Free IRS-run tax filing pilot to be available in 13 states

This is great news; no matter how restricted it may be initially, I think having a &quot;guaranteed-free&quot; tax filing system will be great for most people, especially lower-income people.<p>The private companies have demonstrated pretty clearly that they will do everything they can to avoid people actually having free tax filing, and while ~$50-100 might not seem like a ton of money, keep in mind that at the current United States minimum wage ($7.25 as of this writing), it would take upwards of working 6-14 hours <i>just to pay for tax filing</i>. $100 is a lot of money when you&#x27;re not a yuppie software engineer.<p>I suspect I did enough crazy stuff with stocks this year that it probably won&#x27;t apply to me at first, but hopefully by 2025 or 2026 I can stop giving money to Intuit or Jackson Hewitt.

There are lots of comments along the lines of &quot;xxx is cheap&quot;<p>Why on earth do you need a third party for your tax calc and resolution? It is surely the antithesis of the &quot;land of the free&quot; and all that stuff.<p>In the boring old UK I login to a govt. run website to do my annual tax self assessment. My P60 is already filled in (that&#x27;s my PAYE - pay as you earn, my normal salary) I&#x27;m a company director too so I have dividends and expenses and offsets etc to worry about. It takes around an hour to complete.<p>Most UK employees don&#x27;t do self assessment. PAYE is such a simple and obvious idea - routine taxation should be done by routine.

I&#x27;ve been using FreeTaxUSA for a while now to do my taxes, and I like it very much. (If you use TurboTax or H&amp;R Block or something, I strongly recommend giving FreeTaxUSA a look). I was sort of wondering if the IRS would just buy them wholesale and use that as the free file software, since it&#x27;s already &quot;finished&quot; and making another one would be duplicated effort. But is there precedent for that, the government just buying a private company for its IP?

One thing I really want to see is an official form where if you answer all the questions, to the best of your knowledge correctly, protects you from liability for incorrectly filing your taxes.<p>End of the day with TurboTax and co, you, as expected, get a &quot;not our system, not our problem&quot; type response when dealing with the post-filing ramifications.<p>There seems to generally be a lot of &quot;I&#x27;m not sure if I did it right&quot; anxiety in the general population.

This is only tangentially-related, but I know I&#x27;m asking the right audience: I switched, blissfully, away from Quicken&#x2F;Quickbook&#x2F;Xero&#x2F;all that heavy crap to very simple and elegant textfile-based accounting (ledger&#x2F;hledger) and it&#x27;s been the best and most flexible accounting experience I&#x27;ve ever had. I finally feel completely in control of my companies&#x27; books.<p>Is there an equivalently-blissful tax-filing software&#x2F;service? I don&#x27;t want to go back to TurboTax, and with several single-member LLCs I&#x27;m probably beyond the scope of the IRS&#x27; free service.<p>Anyone have any suggestions?

To clarify: This is not a full launch, it&#x27;s just a &quot;limited pilot&quot; that will only be available in 13 states in 2024.<p>Arizona<p>California<p>Florida<p>Massachussetts<p>Nevada<p>New Hampshire<p>New York<p>South Dakota<p>Tennessee<p>Texas<p>Washington<p>Wyoming<p>Someone please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong.

Before everyone gets too excited: This will probably only apply to simple tax situations: If you have more than these, you might not be able use it:<p>#Income reporting<p>W-2 wage income<p>Social Security and railroad retirement income<p>Unemployment compensation<p>Interest of $1,500 or less<p>#Credits<p>Earned Income Tax Credit<p>Child Tax Credit<p>Credit for Other Dependents<p>#Deductions<p>Standard deduction<p>Student loan interest<p>Educator expenses

&gt;Arizona, California, Massachusetts and New York have decided to work with the IRS to integrate their state taxes into the Direct File pilot for filing season 2024.<p>There&#x27;s the notable point. If states integrate into it, it&#x27;s a game changer. No need for the vast majority of filers to use any 3rd party.

It is mind-boggling how far behind the US is in taxes and retail banking. News like this always amaze me.

I hope this is good! I&#x27;ve been happily using FreeTaxUSA for the last several years, which has a small price for state tax submissions and no gotchas after H&amp;R block jumped me with over a hundred dollars in fees at the end.

I&#x27;m surprised Intuit allowed this to happen. It almost look as if the govt is working for the people.

Will this system integrate with all the banks, exchanges, registered businesses, and etc? I find that 90% of the time spent on tax filing is gathering data. Turbotax does offer some integration, but the experience was not necessarily smooth.

