wait you guys have to pay to file taxes????
do they actually want you to evade taxes??
The tax system is so complicated, most people can’t handle navigating it on their own. Most people have jobs where taxes are automatically removed from pay checks and sent to both state and federal tax agencies. However, that amount is just an estimate and once a year (or quarter) you need to file paperwork to confirm whether you over or underpaid and then you either get a rebate (without interest), or you’ll need to send in a payment to make up the difference. That paperwork has been lobbied to remain as complicated as possible so that companies like Intuit can provide services that tax payers find useful and continue to pay for. This is more complicated for business owners, both big and small.
Well, in my opinion this will be a good platform for American progressives to run on: make taxes less complicated by getting rid of middle men.
This will absolutely 10000% never happen as long as lobbying exists in my opinion.
There needs to be more citizen lobbying. What really needs to happen is citizens organizing, pooling their money, and hiring lobbyists, just like big corporations do.
A look at the Forbes Fortune500 should point out why that's basically impossible.
Just looking at the top one, Walmart, not even considering anyone else on this list, their raw profit in 2024 after all expenses and payrolls and everything was
$15,511,000,000.00
Amazon in the #2 spot made almost double that. Remember this isn't revenue, this is profit, this is extra money after all normal expenses are paid.
If I pulled together every single person I've ever met in my life, regardless of their opinion of me, and we all donated all the money we had ever made in our lives, we might approach a tenth of Walmart's 2024 profits.
The wealth inequality gap in America is large enough that it is actually difficult to wrap your head around. The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars - to be exact, you'll need 999 million more dollars to reach it after you have your first million in the bank. Fighting corporate money with citizens' money is not only wasteful but impossible.
Working within a corrupt system often serves to more deeply entrench that system.
I mean, yes, because if they catch you evading taxes then they get a free slave for the term of your incarceration. To them it's a win-win.
Oh good I'm not the only one who doesn't understand.
No they just want us to do our part by both paying taxes to the government and paying corporations that pay the government. All makes sense in a tidy corporofascisit system.
Yeah I figured the Canadian system we have was as bad as the US’s but apparently not. Having to pay to file is wild
Fuck Intuit!
A million dollars is all it takes to buy whatever laws you want? That's a really good deal for Intuit.
Remember all those (exactly) 1 million dollar "donations" all those CEOs were giving to Trump's inaugural campaign? Those weren't donations, they were bribes and kissing of the ring. Pledge loyalty (and pay a small fee) and the government will work for you.
Politicians are cheap, I remember once seeing a list of how much a lobbyist buys support from politicians for and the list was like $5k $2k $3k $6k. It’s ridiculous
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Trump could have held the Saudis up for $50 billion on Inauguration Day 2016. Five minutes with the ambassador and he could have walked away with plenty of loot.
Yosemite Sam could have figured it out.
Some of this is about accepting bribes. A lot more is simply ideology.
Trump's people do not believe the IRS should exist and they are trying to dismantle it. DirectFile is just low hanging fruit, intended to make people more frustrated with tax filing and more easy to radicalized in an attempt dismantle and replace with tariffs.
Like, this is a real decades long project that goes way beyond Trump. Abolishing the income tax was Goldwater's wet dream.
It's a little late now, but don't forget that FreeTaxUSA is free for federal and cheap for state. Also much less annoying to use than Intuit TurboTax. They don't do those fake loading animations like "checking the best deal!" As if a computer can't do like a billion of those a second.
If I had to guess, this is a holdover from the 90s where people didn't trust a quick calculation, and probably doubted the application was properly choosing the standard or itemized deductions.
FYI if you live in Canada don't use TurboTax, use Wealthsimple(a Canadian company) to file your taxes.
EDIT: There are other companies as well that are Canadian that support CRA NETFILE. Can find all supported listed here. The list doesn't list which are fully Canadian so you'll need to do some digging to confirm. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/digital-services-individuals/netfile-overview/certified-software-netfile-program.html
And if you're in France, don't use TurboTax, use the official government website that calculates everything for you reliably every year :o
Million dollar is practically nothing for this kind of company, they will net billions from this.
Even their corruption is incompetent.
Historically senators and representatives side with companies who've only given them thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in contributions. It's very cheap to buy a vote.
Though often there's also the understanding that a career spent supporting them will be rewarded with a cushy, high-paying lobbying job once they leave politics. Or paid speaking gigs if you're the President.
It's not incompetent to give someone a penny and have them give you back $100. That's a great investment. So I would have to say their corruption is very confident if they can give a million dollar bribe and get back a billion dollars of revenue.
I meant that the administration (i.e. Trump) is incompetent for selling the country for pennies.
