Intuit will no longer be a part of IRS Free File program

We badly need legislation to force the IRS to send every taxpayer a bill which they can pay.<p>They certainly have enough information from employers, banks, estimated payments from contractors, etc. Otherwise, how would they decide who to audit? How would they know to mail you an adjusted return for a past year?<p>It feels completely ridiculous that we need to calculate these things ourselves, only to be bugged by the agency for entering the wrong numbers. Just tell us what you think the bill is, and let us make a counter-claim if we think you&#x27;re wrong!<p>But this has been true for years, decades. I&#x27;m not holding my breath.

I agree with the many comments here calling for an IRS-driven system.<p>But I&#x27;d also like to see improvements for the 10-13% of people who cannot be correctly billed by the IRS (I&#x27;m one of them). I say this because we&#x27;re already so close to how it ought to be ... for several years now, I&#x27;ve used freefilefillableforms.com to file my taxes as a self-employed person with periodic capital gains and other stuff. It&#x27;s not really a great model for how such a website could be designed, but it&#x27;s not actually terrible and generally gets the job done.<p>However, it has been <i>intentionally</i> hobbled: there are several places where you must manually transfer numbers from one field to another, or from one form to another. There&#x27;s clearly no technical reason for this, and the system will also not report any error if you do not do so (making it trivial to have major errors, despite all the data being input correctly).<p>I can only conclude that it has been hobbled by the same motivations that affect the tax reporting&#x2F;return field in general.<p>I&#x27;d definitely like to see this done even better, but a good small step would be a bill for force this site to do 100% of what it clearly already can, rather than 95%.

This didn’t take long. The word must’ve gotten out finally that you don’t need to pay to file your taxes.

Intuit has been scamming low income users into paying for their services that were supposed to be free:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;turbotax-just-tricked-you-into-paying-to-file-your-taxes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;turbotax-just-tricked-you...</a><p>Intuit just decided that it could not make enough money with this scam, so they stopped using this particular one. It&#x27;s probably a wise decision. Claiming that you&#x27;re providing a free service, while making it pretty difficult for users to find it so they will use your paid services instead, is definitely wrong from a moral point of view, but it might also be shaky from a legal point of view. The bottom-line was probably just the profit.

is taxation as fucked up in other countries as it is in the usa? rules set up to encourage people to have to pay some shady third party to know how much they owe (even though the irs could tell them directly).

I almost feel like &quot;doing your taxes&quot; is one of those things that is like going to buy a new car. Everyone hates it, but when Saturn came along and said &quot;no haggling, just best price on every car&quot; people didn&#x27;t actually like that.<p>I go to buy a new car and I HOPE I got a great price, I worked on it, I bargained, I did the research. They say I did really good this team, I got such a great deal!<p>I &quot;do my taxes&quot; and I HOPE I paid as little as possible. I worked on it, I kept my receipts, I did the research, and maybe I even paid someone to do all that for me and they say I did really good this year, low tax bill!<p>Both of these things suck, but if I just got a bill from the IRS I&#x27;m just going to think &quot;maybe I could&#x27;ve done better&quot; just like if I see a car that just has a price I am going to think &quot;maybe I could&#x27;ve done better&quot;<p>I really don&#x27;t like thinking like this!

I am waiting for the day when some ransomeware attack happens to Intuit a day before taxes are due and it causes such a disruption that congress will act and this shit is over but I guess I am dreaming...

Why do we even have to pay income taxes in the first place. Even companies get a far better treatment as they can at least deduct their expenses. Humans are treated worse than a register entity.<p>And for what? To send troops abroad for some killing, ultimately benefiting only a tiny few. For health care, infrastructure, police, education?<p>The whole thing is a joke. Perhaps this move will make people wake up and ask for income tax on individuals to be voluntarly, somehow I still doubt so.

Thankfully I live in a country where I&#x27;ve never had to pay income taxes in my entire life :)

Intuit can eat shit, their business model is to lobby against any meaningful tax code simplification