IRS will pilot free, direct tax filing in 2024::Direct File is a shot across the bows of Turbotax, H&R Block, and others who have resisted free and simple tax filing for decades.
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What? The government will actually collect taxes itself like every other sane country, instead of privatizing it out to middlemen grifters? Oh my, where is mah fainting couch?
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“Maximizing profit for the shareholders” is usually in direct opposition with “minimizing expenses for the clients”, as the current price hike waves in Silicon Valley can easily prove.
LET’S FUCKING GOOOO
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The IRS will test a free tax filing service in 2024 for a subset of lucky taxpayers in as many as 13 states, the agency announced today.
The program is more or less a direct result of funding provided by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, through which $15 million was earmarked for the purpose of exploring and implementing a simple, free, government-provided tax filing service.
Over the last year and a half, the IRS has been building out the pilot program, which it characterizes as being “one more potential option” on the continuum from self-managed Free File, to commercial products like Turbotax, to a tax prep professional.
The IRS describes Direct File as “a mobile-friendly, interview-based service” available in English and Spanish, intended for people with simpler tax situations like W-2s and common income credits and deductions.
This will in turn “allow the IRS to evaluate the costs, benefits and operational challenges associated with providing a voluntary Direct File option to taxpayers.” In software terms, we’d probably call this an alpha.
Intuit and others which have surreptitiously fought against simple, free, and transparent tax filing for many years (as ProPublica documented not long ago) are no doubt seething and scheduling emergency meetings.
The original article contains 467 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Nah, it’s OK. Every person in the world knows what’s IRS, no need to explain the acronym.
You’re right, that title would have been much less wordy if “United State of America’s Internal Revenue Service, the government department responsible for collecting taxes” was added.
Wait, do US citizens have to pay to file taxes? Or is this a service to help navigate the complexities?
Not American, bit my understanding is that filling taxes in the US is complicated and confusing to the point where most people use paid software to do it. There is an obvious lobby of tax filing software companies keeping it that way.
nailed it.
It’s the latter.
The government charges no fee to file.
However, until this year, lobbying has prevented the IRS from providing online services to help taxpayers fill out the forms or file directly, instead being required to outsource that and only expose a (wildly insecure btw) API for electronic filing.
Because the US tax code is also complicated as fuck and changes all the time, services like TurboTax exist and charge you to fill out the forms.
Repeat the above for each state you work / have income / own property in.
It isn’t even that complex if you are doing basic forms. Literally plug in numbers from a document that gets mailed to you January 15.
These are just private companies that typically fleece you out of a percentage of your income tax return.
My ex made us file taxes using “experts” for 17 years, even though I proved to her I could do it myself, and came up with the same numbers the “experts” did, because “they insure you if something goes wrong”
It’s a scam. TurboTax, Jackson Hewitt, it’s a scam
US citizen here. Used to file my own for free. At one point I bought a house and qualified for some tax credit so I paid an accountant to do my taxes that year to ensure I got everything right, bascially never went back becuase it was worth the $175 to litterally do nothing except mail my tax documents to an accountant.
You have a pretty basic tax situation so you might reconsider paying that $175. I’m in roughly the same boat as you and pay $10 for FreeTaxUSA (and previously $0 for CreditKarma Tax) to file my state return and $0 for the federal return.
Be cooler if we didn’t have to pay tax at all…
At a 20% tax rate (relatively low) over a 5 day work week, you will work 1 whole day and receive ZERO money from it. It gets washed away to taxes
We have progressive tax rates so you’ll be paying less than 20%. A simple example using your single week of work would have you paying 0% for day 1, 5% for day two, 10% for day 3, 15% for day 4, and 20% for day 5. Assuming you make $100 a day/$500 a week, this would put your tax bill at $50 for the week or 10% even though you hit the 20% bracket.
You exchange that money for infrastructure and services. You think that roads build themselves with fairy dust and unicorn wishes?
Well have fun when your house burns down, cause the fire department certainly isn’t gonna come there without getting paid.
And even after you pay the fire department to come out, you’ll have to pay someone else to dig out a road to your house for the firetruck to drive on and then pay a third person to dig a trench to the nearest body of water so they’ll have something to spray on the fire.
