I always love reading absurd statements made by otherwise reasonable people who - of course - a salary depends on being unreasonable.
Here:
> Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in taxpayers paying more money.
Majority of work will be done automatically by some free jQuery and PHP scripts (hello Obamacare website) and taxpayers have only shell-out initial cost. Even if TurboTax is $19 per year, I have a hard time believing that 200MM tax payers X $19 will be less than running an enterprise servers for online consumers.
> [...] "STOP IRS TAKEOVER" campaign and a website calling return-free filing a "massive expansion of the U.S. government through a big government program."
I honestly laugh at this one. Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in the IRS possession? With that statement -- they really reach out for the dumbest people hearing them out.
> Explaining the company's stance, Intuit spokeswoman Miller told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that it was "a fundamental conflict of interest for the state's tax collector and enforcer to also become people's tax preparer."
I have to place a call to intuit maybe they will sponsor my idea that I should fill out and asses my own respondibility when it comes to a parking ticket. I mean you cannot trust the government that they will be fair to you - so I should get note "you violated parking zone - fill out this form and return to us with own assessment of your penalty". Gosh imagine wild wild west we would be living in if you stretch it to criminal law.
> Majority of work will be done automatically by some free jQuery and PHP scripts (hello Obamacare website)
Obamacare website was notorious for being completely terrible. And so were many other government-run healthcare sites - I personally tried to find some info on CA site when it was launched and failed for several days until they worked out the kinks.
And tax code is vastly more complex than what healthcare needs. There are literally hundreds of various exceptions, deductions, conditions, etc. Many of them inter-related or conditioned on other things. Did you every try to figure out how to use some of the IRS worksheets? It's no picnic. I recently tried to figure out whether I can deduct the cost of some home improvement I've made - took me several hours and I'm still not 100% sure I got it right. US tax code is insanely complex.
Of course, it may be that IRS has most of it already implemented and it may be that this implementation actually allows to produce pre-filled return (from what I've seen from IRS, it's not that easy, but maybe I'm wrong). Still, the project would probably have very significant cost, and unlike the commercial offerings, it won't be privately financed, and it would inevitably suffer from what many government projects suffer from - cost overruns, bureaucracy, wastefulness, choosing suppliers based on political clout, etc. It's not going to be free, it's going to cost a lot of money.
> Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in the IRS possession?
Quite a lot of it. E.g. my charity donations aren't. Many of my other deductible expenses aren't. Education expenses probably aren't. A lot of small business income may not be. A lot of deals like selling non-public stock aren't.
I think you might have very narrow view of how complex a tax return can be if you don't have just "one/two salaries, standard deductions" situation - which btw many preparers offer to handle for free or near free already. That's not where the problem is. It's when it goes out of that simple case where the complications lie.
And yes, currently the simple taxpayers in some measure are subsidizing the more complex ones, by financing the platform that allows handling more complex cases with their money. However, I'd hate if I had to pay $600-$1K for my more complex case (that what it would cost to hire a tax accountant) instead of $60 or so I'm paying now for the software (plus hours of time reading IRS instructions of course).
Maybe Intuit argument is still bad, I don't know, but it's not as laughably bad as you describe it, not even close.
> Quite a lot of it. E.g. my charity donations aren't.
I think you missed the point.
IRS will know about your charity donation shall you decide to give this information to TurboTax for TT to lower your tax burden. IF you don't want to lower your burden, don't give it to TT and don't give it to IRS, problem solved.
So at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you provide something to TurboTax and they forward to IRS, or IRS will have it directly from you by adding this information to your online tax form on Gov site.
> So at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you provide something to TurboTax and they forward to IRS, or IRS will have it directly from you by adding this information to your online tax form on Gov site.
Ah, in this scenario it indeed wouldn't matter - but this scenario means that there's a government-run clone of TurboTax. I doubt the government will do better job and be cheaper than Intuit, which have a lot of experience and knowledge in doing this.
> I honestly laugh at this one. Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in the IRS possession? With that statement -- they really reach out for the dumbest people hearing them out.
They won't have data from people who are self-employed. That said, neither does TurboTax so there's no difference here based on their argument, just as you said.
It does make a difference. TurboTax is an app that allows you to enter this info. The whole premise of auto-filed tax return is that you don't need to enter anything. The argument "to be able to file without entering anything you need to either vastly expand what IRS knows about citizens, or to restrict it to a small number of very simple cases" is not refuted by pointing out neither IRS nor TurboTax initially do not have the info. Because TurboTax side is not based on the premise of having the info upfront, only auto-file case is premised on this.
The correct way to refute such argument would be to prove that the simple cases - the ones that can be auto-files - constitute not a small part of cases but a part big enough to warrant IRS doing it. That's the argument I'd like to see - with proof, of course - i.e. how big is that part that can be auto-filed completely without increasing IRS knowledge it has now.
It's not a very large percentage of returns (around 6.5%) if you credit them with the ability to file all 1040EZs (they probably can't auto-file all the 1040EZs but can probably do most of them).
Here:
> Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in taxpayers paying more money.
Majority of work will be done automatically by some free jQuery and PHP scripts (hello Obamacare website) and taxpayers have only shell-out initial cost. Even if TurboTax is $19 per year, I have a hard time believing that 200MM tax payers X $19 will be less than running an enterprise servers for online consumers.
> [...] "STOP IRS TAKEOVER" campaign and a website calling return-free filing a "massive expansion of the U.S. government through a big government program."
I honestly laugh at this one. Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in the IRS possession? With that statement -- they really reach out for the dumbest people hearing them out.
> Explaining the company's stance, Intuit spokeswoman Miller told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that it was "a fundamental conflict of interest for the state's tax collector and enforcer to also become people's tax preparer."
I have to place a call to intuit maybe they will sponsor my idea that I should fill out and asses my own respondibility when it comes to a parking ticket. I mean you cannot trust the government that they will be fair to you - so I should get note "you violated parking zone - fill out this form and return to us with own assessment of your penalty". Gosh imagine wild wild west we would be living in if you stretch it to criminal law.