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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

This is great news; no matter how restricted it may be initially, I think having a "guaranteed-free" tax filing system will be great for most people, especially lower-income people.

The private companies have demonstrated pretty clearly that they will do everything they can to avoid people actually having free tax filing, and while ~$50-100 might not seem like a ton of money, keep in mind that at the current United States minimum wage ($7.25 as of this writing), it would take upwards of working 6-14 hours just to pay for tax filing. $100 is a lot of money when you're not a yuppie software engineer.

I suspect I did enough crazy stuff with stocks this year that it probably won't apply to me at first, but hopefully by 2025 or 2026 I can stop giving money to Intuit or Jackson Hewitt.

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FWIW, FreeTaxUSA[0] is much cheaper than Intuit and has worked great for me the past few years. I find it slightly easier than TurboTax, in fact.

[0] https://www.freetaxusa.com/

sorry... cheaper? surely a place called free tax usa would be free?

They are free for federal electronic filing, and charge a small fee for state filing.

Well... free is cheaper than not free.

It is free for federal taxes. The only thing that you are paying for are state taxes.

Free as in the land of the free, not as in beer.

Free as in marketing.

I've used FreeTaxUSA since 2014 and I've never had to pay for federal, but I have had to pay something for state file. I think it's around $20.

It's free for me, but I don't have state income taxes.

Its free for state as well if you qualify

Jackson Hewitt Online isn't terribly pricey (Cost me a total of about $25 last year), so that's what I've used for the last two years. Keep in mind that Jackson Hewitt Online is a different thing that the vanilla Jackson Hewitt

Still, I kind of feel annoyed that I have to pay any amount of money to do something legally required of me to avoid going to jail. I think the IRS should provide a free option for filing, and TurboTax/FreeTaxUSA/Jackson Hewitt would be forced to provide a better service than "the bare minimum".

You can fill out the forms manually for free? It just sucks.

I've thought about doing that before just to say that I've done it, but it always seemed a bit intimidating. I also have completely illegible handwriting now, so filling anything in by hand is effectively a non-starter.

You can fill in a PDF form rather than writing it by hand.

I quit doing paper forms ~10 years ago when I missed coping line 12c from form 5678-e to line 34-f of form 9876-k. The hassle of correcting that was enough to make me quit doing taxes by hand.

It takes longer to do my taxes via the web forms than it did by hand (which says just how bad the UI of tax prep is!), but it saves me from human mistakes.

Note that the ISR already has all the information they need to do my taxes for me. They just don't do them.

> it saves me from human mistakes

Not me! FreeFillableForms is apparently the last piece of software in the western world that doesn’t save your progress as you go. I found that out the hard way about three days ago and immediately switched to freetaxusa.

I use freetaxusa as well (well their paid version from same company). It is slower than paper, but it saves progress.

Although it’s slower than paper, it gives you an up-to-date dynamic final results so that’s pretty cool

I can also walk down to the nearby river to launder my clothes and carry back water to prepare food for my family. Instead we use technology to save time and improve our lives. That we continue to allow corrupt businesses to hold us back so a few people can extort/profit is a testament to our failed state.

At least you live in an awesome neighborhood

It's not that it sucks, it is error prone. Completely ignore a knowledge of tax law for a moment. Data has to be copied from one form to another, copied for calculation (whether you do it on paper or with a calculator), copied from one line to another, and finally copied from the form into the government's tax software. Each step produces the potential for error. Properly written software does not have the same potential for error.

It sounds like you're agreeing with me that it sucks.

> Properly written software does not have the same potential for error.

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.

As a user, how do you know that the tax software you are using was "properly written"?

I'm not following the point of this comment? TurboTax's correctness is battle-tested by millions of people every year- the odds of you making a mistake carrying over numbers by hand are way higher than TT making a calculation error.

FreeFillableForms (.com) is 100% free, has no income limits, has every IRS schedule & form.

It's basically backed by the IRS and implemented by Intuit et al, but appears independent.

It works a little better every year, but you do still have to manually carry over some numbers from form to form.

I've been using it for the last 8 years at least. I don't love it to death, but if it wasn't available I'd do my own paper forms anyway.

FreeFillableForms is basically like doing the paper forms by hand and it's much easier to make a mistake than using something like turbotax. I've used both that and the excel files at https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home in the past but I realized that the hassle if I screwed something up was much worse than paying for tax prep software.

I'm very glad that the IRS is going to be making something that's more comparable to turbotax now.

I think the URL is freefilefillableforms.com (note the "file", the "FreeFillableForms" domain is parked by someone) based on some light googling and a contact email I saw on the irs.gov site.

Glad a digital equivalent to paper forms exists, the US tax code is far less hellish than I previously believed.

