The catch is that it requires ID.me, and there is no way in hell I’m giving some third party a picture of my fucking drivers license.
Interesting that third parties like TurboTax aren’t required to obtain copies of your photo ID.
I looked it up, and there is an article from the end of last year that says they are about to be required or are already required.
I can’t recall ever putting my license on one of these tax preppers, but I am also older and more privacy concerned in my older age, so I would definitely not do it now.
At that point, might be better to hand-file your return. In many of these programs they offer you the ability to print and mail your return.
Your refund takes longer of course.
Eh, I’ve only gotten like $20 back max the last three years. They can take as long as they want, I will not be giving any third parties anything that they truly do not need.
I hope more scrutiny is given to ID.me. I’ll only be using Direct File if they remove it as a dependency.
Seems odd. They’ve been pushing login.gov like everywhere.
It will eventually be supported, and in the interim they have stated that they won’t keep biometric data obtained through ID.me once a verification is completed, or you can opt for an online interview where no biometrics are collected in the first place.
Who knows if ID.me will actually delete the data on their end though, or if the online interview is recorded by the provider.
Government biometric requirements really aren’t a joke. They perform pretty regular audits and the liability of not deleting ID could be company ending.
They might not delete your biometrics, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t. It’s far more likely that they not only delete it but have an audit trail proving deletion.
I even had to make a login.gov account to apply to some federal jobs (ironically enough one was with the IRS even!)
On a related note, it appears based on their job listings that the IRS will not hire anyone who owes them money
…to print my ID in the first place?
(But yes clearly worse to allow personal data to be stored in an additional system.)
Right, my government also gave me a number at my birth. They know where I live, they know how much I make and where I work. The third party, ID.me, definitely does NOT need any of my information, since the entity that is taxing me, already does.
The problem is that given all of the data breaches, anyone can use your social security number, address, etc. and file a return on your behalf.
In theory, that’s what ID.me is preventing.
But if your wallet gets stolen, good luck.
Depressing thought: there’s a remote possibility the government is inept enough trying to roll around verification system that a third party has a safer solution.
Positive thinking: maybe the government is just using a third party until they’ve had time to make their own service entirely bombproof. Let’s go with that for our sake.
And then ID.me becomes the new TurboTax and starts lobbying the government to not compete with them.
Noooooooooooo
Huh, I already signed up for it because they started requiring it a while back to access historical tax return documents through the IRS website.
Why, do they sell data?
It would not surprise me in the least, but more importantly, if they get breached and they have sloppy mechanisms in place, my license could be fully out there in the wild. May be whatever to some, but I think it’s too risky to trust some company with it that also has contracts with the government itself.
Wouldn’t they need to already have your data to check your driver’s license against it?
All praise Deditutankh, the Egyptian god of taxes!
Thank fuck. Finally
Pass, it’s not open source.
The one benefit of open source of having more eyes on the code to find any bugs would likely be its weakness, given that systems like these aren’t updated frequently, any bugs found and made public could open the door to exploiting,
why isn’t this constitutionally protected.
Can we pass an amendment for this shit? It’s actually kind of fucked up.
I think that some companies like turbotax are employing lobbyists to make impossible filing for taxes unless you go through a gatekeeper
yep, which is why its weird that we don’t have a legally protected avenue of direct filing.
Kind of? Are you going to tell us that the US healthcare system is “sorta silly” next?
Sorta silly?! It’s fucked beyond belief. Source: me, someone who profits off the healthcare industry as a corpo. Sorry 🤷.
god if i had the arcane knowledge of the entire field of healthcare, i would do some unbelievably fucked up shit.
And by that i mean writing open documentation that is continually maintained and represents most healthcare providers in the US specifically to fuck up their entire existence.
Doo iiiiit! (If you can).
Honestly I do the best I can to fudge numbers and drive down prices, but I can only do so much. They’re eventually going to catch on and replace me with someone who doesn’t give a fuck.
i mean, it is sorta silly. Not full sillyness, full sillyness would be forcing people in immediate life threatening injury to recite the ABC’s backwards before operation as protocol.
Sure, there’s degrees of silly
i spose there would be, but at the end of the day. Silly is a rather silly word to be using in this manner.
From a certain point of view? Yes.
