[mabbo]

A lot of what H&R Block sells is experience in filing taxes, not just knowledge of how to do it.

I have complex multi-country taxes to file (Canadian living in Canada, but with some income the IRS says is American income). H&R Block have a guy who has handled this exact kind of tax filing hundreds of times before. If I make any mis-steps in filing, the IRS is going to demand I give them thousands of dollars.

I'm not paying H&R Block $600 (CAD) to fill out a piece of paper, I'm paying for the time and experience of someone who won't screw it up and knows how to fight back if the IRS has a problem with it.

The root cause is that our tax system is overly complex and it doesn't need to be. We need to address that rather than build software to help make the complexity continue.

[atonse]

Yes but you wouldn't benefit much by this simplified filing system anyway.

The point is there are millions of people that just have 1 or 2 W-2 incomes and don't itemize, and can file a straight up 1040 which is what H&R block is fighting.

In addition to you, people like me (S-corp owner) have complicated taxes and that's fine. We'll always pay. But doesn't mean there isn't a class of people who wouldn't benefit from this.

[Jach]

After two years at two different H&R Blocks I'm not convinced in their expertise. Got an IRS letter demanding payment for some income the first guy said I didn't have to report, I paid to make it go away and it wasn't high enough that I felt like I needed to cause a ruckus with H&R Block. (Besides they'd probably just say I was the one who forgot to include it, not their fault.) The second time the lady assigned to me tried to shoo me away for the evening (because they charge on the final amount of forms they have to file, not the time) rather than wait (I waited) for someone else at the location who wasn't confused by the concept of RSUs to become available. It'll be TurboTax for me this year though I am tempted to do it manually and use the H&R Block forms prior as a template.

Still, my taxes were complicated for 2014 so I was glad for the help. I agree that's ultimately what their value is, along with their promise of assistance should things really go wrong, it's just not usually top-expert help and if it can be replaced by cheap software it should be, even if overall simplification is still the best outcome.

[kbenson]

Yes. Taxes are complex enough in many situations that it incentivizes paying someone to take that complexity load. The simplest and most sure way to do this is to simplify taxes, but assuming the IRS will be able to to just do it all correctly for you seems naive to me. Depending on your tax situation, there's lots of information the IRS doesn't have (such as almost all deductions you might try). Having the IRS auto-fill forms for you seems like it's putting effort in the wrong place. If they can auto-fill forms for you, your taxes are probably pretty simple, but even then the forms may be complex enough that checking them may require most people use a tax preparer/checker of some sort. The real gains are from simplifying the taxes themselves, not just automating the form entry in the already simple cases. Making taxes simpler reduced the incentives for using a tax preparer, which is the right way to go about this.

[rdudek]

But a lot of the folks who work for those big accounting firms like H&R are just seasonal data entry folks who just input all the data info their program.

I think to fight this, we need a good robust open source solution that could possibly be made automated. Only cost I assume would be for the user to e-file.

[__david__]

> Canadian living in Canada, but with some income the IRS says is American income…

So in that case, I'm curious what the penalty is for not paying. Presumably the IRS doesn't have the power to garnish wages from Canadian banks…

[mabbo]

I'm not really enthusiastic about finding out.

It was RSUs granted in 2012, while I lived in the US, that vested over 4 years (the last of which was 2016). That counts as 'American income'. After this year, I don't have to do this ever again and plan to start doing my own taxes.