&gt; eligibility to participate in the pilot...will be limited to taxpayers with certain types of income, credits and deductions – taxpayers with relatively simple returns. The IRS today announced it anticipates specific income types, such as wages on a Form W-2, and important tax credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, will be covered by the Direct File pilot.<p>This is what I was mostly curious about. So, I&#x27;m guessing things like ISOs, AMT, capital gains from investments etc would not be supported by this service yet.

I&#x27;m glad. I&#x27;ve used Cash App Taxes the past few years, and while it&#x27;s free (including state) and an easy interface, I&#x27;m well aware I&#x27;m the product. Presumably&#x2F;hopefully that will not be the case with this new system. I&#x27;m in one of the listed states, so I&#x27;m ... not exactly looking <i>forward</i> to trying it out, but definitely curious!

If an entire industry can be killed by a public service, it probably didn&#x27;t deserve to exist in the first place.

Declaring taxes in Brazil is free, but it&#x27;s hard work (if you dabble with stocks, for instance). For 1&#x2F;5 of the value of the minimum wage you can hire a accountant that does it for you. I think the service is worth it&#x27;s price. All i have to do is send them a bunch of documents and they make sense out of it.

No thanks to Intuit who had been stymieing it for profit for 20+ years.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;inside-turbotax-20-year-f...</a>

Does that mean I can FOIA for the source code? I ask in all seriousness: I believe some things are withheld&#x2F;redacted due to &quot;national security&quot; but if they hard-coded mainframe credentials in their source code that&#x27;s not <i>my</i> fault

Almost none of the “free” or affordable options work the minute you put in an international address. Uncle Sam is one of the rare cases of taxing its citizens abroad, but everything about getting taxed abroad is more complicated.

This is great. I wished the individual states would do this too for their tax filers.

Just a reminder about certain companies that share data with Meta&#x2F;Google:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36701706">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36701706</a>

This is great, but a lot of people think it will be a Intuit or H&amp;R Block &quot;killer&quot;. It won&#x27;t. People don&#x27;t pay for the &quot;expert&quot; tax prep, they pay for the hand holding. I have worked for HRB corporate for years and have seen countless people with simple W2&#x27;s that happily pay $100+ per year just to have an office to go to, to shake a hand and talk to a person about their past year. As long as there are lonely elderly people, these businesses will always be there.

The description of this makes me skeptical. People have been asking for a system where the IRS does your taxes for your, sends you the draft, and you add in any deductions, etc.<p>They already do your taxes in the background to confirm your return is correct, so this is not significantly more work for them (in fact, it is probably less work).<p>In some countries with such a system, unless you intentionally lie, you are absolved of legal liability if the government screws up your taxes.<p>The article makes it sound like they are building a crappy turbo tax clone instead.

Why not start with simplifying the tax code, instead of letting it metasize in complexity, and then laying more complexity on top with software packages?

Do you still have to enter all your data or does it prefill the data it already knows like W-2 and 1099? That’s where the real benefit comes in my opinion.

The fact we have to file income tax is stupid. The IRS knows what you owe (try not filing your taxes or filing them wrong and you&#x27;ll get a bill from them for what you owe or any adjustments due to your errors), so if you&#x27;re not claiming anything or have special forms, why is it needed? For people who do a standard deduction there should be nothing to file.

The real joke is that they also have to check it.<p>You fill your shopping cart with a bunch of groceries then you have to write down what you think it all costs. The shop keeper then checks if you got it right. Then they call the police for each 12.3th customer who got it wrong. The odds to get it wrong are so big the help of a different company is needed who will add up the shopping cart for you.<p>You cant make it up.

I have my home&#x2F;property loan through a coop (a FCS institution) and so I get dividends every year on my shares. It amounts to about 1.5x my monthly payment. Because of this I have F-income to declare and so most free offerings are off the table for me.<p>I used the FileFreeUSA and TurboTax Federal Free in the past and it worked well. I just use TT&#x27;s paid offering now for the F-income declarations.

Why does the average American have to file taxes? You know my W2 you know my family members. Just send out the withhold amount to my employer.

Retail financial services are a source of misery for low income people. Providers don&#x27;t want those customers, and it shows. Predatory products and service providers prey on the less well off. Postal banking would be a good next step.

Wouldn&#x27;t there just be a lot of money made by someone offering free filing and then offering to give you your return immediately for a fee of like 10%? Is anyone doing this?

I hope the next step would be to tax me and let me decide to dispute if I see something not right. Most of us working with a W2 will have our tax filing simplified and cheap.