The actual tax code is still hellish. Physically filling out the forms is the easiest part. Figuring out what to put in the forms is all the effort. Each page of form usually has many pages of instructions, which are long and complicated because the tax code is long and complicated.

If you are a typical tech employee and have highish income, incentive stock options, interest, dividends, capital gains, etc. don't think you can use freefillableforms to do your taxes in a couple hours.

I'm a self-employed highish income person, no stock options (that was long, long ago), interest, dividends, capital gains, rental property income, a spouse who also has to file schedule C twice.

Takes me about 2 hours on ffff ....

.. mostly because I've done my own taxes for the whole 34 years I've lived in the USA (including the first year when I got the US government to pay me the excess of what I'd paid the UK government, and the year I paid taxes on amzn stock that exceeded everything I had ever earned until that time).

This stuff is not as complicated as people make out, though I would concede that it is likely easier for a software developer-type person than a personal grooming specialist or firefighter. There's a whole industry out there predicated on the idea that you can't do this yourself.

Just used FreeTaxUSA this week for the first time. Crazy good UI. Highly recommended.

I second this, FreeTaxUSA is great.

First time user last year. Pleased with the UX, would repeat unless IRS gives new an option.

I find it bizarre that this is even a market in the US. I would think enabling people to do their taxes is a basic task of the government. Where I'm from the government provides a very simple click through filing system. Most information is auto filled from info the government already has or is manditorily shared with it such as my income as reported by my employer and any tax withholdings performed by them, securities holdings at brokers, houses registered on my name etc. I basically just have to click 'yep, that all sounds right', and I'm done. The tax authorities slogan over here is "we can't make doing your taxes fun, we can make it easy".

Yeah it's wild that you have to calculate your own bill to the government. Just tell me the amount and I'll pay it.

Just print out the sheet from your broker of all the trades you did with the end result of gains circled. Send that in. You should be ok from doing anything more complex.

are you referring to like when you do summarized trades? or something else?

Every transaction of stock should be listed. The broker will total the gains. If you want to play with the rules with a little bit more finesse (like trying to leverage the 30 day end of year rule), you will have to do this manually.

If you buy or vest more shares, you might not be able to use capital losses to offset your gains until you understand the wash-sale rule.

You didn't hear this from me, but allegedly the IRS doesn't give a shit about wash sales via RSU vesting. YMMV, IANAL, IANAA, IARPA, etc etc

You are doing your taxes wrong and should be careful this ain't audited.

I don't know how that could be such a thing. Basically, you don't have to necessarily use any of their forms. You simply list down all income totaled by category of taxation, list out all value appreciation and depreciation that you are considering to be part of the year's gains and losses, and provide backup material of how you came to those numbers (if that is even necessary).

Taxes were made to be done on a simple blank sheet of paper. The forms are more instructional record keepers, than they are systems of procedure every taxpayer must follow.

No one earning $7.25 is going to pay anything to file their taxes, unless they got duped(which is totally possible).

It's worse than that, them are the prime target for rebate advance loans, Very convenient only 30% interest.

> keep in mind that at the current United States minimum wage ($7.25 as of this writing), it would take upwards of working 6-14 hours just to pay for tax filing

Relatively few people in the US earn the Federal minimum wage. It's less than 1/2 of 1% of the labor force. It's a very poor reference for anything in terms of personal finance comparisons.

You can walk into a CVS or Walgreens and earn $15 / hr as the minimum scanning barcodes with zero experience, zero job history, as a teenager. You'll get heavily subsidized health insurance, dental, vision, and PTO.

On top of that, the majority of US states have a higher minimum wage than the Federal.

If you're still earning the Federal minimum wage at this point, it's almost always by choice (if you don't want to work for Costco, Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, et al.).

> It's less than 1/2 of 1% of the labor force.

So it's only millions of people.

According to BLS, 141k workers earned exactly minimum wage in 2022, with another 882k earning a base rate under minimum wage [0]. The latter category, though, isn't the complete picture, because tips and commissions would tend to push compensation up over minimum wage as a rule.

Of the 141k, 53k are teenagers, so that leaves 88k full adults (age 20+) making minimum wage. That's not nothing, but it represents 0.1% of those paid an hourly rate and 0.06% of the workforce as a whole.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2022/home.htm

Nope.

167,929,000 * 0.5% = 839,645

Don’t you already get free filing below some income threshold?

Yes, and Intuit lost a court case recently because there was only 1 way to get to it, and it required following a series of dark patterns to do so.

I got ~$35 out of it, which was nice.

There is free filling using the official government tool. And there is free filling created by for profit businesses.

Likely it comes from your tax, so calling it free might be just an illusion.

I’ve been using https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes ; cross-checked with my manual form filing and it’s spot on. Print and mail and save the hassle :)

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