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- Hacker News
- The Trump Administration is hell bent on doing everything it can to benefit large corporations at the expense of the American people.
Cash App offers free Fed and State filing and it's quite good (used it last year for the first time). Not many people know about it though.
- FreeTaxUSAby chneu
- If anyone's interested, the CashApp tax prep section (kind of its own app, but its contained within the CashApp app) is a feature they have purchased from CreditKarma when CreditKarma got bought out by Intuit (turbotax pricks).
So I had filed taxes with CreditKarma one year, and then the next year the CreditKarma tax service had no information about my previous filing. So I tried out the CashApp app, since I was going to have to fill out all the info anyway, and it actually did have my information from the previous year and I only had to change the new information, rather than re-enter all of my address and employer info, etc.
So I also recommend the CashApp app - it's free for basic taxes, it's not helping turbotax and their relentless lobbying, and it's really convenient if you already use CashApp. Of course, all of this is subject to change any specific year. Big companies gonna big company, after all.
by catapart - Why innovate when you can be a perpetual rentier?by sydbarrett74
- As long as they don't kill FreeFillableForms...by cozzyd
- by tinktank
- If they do, I'm filing paper. Clowns.by beej71
- It started requiring phone numbers and things and I stopped using it in favor of my own spreadsheet.by mixmastamyk
- I’m currently making my way through a video series on Ancient Rome. Apparently, there were times when Rome contracted out the right to collect taxes from certain regions. So businessmen would bid on this, and the winner then had a limited time when they could go out and collect the taxes. If they managed to collect more than what they paid for the bid, that was their profit. It’s easy to see how this was heavily abused, and these “publicans” were hated by the people. They’re even referenced in the Bible; “sinners and publicans”. How long before the IRS considers this arrangement?by impish9208
- Isn't it great to have a government that serves corporations and not its people!by voidhorse
- Corporations are people, my friend!
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310
by duskdozer - But corporations are peopleby croes
- noby tinktank
- Why won't a non-profit pick up the open-source code they released and modify it for 2026?
Everybody seems to care about this issue so much, so this feels like an extremely high-impact thing to do.
by miki123211 - Just because an org is non-profit doesn't mean that it isn't out for itself.by sharts
- There are already ways to file your taxes for free or very cheap, e.g. https://www.freetaxusa.com. It would be hard for anyone to compete with a free or very cheap competitor, even as a nonprofit.by sgerenser
- Paying a private company so you can pay the government.
You guys need to raise your expectations.
- Meanwhile in pretty much all other nations you go online to the free website, see your employer contributions already filled in and acknowledge they are correct for the year, add any extra income, check boxes for relevant deductions and you’re done.
- Remember, Americans have to file taxes separately to the State and Federal government. The Federal government has little authority to dictate State taxes. The paperwork is in part a coordination problem between the State and Federal governments.
Basic taxes are trivial in the US if you just work to live, it is essentially one page. However, there is an extremely long and fat tail where the government has no way of knowing the correct details to compute your taxes. There are myriad subsidies and offsets that have to be accounted for, many of which depend on what State you live in.
If you earn a lot of money, like the tech people that frequent this website, you are much more likely to find yourself in that fat tail. It can become esoteric quite quickly. The Federal tax code has to accommodate the completely independent tax codes of all 50 States in a reasonable way.
- Which is basically how it works here too. If you just have W-2 income from an employer it takes less than 10 minutes to fill out the form. Sure, the system you mention is more convenient, but the difference is minimal.
- Doesn't America have uniquely complicated tax that requires you to keep all your receipts to claim all sorts of confusing deductions? How can the IRS know what you spent your income on if you don't tell them?
I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice.
by foxglacier - Hating taxes is an intentional regressive system to ensure its complex and is politically expedient to "cut".by cyanydeez
- This is true even of some third world countries like Sri Lanka (where I live). There is a web-based system called RAMIS (Revenue Administration Management Information System). Any taxpayer can log in using their tax identification number and file their taxes.by hliyan
- Citizens United.
The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
by ryandvm - 1000%
- Yeah this needs to be the left wing "abortion" fight. Something we need to fight for 50 years before its finally overturned. Dont stop talking about it.by superxpro12
- Money well spent
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trum...
by jordanb - People could do a gofundme to get the bribe together if they wanted to get something done. Power to the people /sby barbazoo
- There's more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_q741QO_m0by thetallgeek
- I thought we were draining the swamp >:(by hypeatei