You have to pay... to file your taxes? Just American things, I suppose...

Not only do you pay, you pay taxes on paying (sales tax).

No, they paid a service to do some of the more fiddly work for them.

I use the same service, but for just federal, and they are upfront about state filings costing $15 rather than surprising you at the end like Intuit/TurboTax.

No you pay to prepare your taxes. Inuit and a CPA have more thorough questions for more complicated tax situations. Nothing stops you from using the paper form and sending it through the mail.

You guys can not just fill out online forms from the gov. to submit taxes? And I thought Germany was bad because it was online but about 5 to 10 pages and then wait 2 months for the agency to check.

Happy I live in Romania now where it is basically 1 form with between 1 (company/cap gains) and 5 (lots of extra income) lines to fill out (and 80% of people don't need to fill anything), submit and get your owed taxes in about 5 minutes.

We can fill out online forms for free. I do it every year. The service is on the sketchy looking freefilefillableforms.com

For most people just receiving a check from an employer, they'd just need to fill out one short form. For more complicated situations, that site has the other forms you need, and some of them are set up to auto-calculate values across forms.

No, you don't have to pay to file your taxes. You can pay to hv someone else do your taxes for you. The tax code is so screwed up, that it can be difficult to figure everything out yourself; but, you can. I've always done my own taxes.

The only "automation" I now use is an Excel spreadsheet, put out each year, for free, by Glen Reeves, (https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home/chan...)

you do not have to pay. you can do it for free by yourself. there is just a lot of papers, and the language used is confusing to people and they choose to get assistance.

Any person smart enough to work in tech (like the majority of HN community) can teach themselves how to understand that supposedly confusing language and file taxes themselves.

Any person who do not is just valuing their time more than the cost of tax preparation services. FWIW, I only spend about four hours every year doing my taxes myself. Which is less than the time needed to research a tax preparation service, communicate with them, and then check the results.

Do you have investments in stocks and index funds?

I trade stocks, ETFs, options (mostly section 1256 contracts which are easy to report), and I have rental property.

+1 on that... I had a complicated ISO options situation once, and that was the only time I used a tax advisor to help me take the return over the finish line. The only mistake in my taxes was in what tax advisor did; I was able to figure it out by reading the official IRS doc a week after filing. Luckily it didn't change the amount owed, the income was just in a completely wrong field according to the doc.

The docs are pretty well written...

I have limited experience with US tax, I lived there only one year. Everybody strongly recommended to have someone do it for me because it's complicated. Turned out it wasn't that complicated. Slightly more so than in my country where everything is pre-filled and you just sign.

I'm probably stereotyping here, but I noticed Americans are more willing to pay for a service, where Europeans are more penny-pinching and don't see why they should pay for something they can do themselves. I guess American love their businesses, where we see them sometimes suspiciously.

Americans have stories of the consequences, which are very inconvenient

Your one year of living there exempted you from that

What consequences? The IRS sends you a nice letter saying you underpaid. You agree with them and pay them. End of story.

It's not like you are using questionable deductions and barely legal maneuvers. Be honest in the first place. Tell them you made an honest mistake.

Ive been audited twice for unrelated reasons. The IRS sends you a letter asking you for additional information and how to submit it. Its not even strongly worded

Very inconvenient, I know.

the stories are inconvenient not necessarily the reality

that and most Americans dont have the budget to pay or hire someone to challenge if theyre worried about how to do additional filings

anything and everything that can have a bloodsucking rentier in front of it, does. And they have way more lobbying dollars than us rubes.

But it doesn't make any sense. I understand renters banking on realty, 'cause there are just so many land and buildings and making more buildings is expensive and complicated. But tax filing is just a software. Nowadays we teach kids in schools to write software.

They aren't being taught the tax code, though, and guess who lobbies against simplifying the tax code?

If you set up to create a tax filing online service for regular consumers, you'll likely get your company bought out by Intuit before you can make significant market impact... Fine outcome for the founders personally, but Intuit really doesn't want the status quo to change.

What CPA charges TurboTax prices? I'm talking "standard" TurboTax, not with all the ridiculous upsells that you don't need.

I agree with everyone that it should be a completely unnecessary product, but I don't feel that it is excessively expensive for what it does.

not sure what TurboTax charges, but I pay $70 for fed , state, and local prep and filing.

lockhouse, If you want your account deleted, please email the HN admins rather than posting the same comment over and over.

The email address is at the bottom of every page.

Thanks, done!

I still think it's wrong that HN needs my email address to delete accounts and comments, but yes I finally broke down and did this their way.

I'll miss the good parts of this community, but the selective moderation and toxic flag-or-downvote-truths-i-dont-like-instead-of-discuss-them parts of the community have ruined this site for me.

Last year was first year using FreeTaxUSA.

> FreeTaxUSA

> $15 total

Sounds like a scam to me.

FreeTaxUSA is free for federal tax returns, and the $15 charge for state taxes is displayed right on the home page.

In WA it’s free because no state taxes. You can pay money for consulting or for being sent a printed or more expensive binded copy of your return. I’ve used it for 5 years now maybe. So I feel comfortable knowing they have a revenue stream and when I did my due diligence when I started using them a while ago.

I should probably figure out how to get notified if they get acquired or something though.

The real scam is TurboTax charging over $100 for software that has a fixed yearly cost for development and a negligible cost for distribution and is used by millions.

Just wait until you find about digital media distribution.

Well, it's not.

you'd be wrong. I've used it for 3 years in a row with zero issues.

I've only done my taxes with FreeTaxUSA, but I think I'll have to pay up for TaxSlayer for this year's taxes because FreeTaxUSA don't support a specific state form I need to file to save me money (Annualized income installment method for calculating estimated taxes). I did message FreeTaxUSA about supporting that about 2 years ago because I knew I was going to need it at some point.

That's too bad. State tax return forms are the worst. A lot of states don't have the resources to fine-tune their form design, and the instructions are often poorly written.

Do they support importing brokerage statements yet?