[aidangrimshaw]

I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org, an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes.

Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!

[paxys]

This is fantastic. I'm curious if you have any tax lawyers or accountants involved with this effort. Doing some amount of pro bono work is standard in the legal profession, and I can't think of too many services that would be more impactful to the average American than this one.

[freedomben]

That's really neat and I'm glad you're doing it. That said I worked on tax software once and the amount of changes each year are huge and often require expert analysis. Sometimes they get dropped on you with very little notice.

How does the project plan to keep up with that? Will it require volunteers?

[aidangrimshaw]

Absolutely, yeah the project has a loose group of contributor volunteers but longer term we would probably have to have a larger, more formal structure.

Right now, we're focusing on tooling to make onboarding new tax forms simpler and require a lower threshold of project understanding to allow a larger, less technical group of people to contribute

[formerkrogeremp]

Huh, as an aspiring tax professional how do I get in on this?

[IggleSniggle]

Go to the GitHub link above, read the README, and pay special attention to the “CONTRIBUTING” section.

If you have questions and the README and CONTRIBUTING documents do not specify a way to communicate, then open Issues on GitHub with your questions. Try to avoid asking questions unless you’ve read everything and cannot figure out how to proceed: remember that everyone working on the project is volunteering their limited time, just like you, and try to be respectful of their time and energy.

I am unaffiliated with this project, this is just the general procedure for contributing to open source projects.

[formerkrogeremp]

Thank you for the explanation. I've never contributed before to open source and have benefited from open source software a lot, so I'm trying to contribute to this the right way.

[zakpatterson]

Awesome

[ehsankia]

I assume the amount of changes is much higher for the more complex tax forms, which 99% of people don't need. If this free software can even just handle the free tier or semi-complex tier filing, it's still a huge step.

[singron]

The 1040 changes just about every year although it's usually just updating line numbers and various amounts (e.g. standard deduction). The 1040 schedules often get updates too.

IME everything else stays the same (e.g. the 8000s forms), but there are so many of them that it's a lot of work to just see which ones have changed and if you have to care about them. The forms also become less formulaic. E.g. If you file 6251, you need to keep your own records about Alternative basis, so you can't just fill them out based on w2s and 1099s.

[TimSchumann]

I volunteer to handle all the forms, compliance, and upkeep for Washington State income tax filings.

[aidangrimshaw]

lol so kind! For those not familiar: https://dor.wa.gov/taxes-rates/income-tax#:~:text=Washington....

[throwawayboise]

Very cool. Will give it a look, I am about to start my taxes.

Last year I used http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

It did the job, mostly, but had some quirks and didn't quite get everything right with the rounding when I set it to use whole dollar amounts, so I had to correct a few totals that ended up being $1 off, which was annoying. Probably won't use that one again.

[zakpatterson]

This is actually a bit of an annoying problem for us! All the 1040 instructions say to round all figures at the end. So it is expected that you would have a few cases of 1.49 + 1.49 = 3 showing as 1 + 1 = 3.

But the freefilefillableforms supported by IRS rounds all input and then does addition based on that. For now we just maintain all cents and do math with the precise numbers, then round at the end when the numbers need to go into the forms. We have some work in the pipeline now to make that user-configurable too.

[throwawayboise]

The way it seems it should work is that once the amount is entered on the form, it should be treated as the whole dollar amount for subsequent calculations. E.g. if the number comes from Schedule C, once that form is completed and you "enter this amount on line X of Form 1040" then any further calculations on the Form 1040 should use the whole dollar amount as printed, not the dollars and cents.

[heavyset_go]

Is there a CLA? If so, does anything prevent the rights holder(s) from closing the project and pivoting it towards a for-profit business?

I'd like to contribute, but don't feel like building someone's business for free.

[aidangrimshaw]

The project has an AGPL license if that's what you're wondering. We figured many people would feel the same way

[heavyset_go]

AGPL just means that users can fork the project if they have access to older AGPL code, but CLAs that assign copyright mean that the rights holders can change the license whenever they want and make it difficult to find old AGPL code by removing repositories and scrubbing the web of it.

It's entirely possible for the rights holders to say "we're going private now" and pivot the project into a for-profit business.

[aidangrimshaw]

Do know of a better license alternative that prevents that from happening? Would be interested!

[cure]

Your license choice is perfectly fine. If you do not have CLA, you have an AGPL codebase with many people owning the copyright on portions of it.

In terms of future proofing against the project "going commercial" (i.e. changing the license going forward), it doesn't get much better than this, because pretty much all the copyright holders would need to agree on a license change.

