I wanted to electronically file my own taxes last year instead of paying turbotax or an actual accountant.
While my situation isn't particularly complex (but complex enough that I did need help from an accountant the first times), none of the free filing services online (IRS FreeFile included) offered the more complex forms I need.
"Not a problem!" I thought. Except, even if I could download the forms from the IRS and do all the work myself, I could not for the life of me find a way to electronically submit (and had to hire my accountant again).
Is it possible in the US to electronically file your own taxes?
A few coworkers and I were able to point a combination of Fable and Astra at our statements and compute our federal and state taxes. They seem to understand W-2 income, K-1 partnership income, rental income, brokerage accounts, backdoor Roth rollovers, and late-payment penalties 100%? I even sanity-checked mine against an accountant's work this year and the numbers agreed; it even flagged that I was eligible for first-time penalty abatement, something my accountant did not. I don't think I'm going to pay for an accountant for taxes again unless my finances become substantially more complicated.
Once you're confident in the federal tax calculation, you can point Claude at Free Fillable Forms through Chrome's remote-debugging port and e-file your taxes that way. Most states (all states?) don't have an equivalent. Some of us did Claude + computer use + Turbotax Premier. Some of us did Claude + Chrome remote debugging port + FreeTaxUSA. It sometimes helps to do both Free Fillable Forms and shell out $20 for FreeTaxUSA just so another calculator can check your work. But, again, Fable/Astra's numbers were accurate. They certainly made errors along the way, but if you can handle the fatigue of reading LLM English and patiently answering every little question the models come up with (if I was good at skimming text before this year, I certainly am now), you can probably prompt them into doing your taxes.
At the very least it's good to run them on your previous taxes. Fable found a $1500 overpayment on last year's taxes. My accountant last year was terrible, and this was no shock. The true test will be whether the amendment I had Claude fill out will yield a real check from the IRS twelve months from now (paper filings take forever), and whether I get audited in future years when I'm no longer relying on an accountant.
My suggestion is to accept the status quo of American tax filing, while in the meantime continue to bother your representatives about it.
If your taxes are complicated enough that you need to pay, just pay.
This will come across as a product plug, but FreeTaxUSA is a lot better than TurboTax and provides 100% of the featureset for free for federal taxes, and charges $16 for state filing. The UI and interface is also way better than the hostile design of TurboTax.
It is technically possible to use Free Fillable Forms but it realy isn't worth saving $16. You will easily burn multiple hours of extra time compared to something like FreeTaxUSA.
When this repo was first discussed a year or so ago I remember it being stated that the answer is "no" unless you qualify for the IRS free file program
When I read these and the related stories I am thankful I live in a country where you don't even need to file taxes. Virtually all income is reported to the tax authorities, so they will calculate a tax rate for you and you rarely need to make adjustments if your income is stable and regular.
Only when I need to make some surprise deductions (e.g. purchasing work-related literature, deductible by law here up to some sum) or for some reason the payer of income is not reported to the tax authorities. Or when the income falls short of what was projected for that year (e.g. unpaid leave, getting fired, changing to jobs to a lower salary (it happens) etc.), or there is a surprise bonus and so on. Normally I do not need to anything.
Let’s say I rent a spare bedroom my home to someone; who’s going to report that income if not me?
If your income is actually fully reported to the IRS (W-2 or various 1099) filing taxes is a breeze anyways. Use one of the several free (as in beer) software to take a picture of your forms and it generates the right form that you can submit electronically to the IRS.
Every transaction is electronically recorded since last month in France to simplify those cases. It created a few issues for small landlords (needed to update contracts, but it was easier to resign a new one for those who didn't have a legal team or legal support), which is not great, but it will simplify their tax papers from now on. It might be an issue for landlords who skimmed off the top of their multi-tenant houses, and for the few businesses who still refuse card payment and only accept cash (my cheesemonger was a bit salty about it).
> Let’s say I rent a spare bedroom my home to someone; who’s going to report that income if not me?
How many people are in this situation? Or have other forms of income that are not part of their full-time job payroll? I know I don't, and most of my personal circle.
Even if 'only' 50% of the population is covered by the situation of having solely one income via payroll, that's still half the country not having to faff about with tax forms or tax software.
