It shouldn't be this hard.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/...
But even then, assuming "they'll just sell it anyways", most of that information exists with other orgs anyways that could just as easily just sell it anyways. If I don't trust Intuit, why would I trust ADP or whoever my bank is to not sell my data either?
But sure, I agree, using any third party to file your taxes exposes you to that risk of yet another party potentially leaking/selling data. Once again though, to me that trade off of 14 more hours with my kids versus someone knowing what I paid in mortgage interest last year is pretty OK to me. Data brokers could just glean that same kind of useful information it means through the thousands of other things tracking me anyways.
unless you happen to click "OK" on one of the deceptive prompts TurboTax will show you while preparing your taxes.
It's about reducing the burden on taxpaying Americans, or something like that.
Palantir got the contract and estimates it’ll take a month to index all the IRS data, rip out the access controls and slap a nice search gui on top.
What they probably get now is even more control over how that data is given to them and how much of it they can access.
No need to partner with the IRS, the DOGE dudes have an external drives in a sock drawer at home, ready for their next Fintech startup. For reasons attributed to "world class algorithms" the Fintech will be preternaturally good at targeting financial services to individuals, and assessing credit-worthiness given nothing but a name and zip code...
I too would work for "free" to gain access to that valuable data. If I didn't have a half-decent moral compass.
Also my bank only knows what goes on in my checking account. They have a lot less information than the IRS does (although what they do have is probably a lot more detailed).
I used to work in Intuit's Security R&D business unit and worked on the software that made it so that even if someone at Intuit/Turbo Tax wanted to do that it'd be impossible. Intuit spends a lot of money on cryptographers and very skilled programmers to ensure that. The definition of PII extends all the way to the HTTP logs of filers such that we couldn't even visualize filings on a map as they came in during tax season.
There's plenty of things that Intuit does that aren't good without alleging baseless claims.
At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.
Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.
Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.
On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.
So, at least it’s not 100% bad.
Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
However, knowing it's that easy requires reading a lot of instructions, and if you make enough money (depending on filing status), it suddenly gets much more complicated (forms 8959, 8960, 6251 have income triggers), and if you have 1099s (INT or DIV) you might need to file Schedule B and form 8995. And if you have a mortgage, you should do your taxes twice to see if itemizing with Schedule A is better. And god forbid you sold anything and have to do Schedule D and forms 8949.
Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour.
I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them.
Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
The worst thing about our system is that the taxes are impossible to figure “correctly” (that’s not even a concept that makes sense, given how the tax code works) and there are massive legal penalties for getting them wrong.
You may not have Rental income and Stocks to report
I never said it is hard. Slow and tedious, but not hard. I take my time. I probably could speed it up, but I usually listen to music while I do it and try not to stress myself out about it.