[makecheck]

The upsells on TurboTax are getting a lot more shameless in recent years. I saw the exact same one pop up at least 2-3 times.

The one that really aggravated me though was the one at the end: after you FILE your taxes, they present this damned progress-bar looking thing as if you are somehow “not done” yet, as if this totally optional product sale is a required step!! No, no, no, that is just misleading garbage, and it is so annoying to have to constantly hunt around the page for the magic text to get around these things. I mean, I couldn’t even reach the page that lets me download my forms as PDF until I skipped this upsell.

What’s more, the product itself is getting more expensive but worse. On desktop, the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?) with all kinds of things unnecessarily hidden. On page after page, there is more than enough space to show everything but instead it’s giant white space everywhere; they HIDE things behind disclosure arrows, and with no logic whatsoever; e.g. on one page it shows the 2020 numbers by default but hides all the 2021 numbers behind arrows!?

Guess what isn’t an insultingly-small, truncated experience on desktop? The ads, the upsells. THOSE are full-page, taking full advantage of screen space and even scrolling off the edges.

Really shows their priorities.

[otikik]

I agree that all those are bad, but the main problem I have with it is that it should be a state-provided (or federal government-provided, I don't care) service. If a country wants taxes the minimum it should do is tell its citizens how much each of them owns. Relying on a private company to provide that "for free" (as long as you jump through the hoops) is ... shameful.

[xyzzy21]

In general, ANYTHING mandated by the government should be available primarily in minimally sufficient form from the government. That goes for insurance, fees, services, etc.

[Spivak]

And honestly it should just be TurboTax but paid for by the government like every other public-private partnership in other industries. Boom now the incentives are aligned.

[guiambros]

This.

Coming from a country where the government offers a decent and free tax software, I really hate being hostage to TurboTax and their dark patterns.

But honestly, the situation could be a lot worse if it were provided by the government, given the current tax code. To start with, we'd likely have the federal government + every state having different opinions on how to implement their version of the tax code, and spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars with consultants and developers (vide health.gov [1]) to implement their own flavors.

On the taxpayer side, you'd have to deal with at least two systems when doing your taxes, but potentially more if you lived in multiple states. In the best case scenario, some data would be portable between them (but likely not all, given the complexity and number of edge cases). In the worst, you'd have to enter the data manually in multiple systems, making it a nightmare to keep systems in sync. In this alternate universe, TurboTax doesn't look that bad anymore.

The only way to solve this cleanly would be through a full reform of the tax code, including a drastic standardization and simplification across federal + states. But it's unlikely to happen anytime soon, and, not surprisingly, Intuit will be always lobbying heavily against it.

Now, if government were to embrace a public-private partnership like you suggested, we can make meaningful progress faster. Create a white-label version that is offered for free to 140M taxpayers, align incentives on simplifying the tax code, and get the 3P ecosystem to develop advanced versions for more sophisticated users, businesses, etc to create extra incentives to continue improving the sw.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/obamaca...

[treeman79]

Isn’t the tax system still running on cobol?

https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/wheres-my-check-cob...

[KerrAvon]

There have been COBOL compilers for microcomputers since the early eighties.

[thfuran]

TurboTax but open source and paid for by the government, I can get behind.

[closeparen]

Mortgages, student loans, ACH and wire transfers… all substantially government provided and funded services for which the taxpayer frontend is private companies.

[pyuser583]

Are you saying the federal government should have introduced a health insurance mandate without provide free health insurance?

[CincinnatiMan]

Have you manually filed taxes before? For the average person it’s quite easy to fill out the required forms.

[burntwater]

They shouldn't have to fill out the forms at all. For the average person it should be a literal "yes, that looks correct" online check box. That's exactly what TurboTax doesn't want.

[kortex]

Yes, and it's awful. I have ADHD and even with turbotax handholding me and importing last years' data and grabbing some fields automatically, it's still quite stressful.

I know several folks that have their partner do it cause they just hate it.

So the "quite easy" is far from universal.

[pyuser583]

Maybe in some circumstances. I’ve been dealing with some horrific tax issues. My wife and I have taken off work to fill out forms.

[sidewndr46]

I think you meant to say "owes", but yes I agree with this idea fully. When I pay sales tax, it isn't like I have to perform some long-form calculation to figure out what I owe. I get a bill and I pay it. When I pay property tax, same thing. I get a bill and I pay it. I register a vehicle as an on-road vehicle, I get the tax amount and I pay it.

