Tumgik
#turbotax
judgejudyofficial · 12 days
Text
Do not use TurboTax. There's a significant chance that you are being charged for something that this trusted website will do for free:
FreeTaxUSA
Turtbotax just tried to charge me ~more than I owed in taxes for freelance work~ to file.... girl what the fuck
104 notes · View notes
fantompebbles · 1 year
Text
That time of year is coming, and since I haven't seen the annual post yet: Taxes
If you're in the same income bracket as me (and let's be honest, we've been pretty good about chasing away the billionaires), you should NEVER use Turbotax
Turbotax pays a loot of money in lobbying to ensure that your taxes stay complicated, so that you have to use them to file your taxes. The thing is! The IRS has a webpage that helps you find a service to do your taxes for free! They aren't allowed to advertise it (Thanks Intuit), but it is the cheat code to make your April 15th so much easier.
Here is the IRS service
I have personally used FreeTaxUSA off of the IRS's recommendation and I highly recommend it.
Remember: Lobbying is Bribery under any other name, and the actions of Turbotax and other corporate lobbyists are contemptible. but at least taxes don't have to suck as much as they want it to
468 notes · View notes
Text
The IRS will do your taxes for you (if that's what you prefer)
Tumblr media
This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.
On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.
Tumblr media
America is a world leader in allowing private companies to levy taxes on its citizens, including (stay with me here), a tax on paying your taxes.
In most of the world, the tax authorities prepare a return for each taxpayer, sending them a prepopulated form with all their tax details — collected from employers and other regulated entities, like pension funds and commodities brokers, who must report income to the tax office. If the form is correct, the taxpayer signs it and sends it back (in some countries, taxpayers don’t even have to do that — they just ignore the return unless they want to amend it).
No one has to use this system, of course. If you have complex finances, or cash income that doesn’t show up in mandatory reporting, or if you’d just prefer to prepare your own return or pay an accountant to do so for you, you can. But for the majority of people, those with income from a job or a pension, and predictable deductions, say, from caring for minor children, filing your annual tax return takes between zero and five minutes and costs absolutely nothing.
Not so in America. America is one of the very few rich countries (including Canada, though this is changing), where the government won’t just send you a form containing all the information it already has, ready to file. As is common in complex societies, America has a complex tax code (further complexified by deliberate obfuscation by billionaires and their lickspittle Congressjerks, who deliberately perforate the tax code with loopholes for the ultra-rich):
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory
That complexity means that most of us can’t figure out how to file our own taxes, at least not without committing scarce hours out of the only life we will ever have to poring over the ramified and obscure maze of tax-law.
Why doesn’t the IRS just send you a tax-return? Well, because the tax-prep industry — an oligopoly dominated by a handful of massive, ultra-profitable firms — bribes Congress (that is, “lobbies”) to prohibit this. They are aided in this endeavor by swivel-eyed lunatic anti-tax obsessives, like Grover Nordquist and Americans for Tax Reform, who argue that paying taxes should be as difficult and painful as possible in order to foment opposition to taxation itself.
The tax-prep industry is dominated by a single firm, Intuit, who took over tax-prep through its anticompetitive acquisition of TurboTax, itself a chimera of multiple companies gobbled up in a decades-long merger orgy. Inuit is a freaky company. For decades, its defining CEO Brad Smith ran the company as a cult of personality organized around his trite sayings, like “Do whatever makes your heart beat fastest,” stenciled on t-shirts worn by employees. Other employees donned Brad Smith masks for selfies with their Beloved Leader.
Smith’s cult also spent decades lobbying to keep the IRS from offering a free filing service. Instead, Intuit joined a cartel that offered a “Free File” service to some low- and medium-income Americans:
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free
But the cartel sabotaged Free File from the start. They blocked search engines from indexing their Free File services, then bought Google ads for “free file” that directed searchers to soundalike programs (“Free Filing,” etc) that hit them for hundreds of dollars in tax-prep fees. They also funneled users to versions of Free File they were ineligible for, a fact that was only revealed after the user spent hours painstaking entering their financial information, whereupon they would be told that they could either start over or pay hundreds of dollars to finish filing with a commercial product.