Like half my neighbors have some part time work that results in income they need to report themselves (mostly taking care of pets or horses or cleaning houses) and the other half let RVs stay on their property for rent. I live in a rural area but it seems really strange to me that you would expect all income to come with a W2. Basically everyone I know has at least some "peer to peer" income that involves no middleman or business.
Now on the other hand I have no idea how many of those people are properly reporting their income. Some definitely do but I suspect many don't.
Why would anyone doing that bother? The sum total of all your neighbor's income, not even the taxes theoretically required, is a rounding error compared to the taxes Musk isn't paying.
As long as we are trading anecdotes, well I’d say it is extremely common among my circle. Young tech employees bought oversized houses expecting them to appreciate, and rent out extra bedrooms to help pay their mortgage.
Okay so you obviously live in a country with a far different system. The U.S. tends towards a “trust but verify” approach. Both systems have their positives and negatives
The impression I get is the US tends towards a "protect the lobby income streams" approach. Specifically related to taxes: the IRS has the majority of the information it needs to just send you a tax bill/credit. And cases where they don't can be rectified by submitting that information which isn't (like rental income, which AFAIK you are supposed to be reporting and paying quarterly taxes on anyway).
The reason they don't seems to largely be that the tax prep industry has lobbied to keep it from happening, and shut down "free file" by the IRS.
You add that manually to your prefilled forms. In countries that have automated these things, there are often even wizards that ask you to confirm such things before you can approve and send the prefilled forms. Tax authorities put together as much as they can from their sources and you only have to add the missing parts, if there are any. And done.
I hate Intuit and support IRS free online filing. I know their lobbying and am proud that I have never paid a single cent to Intuit. I just don’t think tax reporting should be what OP describes: the taxpayer does nothing. It makes tax evasion far too simple for the multitude of the income unknown to the government.
I supported and continued to support Obamacare. Your insinuation is a rude non sequitur.
> When I read these and the related stories I am thankful I live in a country where you don't even need to file taxes. Virtually all income is reported to the tax authorities, so they will calculate a tax rate for you and you rarely need to make adjustments if your income is stable and regular.
Which country?
In my experience, Americans put a very high bar on governments, hence the multiple complaints you keep seeing, but the actual system is way simpler than most EU countries.
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...
That said, there's basically nothing stopping someone from creating fee software equivalent or better than TurboTax from scratch using AI. They can even decompile TurboTax source code as an input
These already exist though: FreeTaxUSA (http://freetaxusa.com), or if you prefer Turbotax itself, there's Credit Karma Tax (https://www.creditkarma.com/tax), which is a free, white-labelled version of Turbotax.
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
The people to blame for complicated taxes are Congress and the President. Over time Congress slips in all sorts of special taxes and special exclusions to support their interest groups. The last time there was a concerted effort to simplify the tax code was 1986 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986 .
Critics of the 1986 Tax Reform Act said, why bother simplifying the tax code when Congress will just make it complicated again? The response was sure, we'll just need to clean up the tax code again every 20 years or so. Well that's never happened since.
In 2017 many in Congress wanted to simplify the tax code. Unfortunately Trump said he didn't want to simplify taxes, he just wanted to lower them. As one great example, some folks wanted to eliminate the State and Local Tax deduction (SALT), which is a complicated deduction. (Example: You file federally based on "estimated" state and local taxes, but if you get a refund or owe state and local taxes, the next year you have "adjust" your prior year's deduction.) Instead of eliminating them, the 2017 tax bill just phased them out at higher income levels, which just adds complexity to an already complex part of the tax code.
Certainly the act of filing one's taxes can be made a bit simpler, but it seems there's never any incentive behind actually simplifying the tax code itself, because every tiny change to the tax code creates winners and losers who object.
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.
Wikipedia in its early days was not a high quality source of information. Assignments citing Wikipedia were graded F, no one trusted the information there, etc etc.
Now look at it! It's a key data source for humans AND AI. When did the flip happen? How did it happen?
Your views on vibecoding are going to become wrong similarly: gradually then all at once.
So keep looking for the signs and be ready to change your views - it'll happen fast to vibecoding too.
It shouldn't. It's not Wikipedia's project to be a source. You should use it as a good entry point to whatever topic you're researching, and use the cited sources. (and sure, acknowledge Wikipedia, but it's not a source)
That's what you should be doing, especially if you want to claim to be an authoritative source yourself, you need to play the knowledge provenance game.