Only the Federal government could come up with a scheme where you have to prove you made X, then prove you owe Y and pay that.

[anamax]

To be fair, the FedGov doesn't know all of the transactions that you do that affect your income. At best, it knows what a legal employer paid you.

FedGov doesn't know the basis of your stock (or crypto) transactions so even if it knows the proceeds, it doesn't know how much tax you owe.

[ilammy]

> FedGov doesn't know the basis of your stock (or crypto) transactions

Aren't brokerages required to file forms for every customer they serve? Let the regulated businesses deal with bureaucracy and accounting, they are expected to hire people for that job anyway.

[nybble41]

> Aren't brokerages required to file forms for every customer they serve?

They are, but there are corner cases where they might not have all the necessary information. For example, if you trade the same stocks or mutual funds through more than one broker then neither one will have enough information to determine the cost basis for each sale. It's also possible to move shares directly from one broker to another.

For crypto, in the US, none of the exchanges are currently required to track any of this to begin with (they aren't considered brokers) so it's up to the customer to keep track of the cost basis. Even if they did act as brokers the other issues still apply, plus the cost basis of your positions will be affected if you trade on your own without involving an exchange. For example, spending crypto on goods or services from an unhosted wallet can affect the cost basis of subsequent sell orders. The tax filings are probably simpler under the current system, since if exchanges were filing 1099-Bs you would need to submit adjustments to their cost basis reporting along with everything else.

[anamax]

How does Binance know the basis of bitcoin that I transfer in?

Heck - how does Schwab know the basis of Disney stock that I bring in?

How does either one know when I acquired said assets?

[ilammy]

If you have stock to bring in, you bought it somewhere, right? That "somewhere" should have filed forms reporting on your purchase, kept records and stuff.

With bitcoin, a part of !!fun!! from holding non-security assets is all the accounting you have to do. Enjoy it, that's a part of a bargain. That said, other countries like Japan mandate regulated exchanged to keep track of their customers assets, assist with cost-basis computations, etc.

My point being, regulated institutions can make filing taxes easy for most of the people, with unsophisticated circumstances. Usually being an employee of a single business is considered "unsophisticated" enough to not deal with any forms, letting your employer do these things for you. There is no reason why other common life situations cannot be made as easy, like having deductions for mortgage, purchasing securities via regulated brokerages, etc.

If your situation is "sophisticated", then surely you gotta enjoy accounting and reporting then. But that should be necessary only for a fringe percentage of people.

[maxerickson]

It'd be fine to just ask for information in the cases where they don't have it, a system doesn't have to be perfect to be better.

[sidewndr46]

The federal government knows exactly how much I made. There is no financial information beyond the view of the federal government. The only way I could hide income would be to get paid in cash (or cash equivalent, like gold) then hide that money in a safety deposit box. That doesn't exactly scale very long. It's notoriously difficult to buy a car (or bread) with gold bricks. Also, if someone does do this they aren't going to just tell the government "yeah I have $700,000 in gold sitting in my safety deposit box".

Even if the government had absolutely no records of my income (which is false), there should be an option for me to just submit all my income records to them tabulated. I can attach a bank account number and routing number and have them deduct whatever money I owe in taxes from the account. End of story. Unless the IRS is claiming you owe a massive amount of money relative to your income, it is never worth contesting it. You're going to spend more money & time than you will ever recover.

[anamax]

How does FedGov know why I gave you a $600 check?

[Taniwha]

So that's how it works here in New Zealand - most people can go on line and fill out a 2-page web form, the IRD already has our equivalents to W2s, 1099s etc, you can look them over, make sure you think they're correct and effectively press a button - taxes done! And if you don't? then the IRD will do it for you anyway and send you a refund (with interest) or a bill.

Of course it's much easier for us because we have a much simpler tax system - virtually no exemptions - chances are if you have one job all year your employer got your tax right to the dollar.

I have to file in both countries, American taxes is like pulling teeth (the paper work side, I don't mind the actual paying of taxes, it's a civic duty after all)

[fennecfoxy]

I was on PAYE all my life in NZ, now I'm PAYE in the UK. So easy. Even a brief spurt of contracting here taxes were super easy (altho an accountant is still useful).

[jokethrowaway]

Civic duty? If I were you I'd renounce my American citizenship. I don't see why you should support a warmongering country with your money, especially if you're not living within its borders.

Even if I were living in the US, getting money from someone under the threat of fines and incarceration is called extortion.

