[the_svd_doctor]

Right. But doing the calculation is pretty hard for most people. Add that to the risk associated to making mistakes and most people will probably prefer paying a bit and have a “””guarantee””” that there are no mistakes. (I don’t disagree he. Just pointing it out.)

[jjeaff]

Yes, and it's not just calculations. It's things like, "if section F line 27 is greater than the total in section B line 12, subtract the amount in section z line 127 from this total and multiply the result by the appropriate tax rate (see long form instructions for form 478B and fill out Worksheet 12C to calculate your appropriate tax rate).

This is not a verbatim quote, but solar to what you have to do now to calculate health care insurance subsidies.

[joshuaheard]

I build a spread sheet for all the forms and worksheets that require calculations. FreeFillableForms does some of the calculations for you, and does not have any worksheets. Excel has formulas for everything I have encountered paying taxes, and I have a joint account with stock options and several rental property LLCs.

As a bonus, the spreadsheets are generally reusable, after checking to make sure there are no changes.

[gorbachev]

FreeFillableForms is great and has saved me a ton of time, but it does not do the calculations automatically for every field. You still have to manually lookup certain things from tables. It's freakin' frustrating, because there's no reason why it couldn't automate those as well.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Even more frustrating because it doesn't tell you that you haven't done the calculation or worse, you haven't transferred a field from one form to another.

I failed to copy my self-employment tax back to my 1040 for 2020, despite having calculated it correctly. No warnings, the form filing went smoothly, and 4 months later I got a notice from the IRS.

It's insanity.

[joshuaheard]

I hear you. I keep hoping they will add more calculations in future versions, and they do, little by little.

My suspicion is that it is deliberately deprecated due to pressure from for-profit tax prep companies.