Intuit has been doing this for a long time, just in case anyone was wondering why $1 million seems like a low bribe. And it goes beyond preventing you from filing your taxes for free, with one of their goals being to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible, so you are too frustrated to do it yourself.
This if from a 2019 Pro Publica article:
But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.
For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”
Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.
I'll stick to FreeTaxUsa even if they charge me. Fuck Intuit.
Wait sorry what? Non-USian here, bear with me.
What does "program" mean here? Why is this program necessary to file your taxes for free? Do you guys have PAY to file your taxes if you don't use/apply/qualify for that program?? Am I misunderstanding what it means to "file" taxes? It's been a while since I was this confused by a US thing.
US tax code is (deliberately) complicated and unlike other countries, you need to manually fill out the forms with your financial data even though the government already knows it and what you owe (minus exemptions that the vast majority of citizens won't claim). This is because there is a major industry around tax preparation, and the big names (such as Intuit) have aggressively lobbied for decades to keep the process as complicated and inconvenient as possible so that people are forced to pay them to fill out their tax forms. This lobbying has also resulted in the legally mandated free filing options being buried and hard to find, with many people not even knowing they exist.
Tax prep is a huge scam with many billions of dollars behind it. Weather providers are probably going to be next in the news, since they've been trying to kill the free government-run forecasts and force people onto their paid platforms for just as long.
Free Tax USA is easy to use and free for federal, $15 for state. I used it last time. This time I filed for an extension because the IRS might be so gutted by October I won't even have to pay. And I owe a lot because I was a contractor for most of 2024.
Normally I have no problem paying taxes but this time it's different.
Definition: A system of services, opportunities, or projects, usually designed to meet a social need.
In this case, a digital service provided directly by the IRS, hence the name "Direct File." In contrast, filing by paper is still supported. Tax preparation businesses have been actively preventing the US filing process from being simplified, naturally because that's the reason they make money.
Funniest part is how they're bribing the government with the money they took from customers. Now they can take more money from customers, which is more money for bribes.
It also means they didn't need to charge customers the prices they charged, since they have enough money to operate their business and bribe politicians.
It's like, you're paying them to work against you.
So backwards, but that's by design. Don't be a useful idiot.
Turbo tax made 1.6 BILLION in income. And that's not enough. They need to lobby and change the landscape of the countries tax system to generate even more profit on top of the profit they already made.
This isn't capitalism anymore this is something else entirely. It's a metal disorder. A disease.
This isn’t capitalism anymore this is something else entirely.
That's the thing, it is capitalism. It's always been about those who have more exploiting those who have less.
The problem is this generation of workers has been duped into believing that corporate profits are a good thing, rather than an indication of workers getting taken advantage of.
It's all bass-ackwards by design. I stopped trying to find rhyme or reason and just settled on "most people are dumb as shit."
Put every manager of TurboTax in prison as a traitor.
Or just put a cap on donations and block corporate donations?
I think people have to understand that we've entered a different era. The rich have gotten richer and become insanely powerful and "the game" has gone on for so long all the rules have been slightly bend to allow them to become more rich and powerful. If you continue to "be sensible" and ask if you may nibble around the edges, all you get is fascism. It's inevitable. So first you have to destroy them and their power, then you can reform the system. Reforming the system now, even if you could, won't do anything.
If you know someone who works for one of these companies, you should ostracize them.
Stop giving free passes to people making our society worse.
I mean I feel like it depends on their role in the company. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing the work they do. I know at least a few people who work in billing for a healthcare company that don't want to do that work and understand it's bad but don't really have another choice as they couldn't get any other jobs. I'm not gonna blame someone for working at a bad company unless they're like an executive or other high up person who could take their skills to a different industry.
Anyone who advocates for ostracizing fellow workers indiscriminately is doing it in order to keep the working class bogged down in endless internal feuds instead of organizing. Solidarity is the only solution.
every time this comes up i am flabbergasted.
this year was my most complicated tax filing yet since i was involved in a bankruptcy, switched jobs, bought a house, contracted work on the house which was eligible for tax credit, and got an inheritance within the span of a few months. it took me almost 20 minutes to do, which was basically only because the tax agency don't package their various calculators in the pre-filled form and i had to double-check the credit thing.
it drives me mental, then i hear about "tax month" and i feel it could be worse.
I honest to God can't imagine how fucking cheap the price for them to make it so that people have to use their paid services... which will make them many, many times more than their bribe ever was.
It would be like if you paid me 1 dollar and I did something that would make you 200 or 300 dollars...
your political system is already based on legalized bribery and this is where you draw the line? lmao. Lobbying has destroyed america for a century.
This is from 1889. Literally nothing has changed. Go back 1000 years and it's the same fucking shit. Even 3000 years ago in Egypt. It's always rich vs everybody else just in different outfits.
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