Intuit also pioneered the use of binding arbitration waivers that stripped its victims of the right to sue the company after it defrauded them. This tactic blew up in Intuit’s face after its victims banded together to mass-file thousands of arbitration claims, sending the company to court to argue that binding arbitration wasn’t enforceable after all:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks
But justice eventually caught up with Intuit. After a series of stinging exposes by Propublica journalists Justin Elliot, Paul Kiel and others, NY Attorney General Letitia James led a coalition of AGs from all 50 states and DC that extracted a $141m settlement for 4.4 million Americans who had been tricked into paying for Turbotax services they were entitled to get for free:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/turbotax-to-begin-payouts-after-it-cheated-customers-new-york-ag-says/ar-AA1aNXfi
Fines are one thing, but the only way to comprehensively end the predatory tax-prep scam is to bring the USA kicking and screaming into the 20th century, when most of the rest of the world brought in free tax-prep for ordinary income earners. That’s just what’s happening: the IRS is trialing a free tax prep service for next year’s tax season:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/15/irs-free-file/
This, despite Intuit’s all-out blitz attack on Congress and the IRS to keep free tax-prep from ever reaching the American people:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/20/turbotaxed/#counter-intuit
That charm offensive didn’t stop the IRS from releasing a banger of a report that made it clear that free tax-prep was the most efficient, humane and cost-effective way to manage an advanced tax-system (something the rest of the world has known for decades):
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5788.pdf
Of course, Intuit is furious, as in spitting feathers. Rick Heineman, Intuit’s spokesprofiteer, told KQED that “A direct-to-IRS e-file system is wholly redundant and is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem. That solution will unnecessarily cost taxpayers billions of dollars and especially harm the most vulnerable Americans.”
https://www.kqed.org/news/11949746/the-irs-is-building-its-own-online-tax-filing-system-tax-prep-companies-arent-happy
Despite Upton Sinclair’s advice that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” I will now attempt to try to explain to Heineman why he is unfuckingbelievably, eye-wateringly wrong.
“e-file…is wholly redundant”: Well, no, Rick, it’s not redundant, because there is no existing Free File system except for the one your corrupt employer made and hid “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
“nothing more than a solution in search of a problem”: The problem this solves is that Americans have to pay Intuit billions to pay their taxes. It’s a tax on paying taxes. That is a problem.
“unnecessarily cost taxpayers billions of dollars”: No, it will save taxpayers the billions of dollars (they pay you).
“harm the most vulnerable Americans”: Here is an area where Heineman can speak with authority, because few companies have more experience harming vulnerable Americans.
Take the Child Tax Credit. This is the most successful social program in living memory, a single initiative that did more to lift American children out of poverty than any other since the days of the Great Society. It turns out that giving poor people money makes them less poor, which is weird, because neoliberal economists have spent decades assuring us that this is not the case:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset
But the Child Tax Credit has been systematically sabotaged, by Intuit lobbyists, who successfully added layer after layer of red tape — needless complexity that makes it nearly impossible to claim the credit without expert help — from the likes of Intuit:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc
It worked. As Ryan Cooper writes in The American Prospect: “between 13 and 22 percent of EITC benefits are gulped down by tax prep companies”:
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-05-17-irs-takes-welcome-step-20th-century/
So yes, I will defer to Rick Heineman and his employer Intuit on the subject of “harming the most vulnerable Americans.” After all, they’re the experts. National champions, even.
Now I want to address the peply guys who are vibrating with excitement to tell me about their 1099 income, the cash money they get from their lemonade stand, the weird flow of krugerrands their relatives in South African FedEx to them twice a year, etc, that means that free file won’t work for them because the IRS doesn’t actually understand their finances.
That’s a hard problem, all right. Luckily, there is a very simple answer for this: use a tax-prep service.
Actually, it’s not a hard problem. Just use a tax-prep service. That’s it. No one is going to force you to use the IRS’s free e-file. All you need to do to avoid the socialist nightmare of (checks notes) living with less red-tape is: continue to do exactly what you’re already doing.
Same goes for those of you who have a beloved family accountant you’ve used since the Eisenhower administration. All you need to do to continue to enjoy the advice of that trusted advisor is…nothing. That’s it. Simply don’t change anything.
One final note, addressing the people who are worried that the IRS will cheat innocent taxpayers by not giving them all the benefits they’re entitled to. Allow me here to simply tap the sign that says “between 13 and 22 percent of EITC benefits are gulped down by tax prep companies.” In other words, when you fret about taxpayers being ripped off, you’re thinking of Intuit, not the IRS. Just calm down. Why not try using fluoridated toothpaste? You’ll feel better, and I promise I won’t tell your friends at the Gadsen Flag appreciation society.
Your secret is safe with me.
Tumblr media
Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!
Tumblr media Tumblr media
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/17/free-as-in-freefile/#tell-me-something-i-dont-know
Tumblr media
[Image ID: A vintage drawing of Uncle Sam toasting with a glass of Champagne, superimposed over an IRS 1040 form that has been fuzzed into a distorted halftone pattern.]