I have a couple of other constitutional amendments I’d like to advance before this.
idk man i think i disagree honestly.
Tax is one of the very few constants that we all have to legally deal with, aside from like, auto insurance.
Biden did that, among many other great things for the average american citizen
Darn I was hoping it’d also be available now since I still haven’t filed my taxes this year.
I tried to use it and it wouldn’t work for me. Got halfway through the process and asked some question about me that seemed basic, but resulted in me not being able to use it.
Fuck TurboTax, fuck H$R Block
🎶At laaaaaaaaast🎶
Won’t SOMEBODY think of the poor, poor monopolists who so far made their money exploiting the alternativeless victims at their mercy? Why would their prey give them way too much money now, eh? Socialism! Terrorism! All the bad words, what’s in right now? Woke? DEI?
Eat shit, lobbying to make simple tax returns something you have to pay Turbo Tax, H&R Block, etc for.
For what it’s worth… You’re already eligible to a free tax return if you’re under a certain income.
I don’t know much about investing, but i wonder if it would it be a good time to short those companies?
it wouldve been earlier, but now this is priced into the stocks already.
It is already priced in. Our human speed reactions are far too slow when the news has this obvious of a consequence.
Those companies actually helped develop this, see “free file alliance membership” for details. It includes 17 private companies such as Intuit, H&R Block, TaxSlayer, Tax$simple, etc.
If you don’t know much about investing then you shouldn’t short anything ever. People who know about investing will tell you that even when your logic is 100 percent sound, the market isn’t that predictable and in general the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Isn’t shorting theoretically able to put you in infinite debt?
Theoretically, yes. A short is sorta a negative stock. When you hold a normal stock, the price can never go below zero. But when you hold a negative stock, there’s no maximum value that stock could rise to.
I think you would be margin called and just have astronomical but not infinite debt.
Infinite and astronomical are used interchangeably here. Since you have to return a share to the person you borrowed it from, if you borrowed 1000 shares at $5 and sold them to make 5k, if the price jumps to something like $350 like gamestop, it would cost you $350,000 to cover them.
Making 5k to lose 350k might as well be an infinite loss ot that investor, even though its technically a “smallish” sum. At that scale, it would destroy most people.
You can also pay to get a short going generally and try to wait out the madness,but you have to stay solvent to do it. The very stupid and very surprising “diamond handing” apes caused some hedge fund issues, although I think most just shrugged into other financial instruments.
Plus, the news of this would already be priced into the stock, so if anything the price is already low and these companies would need to pivot their business (which would increase the value again) or die (which would lower the price marginally, to zero). Either way, shorting is a bad strategy in this case.
I feel like shorting will always be riskier than normal investing. With stocks you have people at the company doing their best to raise that stock. With Shorts you are betting against a company that’s trying to survive.
The chances of the CEO pulling something out of their ass, dubious or not, to maintain their profits is too high.
If you get investing returns (like from shorting those companies)… you’re ironically not eligible to use the IRS direct file pilot (or at least for this year).
Edit: this isn’t to knock direct file… which is good and cool (and should be expanded to have more features)
Mine was too complicated to file for free because I have retirement investments? Seems like a silly reason to force someone to use a paid service.
You’re not supposed to be wrecking our economy like that. Spend, baby, spend.
😂😂
Yeah. Mine was “too complicated” because I had an HSA. Are you fucking kidding me?
Same. It sucks having to pay H&R Block $300/year to file my taxes, but their online records save my ass every time I buy a house. I sincerely hope we see a more robust free file system in my lifetime.
$300? Just use Free Tax USA. It’s free for federal and $15 for each state. No, you don’t need extra stuff, unless you think you’ll be audited.
If you spend a little time figuring out your tax situation, you don’t need to pay someone else to do it. Here’s a secret: the people they have doing your taxes don’t necessarily have a master’s degree in tax. Those people are helping corporations or wealthy people with trusts.
You missed the point of my reply. I pointed out that the benefit of H&R block is that they keep the records easily accessible, so when I buy a home I just link the H&R block account to the lender and they pull all of my tax and income history. Saves countless hours of gathering info and filling out paperwork. That’s worth $300/year to me.