[dwohnitmok]

There's a large group of political organizations apart from just tax filing services and companies that believe that it is intrinsically bad for the government to just tell citizens how much they owe. They are very loud and influential.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848324

[pyuser583]

The long term plan of conservatives is to make taxes as frustrating as possible, then change tax day to November 3rd.

[hanniabu]

I mean, we even rely on a private company to login to the IRS now. ID.me is the gatekeeper even though they said they'd remove it.

[eyelidlessness]

If they actually wanted the taxes they’d be sending bill collectors. They don’t most of the time because it’s highly probable you already did pay, more than you owe, and they owe you. Their incentive to collect is to let private companies generate more revenue with their services, which in turn generates more taxes automatically collected.

[techsupporter]

> the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?)

Yes. According to Pew, in 2021 there were 15% of adults in the US who said they only have smartphone data for Internet access and do not have what we know as home broadband. By age, that number skews towards younger adults, with the largest share being people aged 18-29, however even older adults hover in the low teens of percent.

Even if someone does have broadband at home, the number of "traditional" desktop and laptop computers have been dropping. Mobile phone and tablet devices (but, let's be honest, mostly mobile phones) have been replacing regular computers at a pretty high clip. And where a household does have a desktop or laptop, they may only have one, where almost everyone has a mobile phone device so it's probably convenient to just pull up the tax prep web site and get to it on the handheld.

Pew data: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

[viraptor]

Be careful with "there were 15% of adults in the US who said they only have smartphone data for Internet access" - it means that's how they get the internet, not where they use it. Due to broadband availability / quality there's going to be a non-trivial number of people relying on tethering either through phone or dedicated dongle.

[InitialLastName]

At this point, I know a non-negligible number of middle- and working-class adults who don't have a general-purpose computer in their household, purely because they don't need one. I've never thought to ask how they were doing their taxes; presumably they are outsourcing it, going to a library, or doing it on their phones.

[hanniabu]

I can't even imagine doing taxes on mobile....

[dham]

People seem to like to do things on suboptimal devices. I've never quite understood it. Just the thought of wasting time not being able to use a mouse and keyboard makes 99% of tasks unbearable. But it's almost like you don't know what you don't know.

My 6 year old was playing Minecraft on a tablet / console for a long time before moving to the computer. He's said several times about how much better he is at it on desktop. I've never even mentioned to him that one's technically better than the other.

[Izkata]

I don't know if mobile tax apps do this, but if they did I can totally imagine mobile being far easier for most people: Use your phone's camera to take a picture of your W-2, use OCR to extract the data & confirm with the user, ask the user a few questions for things not on the W-2, autofill the 1040.

[geoduck14]

>I can't even imagine doing taxes on mobile....

It's not that bad. I have this great app that's only $30

/s

[thiht]

I’m in France and I do my taxes on mobile because « doing my taxes » is just checking 2 numbers and clicking « next » 2 times.

[ozzythecat]

You hit the nail on the head. Actually, we used TurboTax, got annoyed with the constant upsells, and the $80 fee (it was advertised as free), and then my husband redid our taxes using another website (freetaxusa). It was actually free.

[jandrese]

Huge upvote for freetaxusa. My wife was worried that it wouldn't be as good so we did our taxes one year on both services simultaneously. TurboTax's interface was so bad it took almost twice as long to complete the same work and the refund was the same.

Why would I pay for a worse interface? We don't have trivial taxes either, we have our own business and investment income. TurboTax was way worse about not letting us skip over stuff we don't have. It creates single question pages one after another instead of just sticking them in a list so you can skim through them all at once and select only the relevant ones.

[dwaltrip]

In my case, Turbotax did a better job helping me figure out my taxes this year.

I tried freetaxusa but there were a few things that turbotax provided clearer guidance on. There was one particular issue where I was quite stumped with Freetaxusa, but Turbotax explained it.

I believe Turbotax also found one or two things that freetaxusa didn't point me towards. But it was all kind of a haze at this point so I might be misremembering.

I don't want TurboTax to be better, but for me it was better this year. I really hate their lobbying. I'll give try more options next year.

[JAlexoid]

I went "screw it, let's get a local tax person".

US is a country where IRS is legally obligated to make you screw up as much as possible.

[sharpy]

I would love to use one of the free products. Unfortunately, for me, TurboTax is the only one I've tried that will import all of my brokerages... Seems small price to pay.