176 notes · View notes
batboyblog · 2 months
Text
The IRS is testing out a free on-line direct tax filing system meant to replace for low and medium tax payers commercial tax preparation software, like TurboTax.
TurboTax in particular has long lobbied against this, and helped kill it under the Trump administration. But in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act President Biden signed the IRS was tasked with developing this system which mirrors what many of America's peers, like Japan and Germany do for taxes.
2024 will park a pilot program to test the system in a few states before going nation wide hopefully in 2025, if you live in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California or New York you may qualify, so check!
it almost doesn't need saying but I'll say it, this program will never make it nation wide if Trump is President in 2025.
13 notes · View notes
Text
youtube
TurboTax 2024 Super Bowl Sweepstakes & Commercial - The TurboTax Super Bowl File (Official Ad :45) - Directed by Taika Waititi
8 notes · View notes
alessandriana · 27 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Read the article here (free link)
10 notes · View notes
shamelesshomosexual · 11 months
Photo
Tumblr media
late night texts from turbotax
47 notes · View notes
preciousthingsdotnet · 6 months
Text
Tumblr media
5 notes · View notes
darrenpillowscriss · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
Pay us $40 so you can report the *checks notes* $40 you got for that day of jury duty you didn't want to do and are legally obligated to report as income.
16 notes · View notes
wearytaco · 1 year
Text
when are we gonna talk about the fact that in the United States you get taxed for not having health insurance?
13 notes · View notes
officialboredom · 1 year
Text
TurboTax these nuts
12 notes · View notes
lingonberry24 · 11 months
Text
Remember folks, if you haven't done your taxes yet - maybe reconsider who you use to do them, since TurboTax is a big reason why we have to do them in the first place.
5 notes · View notes
Text
Turbotax is blitzing Congress for the right to tax YOU
Tumblr media
Every year, Americans spend billions on tax prep services, paying a heavily concentrated industry of giant, wildly profitable firms to send the IRS information it already has. Despite the fact that most other rich countries have a far more efficient process, many Americans believe that adopting this process here is either impossible, immoral, or both.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/20/turbotaxed/#counter-intuit
That puts tax preparation in the same bucket as other forms of weird American exceptionalism — like the belief that we’re too untrustworthy to have universal healthcare, or that we’re so violent that we must all have assault rifles to protect ourselves from one another.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with how they do it in, say, the UK, here’s how it works: your employer submits all of your paystubs to the tax authorities; likewise the custodians of your pension and other people who send you money. The tax authority also knows about your major deductions, like your kids or other dependents.
The tax authority uses this information to fill in a tax return for you and they mail it to you. It’s simple and easy to understand. If they missed some information, or if your tax status has changed, or if you’ve got new deductions, you can amend this return — or throw it away and start over by yourself or with a tax professional.
For the vast majority of Britons, filing their tax returns takes a few minutes once a year, and it’s free. For the minority who don’t fit the standard form, the system works like it does in the US — you either tackle it alone, or do it with professional help.
The IRS could easily do the same thing. Even in a world where many of us are being “casualized” and have income coming in as independent contractors, the IRS knows about it, thanks to the 1099 form. Sure, the IRS might make mistakes, and if you’re worried about that, you can either manually review the precompleted return or pay someone to do it.
It’s a no-brainer, or it would be — if it wasn’t for decades of lobbying by the massively concentrated tax-prep industry — wildly profitable corporate giants like HR Block and Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, who spent 20 years lobbying congress, spending millions to ensure that Americans would have to pay the Turbotax tax in order to pay their income tax.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free
The tax-prep industry couldn’t have done this on their own — their astroturf campaigns were joined by a grassroots of useful idiots, betwetters like Grover Norquist and his acolytes, who openly demand that tax preparation be as difficult and painful as possible, to drum up support for their campaign to “get the US government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
These extremists are joined by many independent tax-prep specialists, who are seemingly convinced that every taxpayer has 11 dependents, four different kinds of pension savings, and six all-cash side-hustles, two of them international. Some people do have complicated taxes — as a writer with income from all over the world, I’m one of them — but most people don’t.
The point of getting the IRS to send you pre-populated tax returns isn’t to deny you the opportunity to pay excellent, knowledgeable tax-prep specialists if you need them — it’s to spare most of us from the needless expense of paying Intuit and HR Block to perform the rote form-filling by which the rake in billions in profits.
In reality, the campaign to defund the IRS isn’t — and will never be — about helping “the little guy.” As Propublica’s IRS Files demonstrate, the defunded, shriveled IRS is a billionaire’s plaything, which is why America’s top 400 earners pay less tax than you do:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022
The commonsense utility of the IRS supplying you with prepopulated returns is so obvious that the tax-prep industry has had to really work to hold it at bay. The most successful scam was Freefile, a program cooked up by the tax-prep cartel that claimed it would provide free tax-prep to low-income Americans.
