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Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

I used to do that. Because I'm a proud software engineer and why should this stuff be complicated? It's just numbers you add or subtract...

wait, does the Transmogrifier Deduction for Frobnubilors apply when you claim to be Single-and-Only Highlander? pauses and takes 1 hour to read up on the IRS rules for this and compares with the advice of $random_internet_guy

And after the personal satisfaction of having completed everything myself, I file and a few months later get a letter from the IRS to the effect of "Dear Mr Bonehead, you totally forgot this obvious item, so we're going to refund you a bit more. You're welcome."

Taxes are not hard if you know how all of the rules apply to your special situation. If you don't, like most people, you're in the dark and it becomes a very poor use of time, with lost money at stake—or worse if your intentions are deemed to be fraudulent.

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One of the problems I have with the software is you need to mostly understand a lot of this arcana anyway. It's just that it makes entering things into the form slightly easier.

The only time I didn't do my own taxes and paid a CPA, he messed up even though I told him that I withheld more than required (and gave him last year's return so he could see what last year's taxes were and that I had more than 110% withheld).

He still filled the form out wrong so that I would have had to pay a penalty. Then when I told him he filled it out wrong, he just took the penalty off, without properly updating the 1040. When I ended up getting the inevitable "you owe us a penalty letter", I just ended up dealing with it myself rather than use his boneheaded explanation basically "pretty please" as opposed to the actual "I made more money, and withheld enough more money, so penalties are waived."

Honestly, the IRS makes these kind of questions pretty much impossible.

For example, I've been considering installing solar panels on my house. There is a federal tax credit for installing solar, and it includes associated costs like repairing your roof to support the panels. But as a normal person the entirety of the guidance is this:

"No costs relating to a solar panel or other property installed as a roof (or portion thereof) will fail to qualify solely because the property constitutes a structural component of the structure on which it is installed."

So if you get a new roof to support the panels will the tax credit cover the entire roof job, or only the part covered by the panels? I've heard from two accountants on this who had two diametrically opposed opinions on this. And if I guess wrong it's potentially Felony Tax Fraud, the kind that put Al Capone in jail for 11 years. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

So I call the IRS help line to get the official guidance on this and the official IRS position is: "We can not give guidance on this subject." It's not like TurboTax is going to have any more official of an opinion on this either. The only way to safely handle this is to pass liability off to a third party, which makes filling out your own taxes not an option.

Do you think that Al Capone was imprisoned for making an honest mistake on his tax return after receiving conflicting advice from two accountants?

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