This is a large reason why Prorepublica keeps digging at this - it’s fucking crazy actual free filing is going down while these paid shenanigan products are holding strong with their ginormous marketing budgets.
Is it really as simple as that? Budget trumps all?
With all due respect to the OP, most state run software operations are complete, utter, garbage. I'd happily pay money to avoid some of the clunky, poor UI/UX, and downright broken web tools that the state of California produces.
TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.
I personally think the Calfile UI is better than TurboTax for what it does. CalFile's UI isn't shiny and Web 3.0, but it is nice and linear and easy to understand. IMO TurboTax can get a bit weird if you skip around sections or need to manually look at the generated forms. CalFile doesn't have all the features that TurboTax does, like being able to say "I donated a microwave to charity, figure out my deduction". However I've found that the two actually work pretty well in conjunction with each other— do Federal taxes in Turbotax to figure out my deductions and get my W2 #s collected, then copy all that info into CalFile.
"but it is nice and linear and easy to understand"
I never wanted "linear". My ideal tax software just has the forms to fill out on screen, but applies all the constraints and rules so that the return is either consistent or you have a comprehensive list of discrepancies. And cascades any fields that can be derived from others. Really, just like a compiler for taxes.
I am tired of for-profit companies hamstringing government using bribes to representatives and funding lobbyists from delivering inexpensive or free services to citizens. If someone wants to pay TurboTax, that is fine. If someone wants to continue to support their efforts to stymie government from delivering said services for free, they should be tarred and feathered.
Intuit's tax products are regulatory capture, plain and simple, and deserve no defending.
Why are you solely blaming the companies? Are the government officials doing their jobs? If the government officials are being corrupt by accepting lobbying money and helping the corporations; they are as much (if not more) to blame for the situation as "for-profit companies". At least, for-profit companies exist to make a profit. The government, on the other hand, exists to defend the citizens.
Hm that's been a big issue for maybe 200 years. Should the government start its own companies? What happened to the free market? How does a 'free' government company respond to competition (since they have no pressure to be profitable)?
It's not a right to be free from competition from the government. The reason we allow corporations is so they can serve the public good, but if the public good would be better served by the government providing that service then there's no reason society shouldn't do that.
It seems to be working fine in every other country mentioned in this thread where government is free to provide free tax filing services. We do not need bullshit jobs at rent seeking companies that are glorified PDF generators. This is a government feature, not a product.
I'm going to say probably not. I've been pretty disappointed by the attempts of private industry to deliver what should be government infra (tax prep, healthcare, prisons, etc), while I'm super happy with my roads, police, fire, water, sewer, muni fiber, and the USPS (all government provided or backed).
I have 'volunteer' fire service out here in the country. And installed my own sewer. Police are essentially non-existent out here - I see a patrol car maybe once a year go by.
And the USPS has been going broke for decades now. Not a good example of a well-run service.
The only reason USPS has financial trouble is Congress mandated huge advance on payments for benefits many years into the future.
It runs excellently otherwise.
Congress did that. It's political. It can be undone.
Free market people want the USPS gone. Trouble is the Post Office is in the Constitution, must exist barring some Amendment, and must be run by the Federal Government.
None of those are bad things. The Post Office has been exemplary.
The trouble began during the Bush administration. Two things were done:
1. Rate changes that turn big bulk mailings for companies into a subsidy. Deep discounted rates. That was coupled with significant increases for ordinary people and smaller publishers. None of that made much sense.
2. Forced advanced payments on benefits. At the time it was done, there were people not even born yet, who would end up working for the Post, whose benefits were being paid now, basically.
USPS is a really well run service. They need to provide universal service, even to country folk at a loss, handle foreign parcels, etc. Most of their woes are created by a republican congress setting out a path for privatization. (Weather is next)
In terms of the self-reliant rural communities, you’re not factoring the very significant cost that the entire population pays to support your rural lifestyle. As agriculture continues to decline and consolidate, those externalities costs will continue to grow.