Do you buy houses all the time? Do you want your income info to be sold to anyone who will pay? You are paying extra for them to have access to your info.
You wanna pay and extra ~$280 a year because you save a little bit of time when you buy a house? You know FreeTaxUSA has all your documents too, right?
You’ve never bought a house if you think it’s saving “a little bit” of time. We’re talking easily 40 hours of gathering and filing paperwork here. That’s $2,200 of my time. If I buy a house once every 7 years it works out.
Sounds like having any 1099 is ‘too complicated’. So anyone with any sort of savings account that managed to get $10 of interest over a year… So if you have like a thousand dollars in a boring old savings account you are ‘too complicated’.
Not really. If you are filling out $10 1099s you’re probably taking a standard deduction so it never matters.
Wow, old comment.
1099 is income, not a deduction.
Good. Now make it work for everyone’s tax situation.
Wait really? What’s the catch?
I expect that you’ll have to pay the money according to the statement
You get to pick which oligarch or corporation gets your tax money this year!
Doubt there is one. The hard truth is that most Americans’ taxes are pretty simple and straightforward. We can stop pretending that copying some boxes from a W2 and a 1099 is difficult.
I mean, personally I wish we’d stop pretending that the IRS isn’t already fully aware of what you owe and could just do the filling for you, like in other countries, but until Grover Norquist fucks off forever we’re stuck where we are.
step one for me is get out last year’s so i have a point of reference. just do the same thing again. numbers are a bit different, but the general ‘what-goes-where’ is usually the same–unless they split a form into multiple pages, or add an extra page to one.
once i get the new blank forms printed, it’s about 15 minutes for me to fill-out, copy, and stuff inside an envelope. this year’s added yet another sheet, i had to use a flat instead of the usual #10. cost more to mail, too, but i will not ever ‘e-file’.
one of the few perks of being poor—easy taxes.
most Americans’ taxes are pretty simple and straightforward
Once the reporting for income over $600 from shit like eBay sales, Venmo, etc kicks in, the 1099 they issue would make free filing ineligible
I’ve been in the US for a few years now. All my colleagues used to tell me that doing taxes is hard. So I kind of used to reluctantly pay money to do it through Sprintax. This year, I decided to do it by hand. It took almost the same amount of time as it would’ve taken to do it through Sprintax, which is around 30 minutes.
Even with multiple savings accounts, IRA/401ks, an investment account, and two W2s; it’s still relatively straightforward. You just need to grab the forms, as they are legally supposed to be provided to you.
Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.
I understand why we do out taxes in the current situation, kinda. If the irs just sent you a bill it would be ripe for people thinking they were getting ripped off. People hating taxes and thinking they’re getting robbed is about as American as it gets. The whole boston tea party thing. People on both side doing the math holds people accountable. Also the current tax bracket situation kinda needs some end of the year math. Now, if it was a flat tax, a fixed percent… THAT EVERYONE pays no matter how much you make then it would be easy math. But they gotta make sure the middle class is paying 22% of their income to the feds and the billionaires pay one tenth of a percent… you know… for reasons. Then there are a billion write-offs and loopholes the rich can exploit, so they gotta keep those there.
If it was, say, 5% for everyone, no matter what you make, then it could easily just come out of your check as you get paid with no bs at the end of the year.
A flat tax is a poor tax. 5% of your income means WAAAAY more to someone working minimum wage with two kids than someone who has a second home, even if dollars and cents it’s way less. And the wealthy will evade a flat tax as much as they already do a progressive tax.
Now, if it was a flat tax, a fixed percent…But they gotta make sure the middle class is paying 22% of their income to the feds and the billionaires pay one tenth of a percent… you know… for reasons.
I fall into the lower end of the middle class (nationally) and my income tax is about 11%, but on top of that, after deductions and credits I end up deducting myself into the lowest tax bracket and collecting credits so I get a nice chunk back every year. To actually pay a full 22% of your income in income taxes, you must be making pretty good bank (and probably spending pretty good bank if you’re still considering yourself middle class)
Flat taxes are extremely regressive. The whole idea of tax brackets is that those with more ability to pay pay more and those with less ability to pay pay less. If you only make 22k/year you need all of that and that $2200 can be pretty lifechanging, but if you make 220k per year you can live without that $22k. There’s also fun stuff with how much tax revenue the government can actually bring in depending on who they tax harder, and generally it favors taxing the rich at a much higher percentage rate than they do the poor.