Everyone else that just need information for practical reasons? Wikipedia has long proven its stochastic guarantees are more than enough.
(Even if you need to cite primary sources in the end, it makes more sense to go with Wikipedia early on, and track back the sources for citation once whatever you're working on pans out.)
I used Claude for my taxes last year. It was fine.
Previously, I used Free Fillable Forms which does force me to know more about tax forms than a more abstract software program. Most people's tax situation does not change very much year to year so it's fairly easy to verify - you can check if my tax return looks fairly similar to the previous year taking into account any differences.
If you have a substantially different year for whatever reason, sure get an accountant to double check. But if you're paying for an AI frontier agent, there's really no need to pay for a 3rd party program anymore.
I was thinking of making an open source engine for tax rules that could take all your financial documents locally and produce a tax filing with your own agent. Something like direct file but done for you and open source so you don't need to give all your data to someone else.
It can be done, working on it right now :) I would say the hard part is validating that it's correct (you need a corpus of verified returns), and the actual act of filing still requires manual effort.
My initial runs though show that you need a medium beefy setup to be able to get accurate results. Anything less than Gemma4 31b and you get some input document hallucinations.
This is great that this is out there. I've been working on making an agent based experience that helps you put together your whole return or make an estimated return based on future assumptions and solving for the federal tax code has been a very token expensive operation!
I'm going through their engine as well and validating mine. My engine is built to include the CA tax code also.
The biggest reason that turbo tax and the other companies survive though is that in order to allow efile you have to be a registered agent and that process is crazy expensive and difficult.
I'd be tempted to try something similar for this season. But this is what I generally pay HR Block for; they should be relatively vetted (granted i don't know this for a fact).
like do you have tax accounting experience or do you intend to have someone who does help validate test returns to make sure they look right?
1) I've built the engine and tested it based on CPA or externally reviewed real returns. You can see that in the scenario tests
2) I also have a mechanism for people to test the engine against their previous returns privately and then send bug reports of something wrong
The engine currently only works for 2025 because the 2026 documents aren't out yet from the irs.
There is also definitely a place as well in the tax world for general estimates. For example calculating the tax consequences of a stock sale or iso exercise can get really complicated without a system and cost $800+ with a CPA to do.
In Brazil, we can send our "IRS" (IRPF) via internet since 1995
It used to have a .jar app that runs on windows/Linux/mac, but now we have android/iOS app, and also online via browser too.
Isn't that because Trump killed the directfile program immediately after taking office? Presumably to make sure he is not remembered for doing anything positive.
As an EU person who lived in US for quite some years, I always found it funny when my fellow Americans were laughing at European technological backwardness, only to be reminded about their admin services being basically still from the 90s/00s.
Not the same level. US problem is lack of centralization. This was majestically exemplified with the COVID vaccines certificates which were a piece of paper, because they simply could not agree on FDA owning the complete database. That piece of paper did not even have a stamp on it... Meanwhile the EU had Android/iPhone compatible wallet entries, dynamically refreshed.
Giving an agent a folder of your pay stubs / 1099s / everything for the year and telling it to “file my taxes for me” without all the messing about would be great.
I’m assuming with browser control it would already do a good job of this by driving turbo tax etc. but there’s probably a way to cut them out entirely.
Obviously you’d want to check it over, but 90% of the work for me is working around turbo tax jank / manually entering info when it fails to parse things or can’t auto link to an institution properly. An LLM steering a browser could easily do all that.
True. I’d do it though in the assumption I can delete the session when done so they’d only have that data for a short time period.
And under the assumption that deleting a session actually deletes your data from their systems. Claude tells me that it would be fully deleted within 30 days unless flagged for legal reasons. I’d be ok with that.
I am. For free too! open source and local model capable (albeit most small models and hardware setups can't do it yet). I have some evals provided on document ingestion.
Of course even with software the government can't help itself but produce a degenerate amount of documentation that you have to parse through before doing anything. I really hope AI helps out in this regard, i.e. they should train their own models or fine tune one to produce correct answers almost always. Then it's a matter of following the AI instructions. Of course that's probably too good and efficient for the US government.
> because this is the first pull request and something many people will see, I would like to say that I learned from a former project manager at the IRS that development on Direct File has stopped since January. the source code is only public because of federal law. it's not likely that this is going to be merged but it's possible that the components of Direct File might be used elsewhere
I wouldn't be surprised . I worked as a developer placed at a state government agency. Many of the people who worked there seem to have no natural drive to do good work.
I'd not expect that until 2028 and a little later after that.
The team that managed DirectFile was laid off in DOGE. Further, the current admin has been happily violating the Impoundment Control Act. Congress is going to have to sue to get them to start enforcing the law and I don't expect that to work its way through the courts very quickly. Further, I'd not be surprised if the supreme court decides that the Impoundment control act is unconstitutional for some reason or another.
Not picky how long it takes, just start grinding towards success and don’t stop grinding until it’s been implemented and locked in from future harm with policy whenever possible.
That's fine, I was mostly just putting out what I believe are reasonable expectations on what the new congress can accomplish.
I have high expectations for them and I do think they should create/pass legislation for the IRS to create and maintain simplified filings. But I also realize that it's a uphill battle for them to get the lame duck Trump admin to implement such a law.
I think expectations for congress is to pass popular laws but don't be disappointed when the Republicans filibuster, Trump vetoes, or his admin fails to execute on such legislation.
I wanted to electronically file my own taxes last year instead of paying turbotax or an actual accountant.
While my situation isn't particularly complex (but complex enough that I did need help from an accountant the first times), none of the free filing services online (IRS FreeFile included) offered the more complex forms I need.
"Not a problem!" I thought. Except, even if I could download the forms from the IRS and do all the work myself, I could not for the life of me find a way to electronically submit (and had to hire my accountant again).
Is it possible in the US to electronically file your own taxes?
A few coworkers and I were able to point a combination of Fable and Astra at our statements and compute our federal and state taxes. They seem to understand W-2 income, K-1 partnership income, rental income, brokerage accounts, backdoor Roth rollovers, and late-payment penalties 100%? I even sanity-checked mine against an accountant's work this year and the numbers agreed; it even flagged that I was eligible for first-time penalty abatement, something my accountant did not. I don't think I'm going to pay for an accountant for taxes again unless my finances become substantially more complicated.
Once you're confident in the federal tax calculation, you can point Claude at Free Fillable Forms through Chrome's remote-debugging port and e-file your taxes that way. Most states (all states?) don't have an equivalent. Some of us did Claude + computer use + Turbotax Premier. Some of us did Claude + Chrome remote debugging port + FreeTaxUSA. It sometimes helps to do both Free Fillable Forms and shell out $20 for FreeTaxUSA just so another calculator can check your work. But, again, Fable/Astra's numbers were accurate. They certainly made errors along the way, but if you can handle the fatigue of reading LLM English and patiently answering every little question the models come up with (if I was good at skimming text before this year, I certainly am now), you can probably prompt them into doing your taxes.
At the very least it's good to run them on your previous taxes. Fable found a $1500 overpayment on last year's taxes. My accountant last year was terrible, and this was no shock. The true test will be whether the amendment I had Claude fill out will yield a real check from the IRS twelve months from now (paper filings take forever), and whether I get audited in future years when I'm no longer relying on an accountant.
My suggestion is to accept the status quo of American tax filing, while in the meantime continue to bother your representatives about it.
If your taxes are complicated enough that you need to pay, just pay.
This will come across as a product plug, but FreeTaxUSA is a lot better than TurboTax and provides 100% of the featureset for free for federal taxes, and charges $16 for state filing. The UI and interface is also way better than the hostile design of TurboTax.
It is technically possible to use Free Fillable Forms but it realy isn't worth saving $16. You will easily burn multiple hours of extra time compared to something like FreeTaxUSA.
https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
Just out of curiosity, which forms are Free File Fillable Forms missing that you need?
(I feel like I have moderately complex taxes and they have all of them that I use.)
I'm not entirely sure, but I think it was forms related to foreign partnerships and foreign real estate income
You're right, they don't have Form 8865!
When this repo was first discussed a year or so ago I remember it being stated that the answer is "no" unless you qualify for the IRS free file program
Intuit lobbies the government to make sure we don't have any free options.
And here we are with a public way to do it that comes out after republicans get wiped out in the election. Elections do matter.
Nobody elected last week is actually in office yet.
Looks like this repo was published last year, though.
