Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington State and Wyoming are participating.
It’s a shame more aren’t participating but I can see the reasoning behind staged access and iterative improvement. The real pity is that data they’ve already got won’t be preloaded in this stage. It would have been the nail in the coffin for Intuit and other companies’ predatory practices on lower income folks, at least as they exist currently.
Just New York and California alone. If the expected turnout is in the millions, one can only hope IBM isn’t behind the cloud infrastructure - word to Obama care.
After the ACA had such a bad start, the obama admin actually opened up "innovation" departments to invite technical experts to modernize goverment infastructure. Those teams have likely done a lot over the decade or so to prevent haphazard rollouts.
EDIT: looks like they work under the title of the “US digital corps” banner and are looking for people.
My understanding is that this program only applies to federal taxes, so I’m not sure that the particular state’s income tax laws will have much bearing on selection for participation or which stage of rollout they’re added with.
I used FreeTaxUSA last year and after I entered all the info and had everything finished they said “cool we’ll file federally for free but if you want us to file your state tax then it’s gonna cost you like $30” and I gave in
The article is only talking about federal as well. The IRS doesn’t do anything with state taxes, so that’ll probably still cost money unless your state makes their own free solution.
They usually keep the “seat belts” light on during ascent and descent because it’s when air pressures are changing (or you might run into a tree, or another airplane), while once at cruise altitude it is reasonably safe to take the seat belt off.
Paying for the honor of either giving the government more money, or convincing them that they took too much and to give it back. But don’t worry, they’ll double check your work sometimes to make sure you gave them enough (fuck you if you gave them too much though). Oh, thinking “if they know how much I owed them anyway, why do I have to do this shit in the first place?” Fuck you, that’s why.
Oh, thinking “if they know how much I owed them anyway, why do I have to do this shit in the first place?”
They do that in pretty much all other developed countries. Never had to worry about filing taxes when I lived overseas. Just double check their work and forget about it until next year.
Derrick Plummer, a spokesman for Intuit, said taxpayers can already file their taxes for free and there are online free-file programs available to some people. Individuals of all income levels can submit their returns for free via the mail.
A “direct-to-IRS e-file system is a solution in search of a problem, and that solution will unnecessarily cost taxpayers billions of dollars,” he said. “We will continue unapologetically advocating for American taxpayers and against a direct-to-IRS e-file system because it’s a bad idea.”
And who believes that crap anyway? Intuit markets their solution due to the complicated nature of anything outside of standard deductions and figuring out if you should itemize and how to do that.
Intuit has spent $25.6 million since 2006 on lobbying, H&R Block about $9.6 million and the conservative Americans for Tax Reform roughly $3 million.
Now if the states get on board for easy filing online, it'll be great.
The article “conveniently” omits the names of pilot states and the eligibility criteria, so I dug them up:
The Direct File pilot is available to eligible taxpayers residing in Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming.
You may be eligible to join the pilot if you live in a pilot state and report these items on your 2023 federal tax return:
Income
W-2 wage income
SSA-1099 Social Security and RRB -1099 railroad retirement income
1099-G Unemployment compensation
1099- INT Interest income of $1,500 or less
Credits
Earned Income Tax Credit
Child Tax Credit
Credit for Other Dependents
Deductions
Standard deduction
Student loan interest
Educator expenses
The pilot is not an option for if you:
Have other types of income, such as gig economy or business income
Itemize deductions
Claim other credits like the Child and Dependent Care Credit, Saver’s Credit or the Premium Tax Credit
So I’m an American expat living in Australia. Australia has had the option to file directly to ATO, electronically, longer than I’ve been here. (Google suggests since 1999? So, more than 20 years.) It’s an easy process if you have a straightforward tax return.
It never ceases to amaze me how far behind the rest of the world USA is in some things that just seem like really obvious solutions. Like… Why wouldn’t the IRS want to get tax returns filed directly from the tax payers, skipping the middleman? At least for simple returns. More simplicity, less confusion all around if they get everyone onto the same system. Less paper to wade through, by significantly reducing paper returns. Etc.
It just seems like such a no-brainer. But I guess that’s why it doesn’t work in the USA. >.<
Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose real power derives from his position as the head of the ruling Communist Party, has placed more emphasis on quality over quantity. He has demanded absolute loyalty from party members, launched an ideology drive to shore up their faith, and unleashed a crackdown on internal dissent. Members are bound by more stringent rules – and millions of cadres have been investigated for violating them in the past nine years since Xi took control of the party.
Here in Australia, you can literally file your tax now for free in a few clicks using the government website. If you wait a few weeks, everything for most people is prefilled except deductions
Pretty much the same in the UK. Most people don’t have to file their tax at all (it’s automatically deducted from wages for most people), but for those that do, you can do it for free on the government’s website, which is largely a matter of saying how much you earned, and any relevant deductions. The government then calculates what tax you have to pay. If your tax affairs are more complicated than that, you’re earning enough that you’re in the “having an accountant is mandatory” territory anyway.
Yeah, it’s not flawless, but it’s straightforward to use, which really is the thing you need for this kind of service, since it’s intended to be used by normal people rather than experts. The one and only thing that our glorious Conservative overlords have done well in the last 13 years is modernising a lot of official administrative processes like this so they can be done digitally and without a load of needless complexity.
Americans: demand from your government the responsibility to handle your taxes directly.
I’m in the EU, from a small country, and all tax forms have to be filed through government tax authority servers, running state designed programs.
I can hire a legion of accountants, a lawyer firm and third party to represent me and still everything will still go through the same channels.
Or I can simply use that same program, through the same website, with my secure credentials, and file my own taxes for free, calling the tax department whenever I have doubts on what I’m doing.
demand that your taxes supply you with the government services it supports
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