alt Hacker NewsI cannot see how Turbotax survives the oncoming AI Coding freight train. All the information is out there.
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An accountant does our taxes now, but up until a decade or so ago I was always impressed that I could file taxes and all necessary forms, for myself and my small business with dozens of employees, all using the $25 version of TurboTax.
It's been popular to dump on TurboTax for several years now, but I had a great experience using it.
I personally don't trust AI enough to say "here's my data, please do my taxes for me" yet, but you're right, I suppose that is just a matter of time...
1. Commercial lobby: Intuit/TT, tax preparers, firms that benefit from confusion
2. Political/ideological lobby (less today but still a factor): Grover Norquist railed against return-free filing (using the data they’ve got government sends you a number to pay, if you pay it you are 100% done with taxes no takebacks.)
Commercial lobby is an irritant but the “ideological” one is the most annoying and difficult to surmount.
Norquist & his camp says the government/IRS has fundamental conflict of interest as the collector and enforcer and taxpayers won’t bother to correct government calculation mistakes on their taxes. If there’s a real appeal process doing all the old-school recordkeeping there probably wouldn’t ever be a shortage of taxpayers eager to challenge/contest and file with their own paperwork.
Norquist and friends need taxes to remain a PITA & have high hassle factor for their fundraising and advocacy efforts. If taxes are too easy these people won’t have much political purchase railing against how annoying/$$ it is to pay taxes.
Idk anything substantive about tax policy (ie who should pay what share, best use of $$, etc I’ll leave to the “professionals”/political system) but just as an end user who uses tax prep services it sure seems like there is a concerted effort by people economically & ideologically incentivized to make taxes as annoying as possible
- https://atr.org/senate-conservatives-speak-against-return-fr...
- https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california...
- https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
I'm definitely planning on using AI and FreeTaxUSA.com this year to file taxes. I've used them before and I've been very happy. Last year I had a fairly complicated tax setup because of my wife's business, and had a neighbor accountant do the taxes for a really reasonable price, but he sent out a letter that he's retiring, and my wife's not doing that business this year.
I can usually do it in a couple hours while watching TV, but I'm interested in seeing what AI can bring to it. Most of my taxes are just copying numbers from one form into the web interface and verifying everything.
Having to copy data from a form that was filed with the IRS, into another form that is going to be filed with the IRS, is idiotic.
It's not like the tax code was secret, or like their application isn't a pile of dogshit.
They survived and will survive based on marketing.
Will not shed any tears if Turbotax doesn't make it.