Yes just use Claude or ChatGPT to download it and fill it and paper mail it. Today their capabilities far exceed that of an average accountant
Me: “is it possible to file your taxes yourself electronically?”
Them: “Yes! Use AI and paper mail them”
You can’t make that stuff up.
When I read these and the related stories I am thankful I live in a country where you don't even need to file taxes. Virtually all income is reported to the tax authorities, so they will calculate a tax rate for you and you rarely need to make adjustments if your income is stable and regular.
Only when I need to make some surprise deductions (e.g. purchasing work-related literature, deductible by law here up to some sum) or for some reason the payer of income is not reported to the tax authorities. Or when the income falls short of what was projected for that year (e.g. unpaid leave, getting fired, changing to jobs to a lower salary (it happens) etc.), or there is a surprise bonus and so on. Normally I do not need to anything.
Let’s say I rent a spare bedroom my home to someone; who’s going to report that income if not me?
If your income is actually fully reported to the IRS (W-2 or various 1099) filing taxes is a breeze anyways. Use one of the several free (as in beer) software to take a picture of your forms and it generates the right form that you can submit electronically to the IRS.
Every transaction is electronically recorded since last month in France to simplify those cases. It created a few issues for small landlords (needed to update contracts, but it was easier to resign a new one for those who didn't have a legal team or legal support), which is not great, but it will simplify their tax papers from now on. It might be an issue for landlords who skimmed off the top of their multi-tenant houses, and for the few businesses who still refuse card payment and only accept cash (my cheesemonger was a bit salty about it).
> Let’s say I rent a spare bedroom my home to someone; who’s going to report that income if not me?
How many people are in this situation? Or have other forms of income that are not part of their full-time job payroll? I know I don't, and most of my personal circle.
Even if 'only' 50% of the population is covered by the situation of having solely one income via payroll, that's still half the country not having to faff about with tax forms or tax software.
Like half my neighbors have some part time work that results in income they need to report themselves (mostly taking care of pets or horses or cleaning houses) and the other half let RVs stay on their property for rent. I live in a rural area but it seems really strange to me that you would expect all income to come with a W2. Basically everyone I know has at least some "peer to peer" income that involves no middleman or business.
Now on the other hand I have no idea how many of those people are properly reporting their income. Some definitely do but I suspect many don't.
Why would anyone doing that bother? The sum total of all your neighbor's income, not even the taxes theoretically required, is a rounding error compared to the taxes Musk isn't paying.
As long as we are trading anecdotes, well I’d say it is extremely common among my circle. Young tech employees bought oversized houses expecting them to appreciate, and rent out extra bedrooms to help pay their mortgage.
Rental contracts must be registered with the authorities where I live. Not only to report income, but also to prevent illegal renting.
Okay so you obviously live in a country with a far different system. The U.S. tends towards a “trust but verify” approach. Both systems have their positives and negatives
>The U.S. tends towards a “trust but verify”
The impression I get is the US tends towards a "protect the lobby income streams" approach. Specifically related to taxes: the IRS has the majority of the information it needs to just send you a tax bill/credit. And cases where they don't can be rectified by submitting that information which isn't (like rental income, which AFAIK you are supposed to be reporting and paying quarterly taxes on anyway).
The reason they don't seems to largely be that the tax prep industry has lobbied to keep it from happening, and shut down "free file" by the IRS.
I think you might be misunderstanding that phrase.
probably
Quizzically, the old Russian proverb “trust but verify” is not the experience I expect from US governments, but rather “punish if caught”.
You add that manually to your prefilled forms. In countries that have automated these things, there are often even wizards that ask you to confirm such things before you can approve and send the prefilled forms. Tax authorities put together as much as they can from their sources and you only have to add the missing parts, if there are any. And done.
I am pretty shocked that you'd defend the system of tax reporting in the US. Have you seen:
[Intuit: Lobbying to Save TurboTax](https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=67211)
Can I assume that you also oppose healthcare reform?
I hate Intuit and support IRS free online filing. I know their lobbying and am proud that I have never paid a single cent to Intuit. I just don’t think tax reporting should be what OP describes: the taxpayer does nothing. It makes tax evasion far too simple for the multitude of the income unknown to the government.
I supported and continued to support Obamacare. Your insinuation is a rude non sequitur.
> It makes tax evasion far too simple for the multitude of the income unknown to the government.