Freefile was a literal fraud: Intuit and its co-monopolists used a raft of deceptive “dark patterns” to trick people — students, veterans, retirees, and the poorest among us — into paying for services that they were entitled to use for free. Almost no one managed to find and use the Freefile offerings they’d hidden in a locked filing cabinet in a disused subbasement behind a sign reading “Beward Of the Leopard.”
This was so obviously crooked that the companies were eventually forced to give it up, but they weren’t done — their eye-watering, voluminous terms of service contained buried binding arbitration clauses that prohibited the people they ripped off from suing them:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks
Despite — or, more realistically, because of — the rising fury at the tax-prep industry’s years of unchecked corruption, Intuit has actually increased its lobbying spending this year: Open Secrets reports that in 2022, Intuit showered lawmakers with a record $3.5m:
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/02/turbotax-parent-company-intuit-is-pouring-more-money-than-ever-into-lobbying-amid-push-for-free-government-run-tax-filing/
Their target? The $15m that the Inflation Reduction Act allocated to the Treasury Department to explore free tax filing. Intuit’s line is that this would be “a waste of taxpayer money” and a “conflict of interest” — the same tired boomer nonsense that Norquist has been shoveling since the Reagan administration. Once again, the proposal isn’t to ban Intuit from offering tax prep services — it’s to create a public option that lets people freely choose to pay for tax prep if they think they need it. It’s a breathtaking act of paternalism to claim that we’re all sheeple, too stupid to spot the IRS’s greedy attacks on our pocketbooks.
Here’s a choice quote from Intuit: “Creating a government run tax preparation program would be a waste of taxpayer dollars and further disenfranchise low income taxpayers. A direct to IRS tax prep system is a multi-billion dollar solution looking for a problem.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/turbotax-free-tax-filing-biden-inflation-reduction-act-hr-block-2023-1
Unsaid: the tax prep industry rakes in billions of dollars from American taxpayers every single year. The $44.8m the cartel has spent lobbying against free filing since 1998 is a fantastic investment — for them. The dividends they reap from it come out of all of our pockets.
Another bargain? Hiring ex-government officials to work for Intuit, lobbying their former colleagues:
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2022&id=D000026667&t0-Revolving+Door+Profiles=Revolving+Door+Profiles
Or, as Senator Elizabeth Warren bluntly put it, “adroit influence peddling”:
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/members-of-congress-call-for-an-investigation-of-intuits-lobbying-practices-amid-mounting-turbotax-controversies/
The neoliberal economists’ theory of regulatory capture is a kind of helpless nihilism, grounded in the Public Choice Theory doctrine that says that regulators will always be captured, so we should just get rid of regulators or make them as weak as possible, so they won’t become cordyceps-ridden puppets of the industries they oversee:
https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526
But capture isn’t inevitable. Sure, if you have a referee that’s weaker than the teams, you’ll never get a fair game — nevermind what happens when the ref either used to work for one of the teams or is sure of a cushy job with them when the season’s over. If you want a small government, you need small corporations — need to block the anticompetitive mergers and predatory conduct that lets companies grow so large that they can fit their regulators into the little change pocket in their blue-jeans.
https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e
Anyone who lived through witchhunts, torture and mass surveillance after 9/11 has good reason to want their government small enough to be accountable — but a doctrine of small governments and giant corporations is a plutocrat’s charter — a recipe for regulatory capture so grotesque it is indistinguishable from farce.
[Image ID: An ogrish, tophatted, cigar-chomping giant holds the US Capitol building aloft contemptuously, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of a white-gloved hand. He stands at a podium bearing the Turbotax checkmark logo, yanking a lever in the form of a golden dollar-sign. He stands before a IRS 1040 tax form.]
intuit, turbotax, irs, taxes, death and taxes, corruption, monopoly, freefile, grover norquist, regulatory capture,
139 notes · View notes
fairestopia · 1 year
Text
TurboTax can kiss my ass fr
3 notes · View notes
summonsunmoon · 2 years
Link
Today’s fic is Moondrop Beats you to Death for Tax Evasion. The title alone should tell you that this is a must read. Originally a oneshot, the fic surprise updated twice with increasingly baffling chapters.
What it’s about: Moondrop beats you to death for tax evasion.
Why you should read it: Moondrop beats you to death for tax evasion.
Notes: This fic contains dirty jokes, but nothing explicit actually happens between the characters.
14 notes · View notes
gwydionmisha · 1 year
Video
youtube
TurboTax's “Free” Services Got Them Sued
4 notes · View notes