IS REALLY TURBOTAX 2015 FREE FREE
Should you disagree with this figure, you would be free to fill out your taxes using the regular form. If you decided to participate, you would automatically receive your refund or a letter explaining any additional tax you owe.
We call it the return-free system, and it would be totally voluntary. We envision a system where more than half of us would not even have to fill out a return. The Obama administration supported return-free filing, and Ronald Reagan touted the idea in a 1985 speech: You could even conceivably extend it to many itemizers mortgage lenders already send out 1098 tax forms listing interest paid over the year, and the IRS could mandate that charities do the same for tax-exempt contributions. Austan Goolsbee, former chief economist for the Obama administration, designed a proposal called "The Simple Return" in 2006 that would provide pre-populated returns for everyone not itemizing their deductions. California has a voluntary return-free filing program called ReadyReturn for its income taxes.Īnd there are serious plans for adopting this idea nationwide. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have exact enough tax withholding procedures that most people don't have to file income tax returns at all, whether pre-populated or not. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Chile, and Spain already offer "pre-populated returns" to their citizens. This isn't a purely hypothetical proposal. If I'm not itemizing deductions (like 70 percent of taxpayers), the IRS has all the information it needs to calculate my taxes, send me a filled-out return, and let me either send it in or do my taxes by hand if I prefer. When my bank sent me a 1099 telling me how much interest I earned on my savings account in 2017, it also sent one to the IRS. When Vox Media sent me a W-2 telling me how much it paid me in 2017, it also sent an identical one to the IRS. The main advantage of TurboTax is that it can import these forms automatically and spare you this step.īut here's the thing about the forms: The IRS gets them too. To fill out your 1040, you gather all these together and copy the numbers in them onto the 1040 form. There are W-2s listing your wages, 1099s showing miscellaneous income like from one-off gigs, etc. The actual work of doing your taxes mostly involves rifling through various IRS forms you get in the mail. Why the government should just do your taxes for you This requires privileging your own long-term interests ahead of your short-term ones it's mildly annoying to do your taxes by hand for now, but in the long run, if the plan works, you won't have to do your own taxes at all. The best way to escape this trap is for millions of taxpayers to start doing their own taxes in hopes of weakening Intuit and H&R Block and depriving them of money they could use to lobby against auto-filing. To do so is to perpetuate the status quo in which you have to file your own taxes in the first place. The main reason? Lobbying from Intuit and H&R Block.ĭon't give Intuit money. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. Years ago, the Obama administration proposed a system of automatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. Worse than that, Intuit is one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. TurboTax is an evil, parasitic product that exists entirely because taxes are confusing and hard to file.
But for the love of God, don't give Intuit money. If you want to use a free version of TurboTax or H&R Block at Home or Credit Karma Tax or TaxAct, go wild. Let me be blunt: You should not pay for TurboTax.
Its competitors do pretty well for themselves too, with H&R Block preparing 20 million return s last cycle and millions more using TaxAct and TaxSlayer. You wouldn't be alone Intuit, the company that sells TurboTax, claimed in 2016 that the app has 31 million users. It's tax season again, and that means you're probably thinking about using TurboTax.
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