What makes you think this any more widespread in countries with a form of PAYE than countries like the US where you're expected to do the work twice?
Intentionally omitting some income when submitting a form is a more deliberate act than doing nothing at all.
> When I read these and the related stories I am thankful I live in a country where you don't even need to file taxes. Virtually all income is reported to the tax authorities, so they will calculate a tax rate for you and you rarely need to make adjustments if your income is stable and regular.
Which country?
In my experience, Americans put a very high bar on governments, hence the multiple complaints you keep seeing, but the actual system is way simpler than most EU countries.
I've filed our taxes myself probably 20 times, with multiple partial years in multiple states.
I'm a little at a loss about how it is way simpler than what my friends tell me in multiple EU countries.
Can you elaborate?
UK probably. And while I agree that is a good aspect of our tax system, I wouldn't praise it too much. There are still many many absurdities.
That's the neat thing, in the US virtually all income is reported to tax authorities. They just don't do anything with it.
It is a bit more complex because we have federal and state taxes but there really is no reason why we couldn't also have that system.
Intuit is the reason
I cannot see how Turbotax survives the oncoming AI Coding freight train. All the information is out there.
Will not shed any tears if Turbotax doesn't make it.
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...
I wouldn't trust AI out of the box either.
That said, there's basically nothing stopping someone from creating fee software equivalent or better than TurboTax from scratch using AI. They can even decompile TurboTax source code as an input
These already exist though: FreeTaxUSA (http://freetaxusa.com), or if you prefer Turbotax itself, there's Credit Karma Tax (https://www.creditkarma.com/tax), which is a free, white-labelled version of Turbotax.
To start with Free Tax USA charges for State returns, and second my understanding is that they lack support for moderately complex tax situations
Support this guy. Free tax xls sheets that auto-update all your numbers:
https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home/down...
That's what I use. Need to send him a donation this year. Works in Libreoffice too.
Haha. I am literally vibe coding one because I have more complex taxes.
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...
The people to blame for complicated taxes are Congress and the President. Over time Congress slips in all sorts of special taxes and special exclusions to support their interest groups. The last time there was a concerted effort to simplify the tax code was 1986 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986 .
Critics of the 1986 Tax Reform Act said, why bother simplifying the tax code when Congress will just make it complicated again? The response was sure, we'll just need to clean up the tax code again every 20 years or so. Well that's never happened since.
In 2017 many in Congress wanted to simplify the tax code. Unfortunately Trump said he didn't want to simplify taxes, he just wanted to lower them. As one great example, some folks wanted to eliminate the State and Local Tax deduction (SALT), which is a complicated deduction. (Example: You file federally based on "estimated" state and local taxes, but if you get a refund or owe state and local taxes, the next year you have "adjust" your prior year's deduction.) Instead of eliminating them, the 2017 tax bill just phased them out at higher income levels, which just adds complexity to an already complex part of the tax code.
Certainly the act of filing one's taxes can be made a bit simpler, but it seems there's never any incentive behind actually simplifying the tax code itself, because every tiny change to the tax code creates winners and losers who object.
There's a lot of good arguments that Simplicity shouldn't be the most important aspect of a tax code.
Complexity is a good thing if it allows people and businesses to do the things you want them to do and they want to do.
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.
Taxes and vibe-coding--what could go wrong?
Wikipedia in its early days was not a high quality source of information. Assignments citing Wikipedia were graded F, no one trusted the information there, etc etc.
Now look at it! It's a key data source for humans AND AI. When did the flip happen? How did it happen?
Your views on vibecoding are going to become wrong similarly: gradually then all at once.
So keep looking for the signs and be ready to change your views - it'll happen fast to vibecoding too.
> Assignments citing Wikipedia were graded F
They still should, because:
> It's a key data source for humans
It shouldn't. It's not Wikipedia's project to be a source. You should use it as a good entry point to whatever topic you're researching, and use the cited sources. (and sure, acknowledge Wikipedia, but it's not a source)
That's what you should be doing, especially if you want to claim to be an authoritative source yourself, you need to play the knowledge provenance game.
Everyone else that just need information for practical reasons? Wikipedia has long proven its stochastic guarantees are more than enough.
(Even if you need to cite primary sources in the end, it makes more sense to go with Wikipedia early on, and track back the sources for citation once whatever you're working on pans out.)
I used Claude for my taxes last year. It was fine.