They already have this in some form, its called “free fillable forms”, and it sucks. For example if there is any minor issue like something off by a cent it fails to submit and won’t tell you which field has an error or what the error is. Although its not officially maintained by the IRS, I don’t think… if i recall Intuit maintains it as part of an (arguably nefarious) agreement with the IRS. It’s presumably intentionally made to suck and hard to find.

I like how this discussion is always<p>“Free vs Turbotax”<p>and everyone with a CPA just has to pretend they dont do that

Welcome to the 21st century American friends, enjoy your stay.<p>God knows why it took this long.....

Tax year 2024 means the filing due in April 2024 or the one in April 2025?

A dream come true. I’ve been asking for this for years.

Did you find any solution or help from anywhere?

Credit to Joe Biden and the Inflation Reduction Act for making this possible.<p>If Trump wins again he&#x27;s going to have a lot of work destroying all the progress Biden has made in just one term.

Can it calculate taxes on Bitcoin?

Living in New York never gets old…

Doesn&#x27;t change much. I still need to pay my CPA thousands to <i>prepare</i> the tax return.

It&#x27;s CPS time again. Related:<p><i>Tax prep companies: $90M lobbying against free tax-filing</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37363616">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37363616</a> - Sept 2023 (231 comments)<p><i>IRS moves forward with a new free-file tax return system</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36804710">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36804710</a> - July 2023 (221 comments)<p><i>IRS tests free e-filing system that could compete with tax prep giants</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35950836">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35950836</a> - May 2023 (567 comments)<p><i>Call on the IRS to provide libre tax-filing software</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35705469">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35705469</a> - April 2023 (129 comments)<p><i>60M Americans have taxes so simple the IRS could do them automatically</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35476709">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35476709</a> - April 2023 (277 comments)<p><i>Lobbyists begin chipping away at Biden’s $80B IRS overhaul</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35381701">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35381701</a> - March 2023 (214 comments)<p><i>Intuit pouring money into lobbying amid push for free government-run tax filing</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34840039">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34840039</a> - Feb 2023 (178 comments)<p><i>IRS builds task force to explore running its own free e-file system</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34764952">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34764952</a> - Feb 2023 (199 comments)<p><i>IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34462122">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34462122</a> - Jan 2023 (247 comments)<p><i>IRS will look into setting up a free e-filing system</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32753099">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32753099</a> - Sept 2022 (408 comments)<p><i>The IRS could be on the verge of changing the way Americans file their taxes</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32550841">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32550841</a> - Aug 2022 (17 comments)<p><i>IRS will study free tax filing options</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32502321">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32502321</a> - Aug 2022 (25 comments)<p><i>TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31072202">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31072202</a> - April 2022 (394 comments)<p><i>Filing taxes could be free &amp; simple. H&amp;R Block &amp; Intuit lobby against it (2017)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30856968">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30856968</a> - March 2022 (114 comments)<p><i>FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30846071">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30846071</a> - March 2022 (587 comments)<p><i>Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30409523">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30409523</a> - Feb 2022 (122 comments)<p><i>Why do Americans have to pay much to file their tax returns when the IRS knows?</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30267361">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30267361</a> - Feb 2022 (22 comments)<p><i>Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&amp;R Block and Intuit Lobby Against It (2017)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30185484">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30185484</a> - Feb 2022 (18 comments)<p><i>California tried to save the nation from tax filing, then Intuit stepped in</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28944200">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28944200</a> - Oct 2021 (283 comments)<p><i>The IRS has a big opportunity to fix the way Americans file taxes</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28177289">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28177289</a> - Aug 2021 (12 comments)<p>--<p>GOTO <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35970518">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35970518</a>

The inflation reduction act is such a low key mvp of a bill. This is great

will it have embedded links to google.com like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmv.ca.gov" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmv.ca.gov</a> ?<p>(for example, this irs page links to googletagmanager)

wow maybe we can automate it next

I always thought it was weird that something so complex, easy to mess up, and important to the government would require a third party external dependency. For a while towards the end it really kinda became a shining example of late stage capitalism. You, for all intents and purposes, NEEDED to do business with one of these handful of entities or you are in violation of the law. If you can&#x27;t afford that you&#x27;ll have to do this literally impossible stack of paperwork instead.

Misleading title here that differs from the title in the linked article - it’s a pilot in 13 states, not generally available.

For real? Sweden has had this for like 15 years. Perhaps if you paid a bit more taxes your government wouldn&#x27;t be so useless (: