I filed my fideral taxes for free with Freetaxusa and paid $15 for state taxes, in an ideal world these tax filing prep companies shouldn’t even exist but since the corrupt system we live in won’t let us be rid of them then we can at least tank their profits till it becomes impossible for them to exist
Been using FreetaxUSA for years 🤝
Any business that depends and actually lobbies hardcore on making regular-ass people (with simple returns the government could handle easily manage themself) pay to pay their taxes shouldnt exist.
It should be an absolute defense to not filing/paying your taxes that you refuse to pay to pay your taxes and that you are happy to do so once the government either does it for you or provides a free streamlined way to do so or lightly amend the governments working copy to include the relevant and recurring deductions where applicable
My income is disability, and falls below the poverty line so I don’t technically need to file. I like to file just to make sure i have a record, but damn all the free programs were trying to make me pay out of pocket to file in my state. I’m sure most people are happy to spare the $35 or so for the ease of using software, but not having money at all makes the cost seem absurd. And there’s no reason for these companies to care that I can’t afford it, considering people going to pay that cost because for most the penalty of not filling taxes is much, much higher than the cut those programs take.
Not sure if you already know but for people in your situation you can usually file for free using the free to file links from the IRS website.
Only federally. State filing isn’t free
Would have been free, if the traitor filth magat trash hadn’t destroyed the program designed to help people file for free easily.
Depends on the state. Several offer their own online filing through their website.
Over half of the states already the software capability to do the same, but many are prevented by Intuit’s “free file alliance” contract bullshit preventing them from turning it on
Yeah unfortunately not unless you want to do them on paper. I’ve been using FreeTaxUSA since CreditKarma got bought out by intuit and cash app. I think it’s $10 or $15 for state filing
If you have a complex situation you should pay for help. However most people should not have a complex situation where they need that help, and tax preparation has made a ton of money preying on people who have a simple tax situation. This long predates software.
It shouldn’t matter how complex your situation is if you’re filing using software. I can understand paying for actual help like chat support, but a user filing a complex return and user filing a simple return are going to be using the software all the same. TurboTax loves to force you into a higher cost tier if you have simple stock sales or have an HSA which are both pretty basic.
Orrrr - and hear me out - maybe that rag-tag collection of state and federal governments you’ve got going on over there in the US should have a way of online filing that’s free?
You know, like how most civilised countries have been doing for the last decade or so.
They had one half built, but then a pedophile took over the government
Of course, but you still have to file your taxes in spite of those things being nonexistent.
Implementing the software to handle the labyrinthine tax code takes a lot of development effort. And not just for annual updates, they often identify bugs in the logic and issue updates monthly or weekly, especially as tax season ramps up. All that development labor needs to be paid.
… And the various Departments of Taxation can handle that. Half of them already have the software to handle direct filing, but simply can’t turn it on for contractual reasons (because of Intuit).
small violin
MAYBE THEY SHOULDN’T MAKE THEIR PRODUCT SUCK SO MUCH ASS.
STOP CRAMMING AI INTO MY BOOKKEEPING SOFTWARE YOU WET FUCKIN TURDS.
Imagine one of the top 500 companies in an economy being a company where it’s sole job is to help people pay taxes.
Their sole job is gatekeeping access to filing your taxes.
I hope they burn into ashes.
I use Quickbooks Self-Employed for my software dev contracting business
When I first started out, I added my vehicle because I was silly enough to think I might need to log miles as a programmer, but of course I never did. Every single year when I go to file, Turbo Tax chokes because I have zero miles logged and it makes me manually fill out every single vehicle-related tax form (it won’t let me leave them blank). Worse yet, there’s no option in Quickbooks to remove a vehicle.
Also, it somehow completely fucked up the reporting of state estimated taxes this year, even though I had all my payments accurately recorded in Quickbooks, and I had to follow up with the state to get it corrected.
This is software I pay for btw
Yay :3
Intuit really is the worst.
I sort of expect them to conduct more layoffs / raise the price of their other software/services even more to compensate, greedy fuckers. Unfortunately a lot of businesses use their other software so Intuit is sort of embedded there. Outside of work/business stuff not sure why anyone willingly gives these people money.
Maybe the standard deductible increased so much that everyone can use free services to file the EZ version.
Edit: Article blames the decline completely on AI tax services.
