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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

Funny anecdote, I've been using TurboTax installable for a decade or so (having given up on doing them completely by hand).

Been considering hiring a professional because you always hear that they are worth their weight in gold. (Our tax situation is not particularly complicated though, typical Silicon Valley married homeowners).

Well, last year, did everything in turbotax, said we were short by like 15k. Believable, BTDT before, but didn't want to believe it. Hired an accountant on a recommendation. She did all our stuff, came up with a bill, turned out we owned $500 more than TurboTax said.

Okay, paid it.

2 months later, get a check from the IRS, we overpaid by $500. Yup, TurboTax had it right all along!

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> Been considering hiring a professional because you always hear that they are worth their weight in gold. (Our tax situation is not particularly complicated though, typical Silicon Valley married homeowners).

Tax professionals may be worth their weight in gold if you can rearrange your finances to do things they recommend to reduce your taxes. If you're just a regular person (perhaps highly compensated), there's not that much to do. Especially with the cap on State and Local Tax deduction, there's not much room for a professional to ask about deductable things you might have forgotten, because even if you have them, they will likely not add up to the standard deduction.

Now, if you own a business that makes a lot of profit, a professional should be able to advise you on how to reduce or delay tax on that. There's lots of options there, and they might not be apparent.

Similar boat, except also with a kid and a nanny. The year we had to deal with employer taxes for the nanny we tableflipped and stopped doing taxes by hand, going to HR Block instead. Was tempted to try an accountant but the HRB product seemed solid enough to just go with it every year after. Anecdotally it finds credits/refunds that I know I would never have found on a manual tax return. It's not a ton of money but it saves a lot of work.

The real wtf is: if the IRS already knew what you owed why did you have to go through the rigamarole to begin with?

not all taxable income is reported to the IRS

No, but the vast majority is. Which means for the vast majority of people the IRS could easily send you your taxes already filled out.

Lobbyists. Intuit (creator of TurboTax) among other organizations tells Congress that if the IRS does it for us, it's stealing jobs.

BTDT = been there done that

Should I feel old if I didn't know that?

I’m well aware of the phrase but have never seen it initialized before.

Probably not! I use it all the time without even thinking about it, but now that you mention it, I don't see others using it much if at all.

I had this misconception for a long time, that a tax expert can somehow magically reduce my tax bill. Turns out, I had it backwards. Once the tax year is behind me, everything is said and done. You pay what you owe, doesn't matter if the number comes from TurboTax or a CPA. It's the planning part that's important. And to plan better, you either talk to an accountant before the year starts, or you learn to do tax yourself.

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