And they always get me with the "Audit defense"... I am not sure how useful it will be if I ever get audited (I err on the side of caution when doing taxes), but still some small extra amount of money for extra peace of mind...

[lights0123]

CashApp Taxes provides audit defense for free: https://taxeshelp.cash.app/s/article/Audit-Defense-when-you-...

[formerkrogemp]

Since I'm not a tax professional at this time, I can tell you that your odds of being audited are somewhat random and usually very low unless your filing is off by a certain percentage in some fields/parameters. Lower income folks are more likely to be audited. The audit "defense" just means you'll get x hours of professional time if you were audited to represent you during an audit. On the whole, the odds of being audited are usually so small it's usually just free money for Intuit.

[mandeepj]

> TurboTax is the only one I've tried that will import all of my brokerages

That's trivial; don't throw your ranch so easily. You only have to copy few fields from your 1099 form and the instructions are very clear - which fields to copy and paste where.

[sharpy]

It's the form 1040 that forces me to use TurboTax. In any given year, I have hundreds of entries...

[smaddox]

Nice. I will definitely be giving this a shot next year.

[kaitai]

Agree, finished taxes with Freetaxusa and figured out backdoor roth conversion, included freelancing income, dealt with a schedule k-1. So much less obnoxious than TurboTax, which I have also used but which makes me angry for all the reasons discussed in this thread. Yes, Freetaxusa charges for the state return, but it's also the case that I can't file electronically for free in my state at all (?????). Spouse wants to do paper on principle, which I acquiesced to last year, but.... our paper federal return from last year has literally still not been processed (check was cashed 4/8/2021).

[atomicfiredoll]

I've been using freetaxusa for years due to outright refusal to give Intuit a dime and it's been great.

I'm somewhat new to the Roth thing and this year it flagged an excess contribution issue, which feels like it would have turned in to a prolonged and painful ordeal if I hadn't gotten the heads up to correct it before filing.

I just wish it let me put my return in to I-Bonds.

[u801e]

> it's also the case that I can't file electronically for free in my state at all (?????).

Up through the 2020 tax year, it was possible to e-file state taxes for free using state fillable forms (like you can use free fillable forms for federal taxes). But intuit decided to no longer provide that service this year.

[sngz]

i just did my taxes last night and checked freetaxusa seems like they charge for state though? I ended up using credit karma's app which was still annoying after intuit bought them and they were forced to sell the tax software to square, and it required I download the mobile app first. It was much better in the past

[jandrese]

Yeah, they charge for state, but much less than Turbotax charges for state.

Of course this is a bit of a sore point for me since my state used to have free online tax filing but H&R Block got their rep voted in and killed the program "to save taxpayer money", it cost the state about $40k per year to run and now instead we have one of the highest e-filing costs in the country.

[retzkek]

I switched to freetaxusa this year (from TurboTax), and after such a wonderful experience working through my somewhat complicated taxes I was happy to pay them $15 to save me the trouble of typing the information into my state's free-but-lowball-government-contractor website.

[trianglesphere]

They do charge for state taxes. It’s like 15 bucks per return with not that much up sell. I’ve used them when I had simpler taxes and liked them over other common preparers

[formerkrogemp]

I help friends and family and I can't recommend freetaxusa for simple returns enough. It's so much cheaper if you're doing your own taxes. Tax slayer is decent as well.

[everybodyknows]

What were the complications that FTUSA could not handle, if you recall?

[phate]

I previously used CreditKarma for prior years taxes. This year I didn't strictly because the whole thing feels like a push to just get you to install CashApp on your phone. And that is on top of not wanting to use anything Intuit owned anymore. I'll gladly pay $10 to file my state taxes if I can avoid them giving it to Intuit.

[010101010101]

CK Tax was sold to Block as a part of the acquisition by Intuit - Intuit sees nothing from it any more.

[conductr]

I've used that service for a decade and never paid them a penny, I think there are a few services they bill for but I don't need. The UI gets only minor changes and it still basically works as it did ten years ago, so I appreciate the consistency as well especially for something I touch once a year.

[gordon_freeman]

One bright spot in all this pay-to-file-taxes game is the "Cash App Taxes" [0]. It is just great and seamless to file taxes for free even for a bit complex taxes such as RSU, Stocks, Virtual currency sales etc. Usually what I do is just progress on TurboTax until the end so I could calculate my estimated refund and then go ahead and file using Cash App Taxes and it just saved me $150 this year.