USPS requires Congressional approval to set rates (as well as pension funding requirements). Your complaint is with your representatives, not USPS itself.
It reminds me of the demonization of the IRS, they just carry out Congress' laws and funding. It's disingenuous when Congresspeople complain as they reduce their funding.
My complaint is with 'government-run businesses', which will always have such issues. It stems from not being responsible for efficiency or profitability.
I mean, honestly, yeah? I'd rather not my roads focus on being profitable. I'd really prefer the opposite of my police force focusing on being profitable. I'd really start freaking out if my voting system(the actual counting of votes) focused on turning a profit, and probably take to streets if my public schools were trying to profit off my children.
Efficiency, sure, what's inefficient about the USPS? I sent a package over my lunch break today, and my package delivery is 10x better delivered by a USPS mailperson than someone hired by amazon. (A USPS mailperson leaves a package at my door, but I've had packages from amazon thrown into my bushes, or dropped beside the street)
But USPS is focused on efficiency and profitability. They have streamlined many of their operations and created new profit making initiatives (e.g. Informed Delivery), all while having the mandate that mail cost the same from Alaska to Florida as from New York to DC. They just have the aforementioned budget burden to fund retirement funds no other organization, public or private, would ever bear upon themselves voluntarily. And they can’t set their own rates. And they have to deliver to every address once a day six days a week no matter what.
This is a strawman argument. Being "government run" does not automatically equate to being irresponsible or inefficient. Your complaint holds no water: Social Security and Medicare are incredibly efficient programs for their scale, and both wildly popular with their participants (per Pew Research as well as direct survey data from SSA and HHS). If they can achieve such results, why would other large orgs such as the IRS not? Rhetorical of course! They can, with proper political and logistical support (as has been seen with USDS/18F executing at the IRS, DHS, and VA).
I don’t know about social security but the claim that Medicare is more efficient than private insurers is not correct. It only appears to be so due to accounting procedures that do not expense services from other govt agencies on Medicare’s pnl. So for example, a different department of the government handles billing, all the costs therein are not included in Medicare’s bottom line, thus inflating its efficiency.
Medicare is still more efficient than private insurance, even allowing for Social Security handling a lot of the administration you mention. Social Security must exist, and must provide the services it does, so you would of course rely on their infra if you're Medicare.
it is telling that the only way you seem to judge entities is through the lens of efficiency and profitability on a short term basis.
could you please share your thoughts about internet access in the US of A? it seems that despite the best efforts of Saint Market, long may he reign, and all of this wonderful competition and efficient allocation of resources and so forth optimizing for short term outcomes has led to mediocre speeds and monopoly-ish behavior/choice in most areas.
or that Saint Market has led to pretty poor health outcomes in the USA despite spending massively amount more per capita than other nations
or that Saint Market's desire for profitability and efficiency leads them to, say, not replace lead pipes which ruin health of various communities (probably far away from yours, so it's OK .... for now)
it's almost like evaluating things based on extremely myopic criteria that people use to judge for-profit companies leads to outcomes that optimize for local maxima but are horrible when viewed from even slightly more far out, like, i dunno, a few years.
can you acknowledge that some things are best evaluated on performance outside of "profitability" and "efficiency" in the time span of 3 months?
Ok, how about cost overruns, administrative costs, technology upgrades and on and on? Its only as regards these things, that I regard profitability to be an important pressure.
Management responsible to the bottom line will sometimes improve those things. Management responsible to … I don't know what a government agency is responsible to? rarely upgrades, review, improves. It is axiomatic of government agencies that they exist for their own sake. And cost a bucketload of (our) money.
All of this /could/ be provided by the private market or by volunteers, but the things you're describing have a huge operational expense--especially in more rural areas. Something like tax software has more of a capital expense paid upfront. It doesn't cost significantly more if its widely used or used in more rural areas.
