Thank God that they did it in house, instead of giving a contract to Accenture!
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41737653
But will it support Login.gov?
I’ll wait for other people to test it.
Just curious, are you worried about anything in particular?
it getting hacked is probably the top concern. if an attacker can access my information on that site, they can steal my identity and conveniently also know exactly how much that identity is worth stealing. Not that not using the system is any guarantee that I'll be safe either. my data's already been leaked by Equifax so I'm expecting someone will try something eventually. scammers have already tried calling my mom, telling her I'm in the hospital but fortunately she was able to call me and I was able to say that I wasn't.
which is to say, that worry shouldn't stop anyone from trying their site.
'taxes' is a 4... erm, 5 letter word for some; almost taboo.
Right, but given the choice between the agency that decides whether you did your taxes correctly and a for profit company, why would you choose the latter?
Because the agency which decides whether I did my taxes correctly is likely going to have terrible UX and has an incentive to hide options for me to save on taxes?
I pay private agents all the time to avoid having to deal with terrible governments interfaces and find shortcuts, wins for me.
As opposed to the terrible UX of the for profit companies that have been providing the same services for years? For most people, the cost of TurboTax is higher than whatever mystical savings they might "find".
I'm not in the US but in the UK and Estonia private accounting solutions are really good. Eg. I'm a huge fan of https://freeagent.com/
The problem is with your own government accepting bribes to keep things complicated and preventing new competing companies to enter the market, lowering costs and improving the experience.
> Filing taxes is surprisingly complex, thanks in part to the lobbying efforts of Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, which in 2016 alone reportedly spent $2 million on lobbying to keep the tax code complicated. It’s not just Intuit, either. ProPublica reports that H&R Block spent $3 million lobbying in 2016, some of it on the same effort.
What makes you think that a division of the federal government is going to get it right the first time? I'm being serious (not snarky). Have you ever worked with the federal government? I have (as a contractor) and I was constantly amazed (not in a good way).
It's literally not their first time. It launched for tax year 2023.
I still wouldn't use it this early.
I completely agree. I pay like 80 or 90 bucks a year to file with TurboTax and can afford to pay that for a few years while the kinks are worked out on the IRS system.
Just use FreeTaxUSA. It does everything TurboTax does and costs nothing except for state filings. Stop giving intuit your money so they can lobby to continue making the tax code complicated…
It always amuses my how indoctrinated Americans are.
Put another way, if spending maybe $100, maybe even a couple hundred bucks, might save you thousands, is it really that bad of an idea? For the first few years?
TurboTax has never saved me hundreds let alone thousands.
What i’ve found delusional is the amount of duplicative entry of data by individuals that’s already been submitted to the tax agency electronically by employers and finance firms.
At least in Canada for the last couple years, our tax software can download all that from the tax agency and plug that into your forms automatically. And for most people, that’s all the info there is.
There aren’t a lot of “elections” or “decisions” to actually make when filing.
And there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t happen automatically because you •could• have the same investments across multiple brokers, but that’s not the majority either.
Obamacare Website Tips - SNL
The USDS, which helped build this site, was literally started because of the embarrassing launch of healthcare.gov. And as the article states, the test launch for tax year 2023 went extremely smoothly.
It was tested last year.
Good