[0] https://cash.app/taxes

[ajdude]

I've been using Credit Karma the last few years for taxes until they sold to Intuit, at which point their tax division went to cash.app. Initially I tried going with them until I realized that I had to download their app on my phone to even sign into the desktop to do my taxes (it was requesting I scan a QR code or something). I couldn't even access my previous tax returns that were stored on Credit Karma without downloading the cashapp to my phone. Eventually I caved, but only to contact their support to retrieve my returns and formally cancel my account.

I shouldn't need to download an app to a smartphone for something that I exclusively intend to use on a desktop. I went with FreeTaxUSA in the end.

[nybble41]

> I shouldn't need to download an app to a smartphone for something that I exclusively intend to use on a desktop.

I see where you're coming from here and mostly agree. However, I will say that as someone who already had the Cash App installed the process was pretty seamless. The only major item I would change is that it would be nice to have some way to import a CSV or XLS file (or even JSON) for the capital gains forms. They offer an online spreadsheet but you still have to fill out each cell individually. If you have a few dozen trades (or more) to report it gets rather tiresome and could even be a bit error-prone.

I suppose I could have scripted the data entry with keyboard macros (via xdotool[0]), but for something I only do once per year it probably wouldn't be worthwhile… and the interface could be different next year.

[0] https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool

[vgeek]

Same path here. 2 years using Credit Karma, then jumped through hoops only to see that Cashapp couldn't locate my prior returns, so I just used Freetaxusa.

[civilized]

I'm on H&R Block, which I used to be pretty happy with, but it's also getting a lot worse. Much slower, pointless UI changes always in a bloaty direction, navigation is less functional, more upsell garbage, more expensive, etc.

I've kept coming back until now out of habit and because they've got a lot of data on me they can prefill, but maybe I should look at FreeTaxUSA now.

[astrea]

This year was a nightmare for me. The UI wouldn't save state, going through the same steps would lead me to different results ("Your state was e-filed!","Your state isn't accepting e-file."), and there was an alleged error but it would never tell or show me what the error was. Customer service was just as confused as I was and the "Get virtual assistance" button eventually disappeared for me. I ended up giving up and going to a local CPA to get it done for me. I don't think I'll be using HR Block next year after being a customer for over 5 years.

[civilized]

Yes, the "pick up where you left off" was a lot more fragile than in years past. And they sent me tons of emails begging me to finish filing after I already filed everything.

[spear]

Same here. I couldn't get their discount codes to work this year and the IRA Worksheets seem to be broken now.

[Stratoscope]

> On desktop, the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI

Meanwhile, the traditional desktop software version of TurboTax remains quite good, and I have been using it year after year on Windows. They have several editions; here is the one I used this year:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B09FW199HB/

It's much cheaper to buy it on Amazon than directly from TurboTax.

[loeg]

I wouldn't call it "quite good." It's also pretty crappy. There are arbitrary sleeps thrown in between pages to make it seem like the software is doing something; additional upsells, like GP is complaining about; they block paste when filling in bank credentials, which is super obnoxious; and the UI flow drops you back at "guided or self-service" every time you leave a section.

[kmeisthax]

Personal experience: every year TurboTax gets at least one thing wrong per filing, and it's always a different thing. Always love getting stopped at the "error check" with a question about how some field that's supposed to be a zero is blank, or some field that's supposed to be blank is a zero, because the guided questions and the tax forms aren't communicating properly.

State taxes are full of really confusingly-worded questions and things I've never heard of, with little explanation as to what means what. At least the federal section has proper explanations of things.

[bombcar]

The state ones are hilarious, because they offer no guidance: •Wangled Garbfinkle Reduction of the Belaurtiun Disaster Zone• will say “if this applies to you enter the amount from form L3O-P4RD”

[Stratoscope]

Yes, I stand corrected. What I meant is that it is good compared to the web version, and good enough for me to use.

[mike503]

Web version was quite annoying by vs desktop. First year using web this year. Was "wonky" compared to desktop.

[jrockway]

Things like this are why I could never write consumer-facing software like this. To me, I think software is working well when it's fast and responsive. But clearly their market research shows that you need a lot of sleep statements between screens so it feels like it's "doing" your taxes. I can't wrap my head around this thought process. Just moving the Turbotax window around is many orders of magnitude more computations per frame than an entire tax return :)

[bubblethink]

Why do all these tax companies have a web version and a desktop version ? Why isn't it all web at this point ?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why isn't it all web at this point ?

