't cost you a thing to do your taxes.
I don’t personally believe that you’re right, but even if you are, why not try? If people think it’s worth it to them to pay TurboTax they will. If people want to use the free government program they’ll do that. How is that worse than what happens now?
Yeah I guess the private companies set it up so you only have to pay to efile the state form not the federal form. Maybe my beef should be with the states. Damn you federalism!
I don’t know how all the states work. My state (Illinois) allows you to file for free on their website. Very easy.
Yeah, I honestly never thought of it like this but I mostly agree. However, I don’t care if that free is TurboTax or FedTax or something else. I do find it odd that the government would pass legislation that prohibits another part of government from doing something that they allow private companies to do. Just seems weird.
Why would you want to reinvent the wheel just for the government to run it? Again, all the services like Turbo Tax, Tax Cut etc are required to provide a free service that well over 70% of the country is eligible to use (though less than 5% of them actually use it). The simple math of cost/benefit alone is enough to see that it's not smart. Think about all the infrastructure they'd have to set up just to run the application on.....and all in an effort to give someone a service that already exists. It's completely illogical IMO.
And to follow up....don't believe which part? That they tried a beta and it failed miserably? That's absolutely true. I doubt many even know about it, that's how poor a product it was. Only reason I know about it is because one of my first contract jobs was helping set up the databases this thing was supposed to run on.
