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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

IRS’s use of ID.me [1] is one of the oddest public–private partnerships I’ve seen. Facial recognition aside, why should I provide my personal ID to a private company to verify myself with the government that issued that personal ID in the first place?

[1]: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/new-online-identity-verificatio...

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And similarly in absurdity is that the IRS does not have the ability to accept direct payments via credit card or debit card. There's a separate public-private partnership for that.[1]

[1] https://www.fool.com/taxes/2019/04/13/heres-what-happens-whe...

I'm sure I got fucked this year: one of those sites said in big letters at the top "we attribute all transactions until midnight to today," so I chose them.

I gave them thousands of dollars (hoping to get some of it back as credit card points). I immediately got an email saying "Thanks for your payment at 1:30 AM (not my timezone, tomorrow)." I was livid, and I had no recourse.

I don't even know how to check for the fine and pay it. I'm just waiting for an IRS nastygram at this point, so I can contest their "processing fee" on my credit card.

In my experience, if you miss the deadline that closely, the fine from the IRS is negligible, or they ignore it entirely and move on because it's not worth the effort to follow up.

Though why you would leave it that close is something of a mystery to me. After all, you might have connectivity problems or an unexpected personal emergency or something. It's not like you didn't know the deadline was coming up.... just pay a day or two early and avoid the stress!

(I'm sure there are people who legitimately have to do it at the last moment for some reason. But I don't believe that's the common case.)

Emergencies, scheduling conflicts, ADD. :)

IRS Form 4868 (tax extension) exists for a reason [1]. The tax system is needlessly complex, especially if you're dealing with business ownership, salaries, or basically anything that creates additional tax complexity.

I've outsourced this clown show of an obligation to an accounting firm for the past 6 years or so, but for some that's simply not a feasible option. Nor should it be required -- an additional cost for the privilege of knowing how much you need to pay in to the government (who pretty much already knows this amount, in many/most instances, mind you) is beyond absurdity.

Tax filing in the US is archaic and like I've mentioned previously (but I'll say it again because it's a constant source of frustration for me) a needlessly complex process.

1: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4868.pdf

That extends your time to file not your time to pay.

Honestly, I did them a couple days before and I was sleepy, so I wanted to look at them with fresh eyes before agreeing to spend a bunch of money in taxes.

Square Cash took over Credit Karma Tax this year, and their CA state form was atrocious.

Dispute the charge on the card

They can do direct wire transfers and that actually concerns me more. I had zero interaction with my bank. I gave the IRS my bank routing and account number then told them how much to transfer. Not even a single email or text message from the bank at all. As far as I can tell there is no upper limit on how much they can withdraw. Ever since then I have been super careful what I keep in banks.

Yeah, that's how the banking system works. Every single check in your checkbook has your account number and routing number on it, and those two numbers are literally the only pieces of information necessary to transfer money out of your account.

What the system lacks in technical security is (supposedly) made up for by legal protections/processes--yeah, it's incredibly easy to take money out of an account, but that transaction _will_ get reversed if it was fraudulent.

I get that is how it works, just seems alarming that the bank didn't send me anything. If I typo my pin code in the grocery store I get an email and text right away. My debit card has limits how much one can withdraw. A wire transfer has no limits, yet an org that never did a wire transfer from my account shows up and pulls a large amount and I get nothing.

It's just a different type of transaction. Not sure about your bank, but mine has separate alert settings for ACH vs. Debit transactions. I have alerts set up for both (and wires for that matter).

Yep. Nowadays with cash-by-phone, it gets even scarier: I had $5000 withdrawn from my account due to bad OCR on a check. It took way too much effort to get it reversed as well, even though the picture of the check in the banking app showed obviously wrong information.

It will get reversed if you notice it and report it soon enough. But the law only requires they give you 60 days after they transmit you a statement. I believe for businesses, you are only protected for 2 days.

And that's why they came up with Zello, which removes those legal protections and processes.

I wish they could do wire transfers easily, instead they don't say anywhere but their standard "pay by bank" is with ACH. You can quickly run into ACH limits with your bank and then end up paying your taxes late. This happened to a friend of mine.

To pay them with wire is extremely complicated and requires setting up an EFTPS account.

Probably a good idea to not let people pay their taxes with a credit card.

Why not? If the amount you owe is within your spending limit why does it matter if it's credit vs debit?

Because the interest rates for just paying your taxes late are going to be better than the interest rates on your credit card.

I wasn't referring to financing it. Nobody in their right mind would do that. If you pay your bill in full at the end of month you don't incur those usury rates. Many people treat a credit card like cash.

Well that's mostly what I was referring too. But regardless, the government also probably doesn't want you to pay your taxes with a payment method where you can easily issue chargebacks.

If you have the money to pay your taxes, less hassle for the government for you to not pay with debt. If you don't have the money better to just pay late.

>"But regardless, the government also probably doesn't want you to pay your taxes with a payment method where you can easily issue chargebacks."

You realize the IRS accepts check right? You could also just easily put a stop payment on a check or write a bad check. There would be no point in doing that of course just like there would be no point in in issuing a chargeback for a card payment.

The IRS accepts checks for historical reasons, and I guarantee you people have written bad checks for their tax payments. Alas people do silly things like that regardless of your assertion that it is pointless.

I spent hours and hours setting up an ID.me account (I'm a US citizen living abroad), had to use a VPN, numerous SMS verification failures (even using a US number), extreme hold times for a video interview, incorrectly OCRed US passport (issue date read as date of birth) resulting in immediate rejection with no workaround... I had to blur the date in order to get around the OCR (good luck to non-techies).

All to be a) spammed with 'deals' I did not sign up for the next day from id.me, and b) to access an IRS page that really isn't very useful.

It's a really stupid partnership which of course exists to avoid the government giving you a digital ID themselves and something something private enterprise something something, but of course ID.me has a monopoly so those points are moot.

Plus, if we go to all of this effort to have a secure, authenticated portal, it would make sense to then be able to actually use the portal to do things. Once logged in I can't change my address (send us a paper form!), I can't see the status of paper-submitted returns (received/processing/etc), nor can I see a digital record of communications from the IRS... they show 'some versions of IRS notices' but I still get paper letters from the IRS that are not on the portal (despite signing up for paperless communications).

Because private is better than government!

(That's the ideological cover. The reality is that the public-private partnership funnels money from the state to the shareholders to the party donor class. Both parties.)

If youre at all familiar with Dick Cheney's role in the 90s as secretary of defense - this is exactly the framework he built for the MIC to funnel money out of the treasury and into private pockets.

This is also part of the reason for the ~$60B in aide to Ukraine and why all of a sudden senators are making "surprise visits" to Ukraine.

I mean .. yes, there's a lot of defense corruption, day in day out, but the reason for the $60B in aid to Ukraine is to fight the Russian invasion?

You didnt formulate a question.

Would you like details and a history lesson on how vile cheney and all his PNAC buds have been?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/10/22/FBI-knew-BCCI-financ...

Guess which Khoshoggi's dad was involved...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal_Khashoggi

and who did donald trump buy his yacht from

Adnan... "the worlds largest Arms trader"

https://youtu.be/yuWMH5TD5bE

yeah, it gets super weird after that...

Right, why can't this be a part of login.gov?

Their homepage cracks me up: "Your one account for government." Don't we wish...

They integrate with ~220 agency sites as of this year. The holdouts (IRS, VA, TreasuryDirect, etc) will integrate soon enough.

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