They would lose sales if it were. People are sensitive when it comes to their taxes. And I imagine a good number of accountants use Turbotax in the back. There could be legal issues with them uploading clients’ tax information to a third party’s servers.

[formerkrogemp]

Actually, no, a good number accountants use Lacerte, CCH, or Drake. Some do use ProConnect by Intuit.

[PopAlongKid]

Competent and legitimate tax professionals use those products (and also UltraTax, from Thomson-Reuters, is quite popular).

However, fraudsters will use DIY software like TurboTax but then charge for it, evading all the provisions of tax law that pertain to paid preparers. This is not as severe a problem as it was say five years ago, since IRS has instituted a number of security features to weed out the fraudsters who efile.

[butlerm]

Violations of various regulations aside, who exactly is getting defrauded in this scenario? Are you implying that the paid preparers in question predominantly commit or help their clients commit various forms of tax fraud?

[everybodyknows]

Is there some regulatory hurdle that deters these companies from offering an end-consumer solution to individuals?

[everybodyknows]

LaCerte it seems has been swallowed by Intuit.

https://proconnect.intuit.com/lacerte/pricing-main/

Back in 1998:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB895525787581590000

[formerkrogemp]

I didn't know that. Thank you for educating me.

[mindslight]

Not everyone has bought into surveillance culture? I have an overwhelming preference for local software that I can prevent from backhauling my personal information into the permanent records of data silos. This goes doubly for non-mandatory services that tend to have shameless contracts of adhesion falsely purporting consent for such abuse.

FWIW TurboTax is eminently easy to pirate and crack to get state filing functionality. Network isolate the VM after you get the updates and state forms but before you start inputting data, and you can rest easy that no personal data is being exfiltrated. There's no need to support these regulatory capture parasites.

[bubblethink]

If you kill network access, sure. I don't think the software itself makes any guarantees about data privacy. For me, as a linux user, it's more effort to get windows vms for these things, but I do them because the desktop ones are often cheaper.

[mindslight]

Sure. Like many things, local software is necessary to preserve privacy but not sufficient. Local proprietary software can brazenly work against the interests of the user, libre software can contain backdoors or other antifeatures, a peer-reviewed libre system can be cracked. But by heading in this direction, you retain the possibility of keeping your personal information as private as possible.

FWIW I'm a Linux user that runs most everything in VMs. Each year I create a new one for TurboTax, get the updates/stateforms, then disconnect and never reconnect it to the Internet. It's a little work, but can be done mindlessly while doing something else.

[bubblethink]

I take it that you send the forms by mail then ? Because efile would need network access, and that is half the reason I'm using the tax software in the first place.

[kube-system]

I am glad there are still desktop versions where I can keep the software indefinitely and keep my data offline. I’ll go back to pen and a desktop calculator before I use a web app.

[outworlder]

> I am glad there are still desktop versions where I can keep the software indefinitely

That's useless for tax software though, unless they are getting updated every tax year.

[markkanof]

I recently had to go back and file an amended return for one state and file a return for an additional state for the past 5 years. It made my life a lot easier to be able to just install the past 5 years versions of TurboTax Desktop which I had saved the installers for. I was able to run through this whole process using the tax rules that were in place at the time.

Not sure if this would have worked on a web version or not, but I was pretty happy to have this option available to me.

[kube-system]

Older versions of the software are useful for reviewing historical records and calculations in context.

Last night while preparing my 2021 return I opened up the 2020 software with my old return to review what I had done in the prior year.

[bubblethink]

I don't think the desktop version makes any guarantees about data privacy, analytics, or anything of that sort. It routinely connects to the mothership from what I can tell.

[kube-system]

In my experience, I have never had an issue running them offline after downloading the updates and before inputing data.

[svachalek]

Some of the interactions are even too granular to make sense on mobile. I can't remember the specifics but there are some sequences that go like:

Do you need to adjust the value here? (Yes) (No)

... new page slowly loads ...

Do you need help calculating this value? (Yes) (No) (I don't want to change this value)

... new page slowly loads ...

What should the value be? (I'll enter it manually) (Help me calculate it) (I don't want to change it)

Like other than some basic wording changes, the third page already supports what the first two pages did. And depending how many stock trades are in your form you might have to repeat this loop a hundred times. It's really enraging.

