USA is finally catching up with the rest of the world?
Sorry, but still very far behind on this and many other things.
No, we have 50 states to get through as well. And then all the municipalities.
God, it’s times like this where I wish we merge some states.
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.
Yeah. Mine was “too complicated” because I had an HSA. Are you fucking kidding me?
You’re not supposed to be wrecking our economy like that. Spend, baby, spend.
😂😂
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.
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.
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.
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’.
All praise Deditutankh, the Egyptian god of taxes!
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.
Now if we could do like other countries and just have the government send a pre formatted document of things like wages, dependents, and other taxable items so we all know what we owe because the government has all that information already. Add what you need as far as write offs or other income and send it back. Done. None of this collection of tons of different forms, figuring out what percent you can write off, etc. and submitting it all hoping you don’t get it wrong and get audited or owe fines and interest.
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.
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?
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.
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.
…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.
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
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.
Seems odd. They’ve been pushing login.gov like everywhere.
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
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.
The ATO’s myTax system is pretty great, I hope with this you guys finally get something as nice.
They don’t know what you are talking about my fellow Aussie. Any A in an acronym means “American” to the USAns. That other countries exist that start with A is unfathomable.
Good. Now make it work for everyone’s tax situation.
You need to enable JavaScript to use Direct File.
On the plus side, UBO only had to block one script (on the login page at least).
As a tax accountant, I sincerely hope this gets to a point where a vast majority of the population has no need for my services.
I used to play in the big leagues where none of my clients would ever qualify for this and their returns routinely took upwards of a hundred hours to complete. Those guys need to keep paying.
Now I play down in the minors a couple steps above the Block, and I hate seeing the owner sell these three or four hundred dollar returns that might take me an hour to complete in the first year and maybe thirty minutes in subsequent years.
That’s a very interesting transition. Was the catalyst neutral or happy one, or perhaps a sad one?
Mutual disdain was the catalyst. I did it for eight years and probably lost fifteen years of life expectancy from it. Ungodly toxic environment. Fuck big firm accounting. Fuck them all in the most demeaning, painful way imaginable.
I make roughly one third the money today, and I’m much happier for it. I still make a comfortable living where I don’t particularly worry about money, so what would the additional two thirds do for me outside paying medical bills it causes?
No matter how much I try to remove my name from searches, I still get recruited by ambitious young people on a regular basis. I generally make them stop with a response that goes something like this:
I would rather have my eyes gouged out by the white hot barbed penis of Satan himself while he spits in my mouth than return to public accounting for any amount of money.
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?
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.
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.
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 $350,000 to cover them.
Making 5k to lose 350k might as well be an infinite loss ot that investor, even though its technically a “smallish” sum. At that scale, it would destroy most people.
You can also pay to get a short going generally and try to wait out the madness,but you have to stay solvent to do it. The very stupid and very surprising “diamond handing” apes caused some hedge fund issues, although I think most just shrugged into other financial instruments.
I feel like shorting will always be riskier than normal investing. With stocks you have people at the company doing their best to raise that stock. With Shorts you are betting against a company that’s trying to survive.
The chances of the CEO pulling something out of their ass, dubious or not, to maintain their profits is too high.
Those companies actually helped develop this, see “free file alliance membership” for details. It includes 17 private companies such as Intuit, H&R Block, TaxSlayer, Tax$simple, etc.
it wouldve been earlier, but now this is priced into the stocks already.
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)
It is already priced in. Our human speed reactions are far too slow when the news has this obvious of a consequence.
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?
But is it compatible with the tax filing dating sim?
Wow congrats USA for doing something that makes sense before Canada.
It’s literally the Biden admin. They’ve made it a huge priority and followed through.
People knock Biden, but he’s been consistently doing this stuff across the government. It’s refreshing.
I keep bringing up how awesome the new SAVE federal student loan repayment program is. Income based repayments that go as low as $0 with the federal government covering any interest that you payment would have gone towards, plus after 10 years of payments balances of $12k and less are forgiven (11 years for $13k, 12 years for $14k, etc.)
So if you got a low paying degree from a community college, like say an early childhood education degree, you get pretty close to free education since you can make your $0 payments every month and get your entire student debt forgiven after a decade. Or if you have a career that doesn’t pay much at first but ratchets up you only make payments when you have the income to make them, and still get forgiven after 10 years, and there’s no real penalty to paying the $0 payments earlier since the balance hasn’t grown and is still forgiven on the same date. Or like many people who attend community college, if you end up dropping out and getting no degree, you’re not penalized like earlier plans would have penalized you.
I still wish we got a bill at the end of the year like some European countries. Maybe a deadline to send in special forums in case of some edge cases but they know what’s up .