With taxes you're interfacing directly with the government; that's either as a citizen or Turbo Tax as a proxy for the citizen. To me, that seems more appropriate for the government to handle than fire, police, or sewer service. Whether it's the citizen or Turbo Tax, it costs money to implement Congress' tax code and build out a "UI" (tax forms). It still costs money to audit. So you're outsourcing one portion of the interface, you still have to build/maintain an e-file protocol, and you're doubling up on the auditing.
History bears this out as a band-aid. The program started in 2001 under GW because other countries already had online tax filing and engaging the private sector was seen as a way to "catch up" quickly. 20 years later it's still miserable for the average citizen and there are countless examples of other countries showing how much easier it can be.
This is misleading. The USPS has an operating budget of about $70 Billion dollars per year, and loses about $150 million per year as a result of lopsided "terminal dues" under the UPU. So about .2%, and not all of this is due to China. While there is legitimate fear that this loss will continue to increase, relative to their budget it is not "a massive amount of money". This link has more complete numbers: https://www.lawfareblog.com/withdrawal-universal-postal-unio....
I worked for a self-sustaining government entity for a few years. There was no direct appropriation, all funds re recovered via fees. We were able to compete successfully with commercial entities in a variety of ways.
A big advantage is overhead. If the work scales out, government employees get paid less, especially executives. The disadvantage was that you couldn’t make money to re-invest, and capitalizing new services was difficult.
.gov orgs get a lot of grief, but if you compare them to an average large company, they aren’t as awful as most people think.
I've worked in a private sector (publicly traded) fortune 500 company, a large government contractor, a non-profit state government subsidiary that was quasi-independent, and now for a state government.
My experience is that in the public sector, things often move slower, but the range of productivity seems to have a significant overlap with an average large company. I think the cost of nobody believing in what they are doing is an underappreciated drag on many private sector workplaces. The fact that failure is not an option in the public sector has several oft repeated negative consequences, but it also means that you have a reason for coming to work and making an effort, (other than not starving) even if nobody appreciates it, management is terrible, working conditions are lousy, pay is poor, co-workers are idiots, etc. That counts for something towards effectiveness, if there is a core group that hasn't descended into nihilism.
> How does a 'free' government company respond to competition (since they have no pressure to be profitable)?
The leadership of government organizations has pressure to get re-elected, or to get someone from their party elected.
I'm not sure whether you are simply ignorant how representative democracy is supposed to work, or whether you're feigning ignorance. Is it really so unfathomable that people might be motivated by something other than financial gain? Are we expected to take anything else you say seriously if this is the starting point of your ideology?
Is the vote of the election ever: "Can you make this one website that is messy better?". People are more focused on big issues and annoying software won't often make the platform.
The vote of the election isn't "Can you make this one website that is messy better?" because the politicians are incentivized to never let it get that bad.
One only has to take a look at the Obama administration's apparent panic over healthcare.gov to see this at work. When it wasn't going well, it very much was a political issue at the forefront of political conversation.
> TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.
For this tax year I used TurboTax. I have a relatively simple return, but editing stock sales was extremely tedious and I was constantly upsold on random products when I just wanted to go to the e-file page.
One example where it worked well before and became a complicated mess now: for some deductions you need answer a lot of questions just for it to tell you that you are not eligible because of your income. Why not to check this in the very beginning?
If they told you sooner that you weren't elligible, your return would be lower, and maybe you'd feel you could "get more back" by using a different tax preparation program, but at the juncture where you're told it isn't possible, you already feel more invested in using Turbotax and ultimately filing with it.
I file my taxes in Australia using a government-run web application. It's not perfect (like all big government systems it has outages, etc etc) but I can't really complain about it, it's more than adequate to get the job done and I certainly wouldn't want to pay for something that's only marginally better. There's a few UX tweaks which would be nice but it's fine, really.
For number 2 can you import fed return with calfile?
IRS free returns going down too so you are not alone: https://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/Free_File_Program_Is_Failin...
This is a large reason why Prorepublica keeps digging at this - it’s fucking crazy actual free filing is going down while these paid shenanigan products are holding strong with their ginormous marketing budgets.