[felipellrocha]

I've been wondering lately why hasn't someone just built an open source version of it. It would be less buggy and more up-to-date than anything a corporation could build. It would also create the incentive to eventually get rid of the industry all together

[kube-system]

It has been tried, but I haven’t seen any projects that were able to keep up.It takes a lot of manpower to update all of the various forms for every tax season. Congress can and has done things like pass a 1700+ page bill changing the tax code on Dec 20th of the same tax year, and some users will want to start filing their returns within a month. And there are 50 states that can do the same thing.

Also it requires expertise outside of programming for which there is not much enthusiasm for open source.

[formerkrogemp]

Becoming a CPA sucks. You need 150 credit hours, pass 4 exams with 50% pass rate, and usually needs 1 year of qualified experience to qualify. Programming is so much easier to get into.

[JAlexoid]

It's intentional. The whole point is to protect the jobs from competition.

[outworlder]

The tax code is particularly complicated – and then there are multiple states to worry about. It would be difficult for a single person to do this. Not impossible, maybe there are some CPAs which are also software engineers. Once the project becomes big enough, maybe more people would help.

The problem is then: are they shielded from liability? If there's a mistake and people sue, they won't have Intuit's lawyer army.

But let's say we have the perfect program. Would people be OK with printing out and mailing their returns? Because you have to be an authorized provider to e-file.

[dlp211]

I would say that this IS impossible for any single individual. The amount of edge cases that software like this needs to capture is enormous and there isn't a single human in the world that could account for all of them. Not to mention the changes in the tax code every year.

[jlund-molfese]

There is https://ustaxes.org , an open-source tax filing application, but I'm not adventurous enough to use it when a mistake could be very expensive.

[beembeem]

When I'm done filing mine this year I'm going to take a serious look at contributing to this project on Github.

[caturopath]

Not the Wizard format, but https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home is a pretty popular project along those lines.

[HWR_14]

The IRS has the information to do my taxes. They should just send me a bill (or a check) with a copy of their math that I can accept or dispute.

[DesiLurker]

they dont have your deduction information though, also for investments they dont always have cost basis info. other than that for simple returns they can absolutely do an automated federal 'tax receipt' with standard deductions.

[HWR_14]

> they dont have your deduction information though

Except for medical bills, mortgage deduction, education expenses, retirement/HSA/etc. accounts and SALT (if that gets reinstated) and maybe a couple of others, probably. Although, frankly, I'm not sure what deductions other than charitable contributions don't get reported to the IRS and I'm similarly not sure what deductible expenses don't already have a paper trail I would care about retaining. But that's where "correcting the math" would include replacing the standard deductions with itemization would come in.

I think requiring a basis for investment income to be made in the acquired year to the IRS is both reasonable and trivial.

[trianglesphere]

It’s not just federal taxes, but 50 states. I think you could get enough oss manpower for keeping up to date with federal taxes, but not every state.

[pinkythepig]

There are already affordable alternatives. The people still using turbotax are the same people that spend 0 time looking into alternatives or there is some import feature that an opensource platform realistically would not have the manpower to replicate. Freetaxusa is $15 at a minimum (state fee) and $50ish at the max if you opt into everything. UI isn't loaded with fake loading screens, and they only try to upsell maybe 2 or 3 times during the whole process. My parents complain about turbotax every year and every year I tell them about alternatives... But they still won't switch because 'its what they know'.

[tomc1985]

FreeTaxUSA made me manually input my stock transactions last year, via a paper PDF I had to print and mail separately. For most situations it is probably fine but its investments support seemed limited.

[sjg007]

You have to update these things anyway in turbo tax and hr block. 90% have the wrong adjusted basis.

[pertymcpert]

Only if they're RSUs.

[wardedVibe]

There is the summary option, though I'm unsure about when that is or isn't legal

[pinkythepig]

Why would an open source solution improve on that though? If anything, that would be way lower on their priority list as anyone doing large numbers of investments would (should?) have money to pay for a nicer UX solution and probably would want to, as the risk of an audit is a bigger 'cost' than $50-80 in filing fees.

The sheer number of changes that the Tax code makes every year would be hard enough to keep up with for an open source project, let alone making integrations with all of the brokerages to make this process less painful.

[jandrese]

Turbotax did the same thing, at least a few years ago when I used it last.

[rrauenza]

Every time I opened it this year it begged me to register. So they could capture my personal information to market to next year, or try to get me to “subscribe.” It seemed to also prompt again at exit.

Really irritated me that I couldn’t opt out permanently but had to click skip every single time.