The argument has been since free filing means only the wealthy will hire accountants, free filing would discriminate against the poor given a few mistakes will be made here and there.
I may not need to mention that disingenuous argument is made by the pirates at Intuit and their lobbyists.
Holy Christ someone using disingenuous appropriately, I’d almost given up on the word. Thanks for saving it!
How exactly is it usually misused? Its use here matches every other time I’ve seen it as far as I can tell
I always see it being used in place or dishonest for people who think they are the same and feel it makes them sound more intelligent.
Oh didn’t know it was misused!
🍻
free filing would discriminate against the poor
As opposed to the current system where the richest among us can hire a whole team of accountants to find every deduction possible?
Shhhh!!!
It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Ew
They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about
Solo 401ks/IRA also wouldn’t be something they know about until you file if I understand correctly. Guess you could that expenses?
They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.
Solo 401ks are where you’re the employer (guess technically there’s some wiggle room for others to be in your 401k, but from the perspective of such a person, wouldn’t it just be a normal 401k?). So you have to report it yourself. The brokerage firm holding it won’t.
They would go in the sections for 401ks and IRAs just like they do on the paper forms. The online form will have the same way to enter the additional deductions.
In italy the data is pre-filled, you just have to check if there’s something missing and you’re good to go, but you still have to send the module manually, like going into the website and doing the stuff.
It should be all automatic, wtf
Don’t they just assume that everything is good if you don’t reply? Works that way here
It’s not a “reply”, it’s a thing that you have to do, so that if you owe the government something you’d pay it, elsa you’ll receive money if the government owes you something (for example, a percentage of medical expenses gets “refunded”)
Here if you owe something you’ll get basically billed for it and if you are owed they just inform you about it and pay it to your account. If you are owed or you’re even then you don’t have to do a thing. No confirmation, nothing to do, you can ignore the whole thing. Is it the same for you guys?
Unfortunaly not 😂
How is the IRS supposed to know you paid me 5k last year via check??? How do you think people who don’t get w2 from their job have their income reported to the government? How do u think w2 get reported?
You have no clue how any of this actually works… stfu
How would they know now? It’s the same answer. Stop being a dick.
All of those things you mentioned are edge cases which you would still be able to handle yourself if they auto filled everything for you.
I use an online tax service which scans my w2 and filles it out. It still gives me the option to edit stuff but I mostly just check to make sure things look good.
y u no be nice about it :(
You’re acting like the filing that would come from the government would be the final record and you wouldn’t be allowed to correct it, which is not at all what people are suggesting.
Plus, audits will still be a thing.
Grover Norquist fucks off forever
This is the world I want to live in.
Unless it’s changed from the pilot, it’s only useful if you file a 1040EZ or take some really basic deductions. Anything beyond the basics, like any kind of investments, means you need to use a different tool.
But freetaxusa is still free for all but the most complex cases.
I’d say it’s still a win, and I’m hoping they expand upon it.
But even that would cover a large percentage of the American workforce, and I imagine over a few years, it will grow to cover all users that don’t need personal accountants. Progress is progress.
Personally, I hope this transitions into a system where they email you a proposed return and you do nothing to accept it (only needing to take action if there’s an issue).
From the article:
The pilot program targeted people with simple tax returns based on W-2 forms. In her remarks today Yellen said that over the next few years they will expand Direct File to support more situations.
It probably doesn’t do state taxes.
The catch is that Turbo Tax and H&R Block are gonna lose a ton of revenue
Only catch is Republicans probably launching some type of legal action to try and stop it.
No lawsuit launched yet to my knowledge, just sternly worded letters saying please stop helping taxpayers instead of letting predatory companies like Intuit fleece money off of them.
I would expect them to try something soon though with this announced.
You have to register an account with the 3rd party service ID.me that uses biometrics like facial recognition. Their privacy policy is horrendous.
The only reason I haven’t used it this year.
I was in a pilot state (Arizona), and I looked into it. It’s only for federal taxes. You need to file state taxes separately.
There are already several online tax solutions that offer free federal and charge for state.
