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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

They've almost got a working system already. Free File Fillable Forms (alliteration intended?) has improved each year since it has existed. It has the downside that it looks like the paper forms, which is likely to be offputting to some. If they just finished it so that it (a) does 100% of the math for you (b) transfers 100% of the values between forms for you, it would be a system that could be used by anyone.

That's not to say that a totally different UI approach (e.g. as used by Turbo Tax) would not be even better, but they absolutely do not need to "start from scratch"

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Free file fillable forms is run by Intuit and, iirc, is client side only.

Free File Fillable Forms is owned by On-Line Taxes, Inc. of St. Joseph, Missouri, not Intuit.

https://freefilefillableforms.com/home/privacy_security.php https://www.olt.com/main/home/leadership.asp

Interesting. Internally we called it Quad F and I did some work on it. Looks like it changed hands at some point. Vox references our work here: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22596072/irs-turbota...

> The timing is auspicious for such an endeavor. As you may know, if you make $72,000 or less, you’re eligible for a free return through the IRS Free File program, including software provided by Intuit, the company that operates TurboTax. If you make more, you’re eligible for Free File Fillable Forms, an Intuit product.

If you open the actual forms (not the homepage) the asset links went through an Intuit CDN. I'm not sure if this is still the case.

Even more oddly, the Vox article is from April 2022, so if it was sold or transferred it was recently.

I used FFFF for a few years, and it always felt like it was trying to _exactly_ meet a set of requirements -- functional enough to legally fulfill a contract, but just frustrating enough to use that most people would go use a paid product instead.

e.g. it would do all the math that was defined on a given form for you, but wouldn't fill out any worksheets in the instructions. IIRC it also wouldn't automatically fill in the "Enter $X if filing single, $Y if married, ..." fields. Most annoyingly, it disallowed copy/paste, which seems like something they would've had to have broken on purpose.

Wayback machine seems to be broken for the FFFF homepage, but the earliest result for the privacy_security.php page is from February, and it already mentions On-Line Taxes: https://web.archive.org/web/20220211143256/https://freefilef...

But yeah it definitely used to be owned by Intuit. This 2020 Wayback Machine result shows it being owned by Intuit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200418025728/https://www.freef...

Maybe the new owners can fix its bad attitude.

As I mentioned, every year that I've used it (I think 5 at this point), it has gotten a little bit better. More form-to-form transfers, less manual arithmetic within forms.

I've used it routinely for many years now. I also used it for VA which had similar free fillable forms. It seemed like an exact copy UI-wise but on a different domain.

However, this past year VA dropped free fillable forms due to lack of funding. Had to go back to mailing forms :/

I don't know what you mean by "client side only" in this context.

That it only operates in the browser. I don't think they store tax-related PII.

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