Ideally, the bulk of the copyright does not reside with a small number of authors - the more authors, and the more evenly the copyright is spread among them, the better.

[lakecresva]

You don't need a CLA. Github's ToS are set up such that contributions you get from other github users are licensed in the same manner as your repo unless the contributor gets you to agree to accept them under some other license : https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t.... People should not be worried about you "going private"; if you've accepted non de minimis contributions from other users, any future conveyance or network interaction stuff would require you to include the source materials to stay in compliance.

[marcianx]

You don't need another license. You just need to either (1) not require a CLA, or (2) if you do, write the CLA so that it prevents you from doing that with others' contributions.

[chungy]

There isn't one, because copyright holders have all the legal right to do whatever they want. The legal owner of a copyrighted work is not beholden to the license they release the work under.

[remexre]

Note that AGPL and _not_ having a CLA means that this _isn't_ the case, because... you don't have a CLA.

[candiddevmike]

This is an interesting situation for FOSS licenses. AGPL doesn't necessarily prohibit commercial behavior. I think if all the maintainers truly wanted to prevent anyone from commercializing it, you'd go with a source available license like BSL or creative commons.

It's interesting because having a group of disparate humans come together and say "yea, we hate the current thing, let's build something better and not commercialize it" doesn't typically happen. Kudos to you folks!

[myroon5]

How are states prioritized? Population and complexity? Or personal priorities of contributors?

[aidangrimshaw]

Currently, it's states that contributors live in because our resources are limited

[sitkack]

Seems like one could setup an org/corp and get funding from those states to implement tax filing code.

[aidangrimshaw]

Yeah, we have been considering setting up a nonprofit org. I'm not sure if we have the scale to justify it yet, but it's sort of an open question.

[EnderWT]

Many states already have ways to file online for free. For example, Illinois: https://www2.illinois.gov/rev/programs/mytax/Pages/il-1040.a...

[aidangrimshaw]

Definitely true. The goal is to unify the filing so that the user doesn't have to refill in their information for separate state and federal tax application websites.

[throwawayboise]

Fortunately, state tax returns (in my experience) are pretty straightforward to do by hand once the Federal return is done. I'm sure some states are more complicated than others, that might be the prioritization to use if more resources become available.

[Metacelsus]

Thank you so much! I used it this year and really appreciated it.

[aidangrimshaw]

Glad to hear!

[dataflow]

This sounds awesome. How does the user handle the actual filing? I assume you don't have any way to provide e-filing, so would people have to print this out and mail it?

[aidangrimshaw]

Yeah, currently the user would print out the PDF generated by the site and mail it in to the IRS. E-filing is on the roadmap, but registering as an E-file provider is a pretty complex process. One of the options we were thinking about is scraping and automatically filling in fields on the free fillable forms site https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

[freedomben]

I worked on designing and implementing e-file a few years back for a startup. Happy to answer any questions or give any advice if y'all want it

[ehsankia]

> but registering as an E-file provider is a pretty complex process

Sounds like yet another thing the e-filing lobby worked to ensure their monopoly...

[formerkrogeremp]

Intuit and H&R Block have been lobbying for decades against tax filing. https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

[dataflow]

Cool! Autofilling those forms sounds like an awesome thing if you can manage it! Best of luck! And thanks for doing this!

[vagab0nd]

Very cool. There's also [0] if you just want a "digitized" version of all the forms.

0: https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home

[dheera]

I'm still using Turbotax because I live in California, have crypto to report, and have sick contractor days to report.

Can any free app do all of this?

Better yet is there a free app that can log into my Turbotax account, fetch all the data and then generate the forms and file them?

[xbar]

Your work is needed.

[scrubs]

Amen to that. I use turbo tax but the sooner I never give then another dollar so much the better.

[IggleSniggle]

Switch to FreeTaxFileUSA for now if you’re not willing to go for this open source project.

Not only is it cheaper, more importantly, you’re not giving money that’s going towards maintaining the tax code that prevents the government from “competing” with TurboTax.

Obviously the Government already has what it needs to pretty much do all of your taxes, and they already must do this anyway. They could ask you like 5 short questions and your taxes would be done…they already have all your info.

Stop paying the lobbyists to continue lobbying against your interests. Start getting in the habit of calling or emailing your reps around tax time.

[ouid]

damn it, i live in oregon and california

[dylan604]

I know I'm dumb, but I got a visual of your house with a big stripe down the middle of it so that part is in CA and the other is in OR

[bdickason]

This is amazing.