And I’m tired of the progress bars pretending to be calculating in order to make me feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.

And yet I buy it begrudgingly every year because it is what I know, and it imports data fairly well from my online accounts.

Do the alternative brands import w2’s and previous year’s turbo tax files? Does it integrate with online brokers for pulling 1099’s?

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> What’s more, the product itself is getting more expensive but worse.

The product must get more expensive for Turbo Tax to deliver growth to its shareholders.

[Teknoman117]

Their competitor TaxAct is being more brash as well. I've been filing the same forms for the last 5 years and the filing cost with them has risen gradually from $60 in 2017 to $130 this year.

[______-_-______]

Can I ask, in spite of all this, why you continue to use their product?

[bojo]

Not the OP, however, I haven't found a product that's easy to drop options trading data into. I'd love to switch off of TurboTax, but I'm not putting hundreds of trades into a system manually - their import function makes it a breeze.

Perhaps it's time to hire an accountant?

[tedyoung]

Except for the 2nd year in a row, TurboTax fails to understand how to handle short put positions (of which I have many, many trades). It doesn't understand how the cost basis could be 0.

I'll have to short-circuit it _again_, and this will be the last year I use TurboTax: if I'm going to have to manually work around these things, I may as well not pay for the privilege. Prior years made it trivial to import the data from the 10 different financial firms that provide 1099s.

[xivzgrev]

do you have to document every trade?

At the end of the day the IRS cares about your net loss or gain, and what's short term vs long term gains.

So I typically sum up my various investments into those 2 buckets, by broker. if i ever get audited, i have the individual trades i can share if needed.

[bcrosby95]

It's right in the instructions for a 1040 that you must complete form 8949 if you have any capital gains or losses, and form 8949 says to list out each sale.

[junar]

This is not true for most folks, who can use one of two exceptions that allow summarizing. Exception 1 allows you to simply report totals on Schedule D. Exception 2 has you file Form 8949 with summarized rows, as long as you attach a statement with the detailed transaction info (the brokerage 1099-B generally suffices).

https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8949#en_US_2021_publink594...

These are the very same exceptions that tax software uses.

[deathanatos]

Exception 1, I grant, and TIL. I sort of presume I can take that (in my situation), although this directive is confusing:

> The Ordinary box in box 2 isn’t checked

There is no "box 2" on the 1099-Bs I have. It is on the standardized IRS one, so the instruction from the IRS seems fine … but this is a great commentary on the state of the American tax system and how complicated it is.

(Variations on this theme cropped up multiple times during this year's prep, too…)

Exception 2 doesn't seem to list out what the conditions to qualify for it are, it only lists the procedure for the exception. I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to take it, for that reason.

> These are the very same exceptions that tax software uses.

TurboTax does not appear to take advantage of Exception 1. It would appear to have applied to my situation this year, and yet, TurboTax filled out a complete Form 8949, with each transaction, just like the parent comments hint at.

[formerkrogemp]

Yeah, I usually recommend freetaxusa but it sucks for putting in trade data.

[jandrese]

What do day traders and quants do? If you regularly trade hundreds of thousands of times per day do you end up submitting a semi-trailer worth of paper to the IRS every year?

[res0nat0r]

I'd recommend freetaxusa for everyone, I've been using that for years now. E-filing federal taxes is free, and state income tax E-filing are only something like $15 total. The interface is generally the same as TurboTax and is nice and easy.

[fullstop]

It depends on how much your time is worth. You can import prior returns and compare year-to-year.

[asciimov]

> are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?

More people than you would think. I have several coworkers with kids that don't have a single computer in their house other than their phones. If the kids need to use a computer they take home their work laptop.

[SilasX]

In fairness, that third paragraph is pretty typical (horrifying) web UX these days, not something unique to Intuit or tax software. Let me open subsections in a new tab, FFS!

[clairity]

so just stop using turbotax, h&r block, taxact, etc. try https://www.freetaxusa.com/ or any other decent competitor not trying to monopolize or regulatorially capture the market. for simple returns, just doing it by hand and mailing it in is easy enough too. vote with your feet.

[kaitai]

I used to be able to do a return "by hand" (fine, using a spreadsheet). But now between the health insurance stuff and the child tax credit there is a whole raft of additional forms that did not even exist just a few years back.

[beej71]

If you don't anticipate your tax situation will change for a few years, you can get a professional tax preparer to do it one year and then copy the process yourself subsequent years.