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Comment by mehhh | Hacker News Reader

Great, sounds like TurboTax will still be able to compete if the IRS gives people tax filings precalculated, as TurboTax can say "We can save you $XXX!"

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I’m sure for a large percentage of Americans like myself the “$XXX” that they saved you is just the standard deduction. Maybe at some point in my life an itemized deduction will actually save me more money, but every time I have filed taxes TurboTax looks at my info and decides that the standard deduction is the best I’m going to get. So for some percentage of Americans TurboTax won’t be able to compete because they can’t save you more than the IRS already did with its deductions.

> So for some percentage of Americans TurboTax won’t be able to compete because they can’t save you more than the IRS already did with its deductions.

Except many people will try TurboTax or a competing solution anyway, just in case they can get a little bit of money back.

I would expect that to be common for the first couple years but after a couple years of realizing that they aren’t saving any additional money or are saving less than they are paying for TurboTax I’d expect that to drop off.

Unless using TurboTax actually saves people money. I wouldn't expect the IRS to have enough information to be able to predict in advance the deductions people might be able to take -- stuff like business expenses, mortgage interest, charitable donations, state taxes, etc.

Tax evasion and overstating deductions are common partly because the IRS doesn't have access to the information necessary to verify everything -- that's the same information the IRS would need in order to pre-fill tax forms accurately for the 1/3 of taxpayers who itemize their deductions. 1/3 of American taxpayers a pretty big market for TurboTax and similar services to thrive in.

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