The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30M Americans

36 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by janeerie
(fastcompany.com)

16 Comments

beretguy

10 hours ago

I’ll wait for other people to test it.

BugsJustFindMe

10 hours ago

Just curious, are you worried about anything in particular?

w0m

9 hours ago

'taxes' is a 4... erm, 5 letter word for some; almost taboo.

bastawhiz

9 hours ago

Right, but given the choice between the agency that decides whether you did your taxes correctly and a for profit company, why would you choose the latter?

neverartful

6 hours ago

What makes you think that a division of the federal government is going to get it right the first time? I'm being serious (not snarky). Have you ever worked with the federal government? I have (as a contractor) and I was constantly amazed (not in a good way).

bastawhiz

5 hours ago

It's literally not their first time. It launched for tax year 2023.

neverartful

5 hours ago

I still wouldn't use it this early.

Scoundreller

8 hours ago

What i’ve found delusional is the amount of duplicative entry of data by individuals that’s already been submitted to the tax agency electronically by employers and finance firms.

At least in Canada for the last couple years, our tax software can download all that from the tax agency and plug that into your forms automatically. And for most people, that’s all the info there is.

There aren’t a lot of “elections” or “decisions” to actually make when filing.

And there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t happen automatically because you •could• have the same investments across multiple brokers, but that’s not the majority either.

jokethrowaway

7 hours ago

Because the agency which decides whether I did my taxes correctly is likely going to have terrible UX and has an incentive to hide options for me to save on taxes?

I pay private agents all the time to avoid having to deal with terrible governments interfaces and find shortcuts, wins for me.

bastawhiz

5 hours ago

As opposed to the terrible UX of the for profit companies that have been providing the same services for years? For most people, the cost of TurboTax is higher than whatever mystical savings they might "find".

fragmede

5 hours ago

it getting hacked is probably the top concern. if an attacker can access my information on that site, they can steal my identity and conveniently also know exactly how much that identity is worth stealing. Not that not using the system is any guarantee that I'll be safe either. my data's already been leaked by Equifax so I'm expecting someone will try something eventually. scammers have already tried calling my mom, telling her I'm in the hospital but fortunately she was able to call me and I was able to say that I wasn't.

which is to say, that worry shouldn't stop anyone from trying their site.

jonny_eh

5 hours ago

It was tested last year.