The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced

Was the US so behind that they didn't have a way to file taxes online for free?

Oh that's awesome. I hope it can still be accepted by the IRS for the future (if we still have one in ~3 years) but it would be neat to just be able to have an open standard for online filing.

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

really good article with a couple surprises in there.

"some people speculated that, because of the political pressure against it, its release must have been an act of resistance by someone within the IRS. But the open sourcing of the program was always part of the plan, and was required by a law called the SHARE IT Act. It happened “fully above board, which is honestly more of a feat!,” Given told 404 Media. “This has been in the works since last year.”

Vinton told 404 Media in a phone call that the open sourcing of Direct File “is just good government.”

“All code paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open source, available for comment, for feedback, for people to build on and for people in other agencies to replicate. It saves everyone money and it is our [taxpayers’] IP,” she said. “This is just good government and should absolutely be the standard that government technologists are held to.”"

It's licensed under CC0 to anyone wondering. BSD 0-Clause would probably be better but still fantastic.

What happened to the title of this?? Jeez

I got told I couldn't get a tax return because they flagged me for potential fraud, so I have to go to ID.me to verify.. but then my account got banned while trying to verify my information.

Fml

Repo: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

TurboTax owned buy intuit, part of H&R block who has partnered with credit karma. Everything is a monopoly now

It's already got 4 PRs

lol

Unless it's maintained it won't be of much use. It needs to be kept up to date with tax laws, and it relies entirely on the IRS accepting the generated returns. It seems it may function for now, though.

Direct File interprets the United States' Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) as plain language questions, the answers to which should be known to taxpayers without need of external instructions or publications. Taxpayers' answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS's Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use

The more money you pay someone to find the loop holes in the tax code the less likely you are to support out government and its war machine.

Suck a bag of dicks, TurboTax

HA get fucked turbotax

THIS is the way.

Archive of the full article: https://archive.ph/6qJ6v

hahahahahaha!