Previously, I used Free Fillable Forms which does force me to know more about tax forms than a more abstract software program. Most people's tax situation does not change very much year to year so it's fairly easy to verify - you can check if my tax return looks fairly similar to the previous year taking into account any differences.
If you have a substantially different year for whatever reason, sure get an accountant to double check. But if you're paying for an AI frontier agent, there's really no need to pay for a 3rd party program anymore.
I was thinking of making an open source engine for tax rules that could take all your financial documents locally and produce a tax filing with your own agent. Something like direct file but done for you and open source so you don't need to give all your data to someone else.
I'm curious why this hasn't been done before.
It can be done, working on it right now :) I would say the hard part is validating that it's correct (you need a corpus of verified returns), and the actual act of filing still requires manual effort.
My initial runs though show that you need a medium beefy setup to be able to get accurate results. Anything less than Gemma4 31b and you get some input document hallucinations.
https://github.com/captaincole/OpenReturn
This is great that this is out there. I've been working on making an agent based experience that helps you put together your whole return or make an estimated return based on future assumptions and solving for the federal tax code has been a very token expensive operation!
https://github.com/captaincole/OpenReturn - Still in Beta
I'm going through their engine as well and validating mine. My engine is built to include the CA tax code also.
The biggest reason that turbo tax and the other companies survive though is that in order to allow efile you have to be a registered agent and that process is crazy expensive and difficult.
can you explain your validation process?
I'd be tempted to try something similar for this season. But this is what I generally pay HR Block for; they should be relatively vetted (granted i don't know this for a fact).
like do you have tax accounting experience or do you intend to have someone who does help validate test returns to make sure they look right?
Yeah! So there are two levels to my validation.
1) I've built the engine and tested it based on CPA or externally reviewed real returns. You can see that in the scenario tests
2) I also have a mechanism for people to test the engine against their previous returns privately and then send bug reports of something wrong
The engine currently only works for 2025 because the 2026 documents aren't out yet from the irs.
There is also definitely a place as well in the tax world for general estimates. For example calculating the tax consequences of a stock sale or iso exercise can get really complicated without a system and cost $800+ with a CPA to do.
In Brazil, we can send our "IRS" (IRPF) via internet since 1995 It used to have a .jar app that runs on windows/Linux/mac, but now we have android/iOS app, and also online via browser too.
The .gov url in that repo doesn't work. That's kind of suspicious
Isn't that because Trump killed the directfile program immediately after taking office? Presumably to make sure he is not remembered for doing anything positive.
How do we know this is from IRS?
Weirdly a Google search for "GitHub.com/IRS-Public site:irs.gov" didn't turn up anything.
This is one of the projects that DOGE killed though, so maybe unsurprising that it's not linked to from official .gov websites.
https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filin...
As an EU person who lived in US for quite some years, I always found it funny when my fellow Americans were laughing at European technological backwardness, only to be reminded about their admin services being basically still from the 90s/00s.
I mean… Germany admin services are pretty poor, to stay polite
Not the same level. US problem is lack of centralization. This was majestically exemplified with the COVID vaccines certificates which were a piece of paper, because they simply could not agree on FDA owning the complete database. That piece of paper did not even have a stamp on it... Meanwhile the EU had Android/iPhone compatible wallet entries, dynamically refreshed.
Who is making an agent-forward turbotax competitor? Take my money already. Good god, the previous generation of tools suck.
Giving an agent a folder of your pay stubs / 1099s / everything for the year and telling it to “file my taxes for me” without all the messing about would be great.
I’m assuming with browser control it would already do a good job of this by driving turbo tax etc. but there’s probably a way to cut them out entirely.
Obviously you’d want to check it over, but 90% of the work for me is working around turbo tax jank / manually entering info when it fails to parse things or can’t auto link to an institution properly. An LLM steering a browser could easily do all that.
I think it will be possible to do with the right harness in the future. I've tested gemma4 31b and it's pretty close with an engine backing it.
It's a bunch of PII that you'll be sending to the LLM provider. I'd be pretty uncomfortable with doing that even if it works.
True. I’d do it though in the assumption I can delete the session when done so they’d only have that data for a short time period.
And under the assumption that deleting a session actually deletes your data from their systems. Claude tells me that it would be fully deleted within 30 days unless flagged for legal reasons. I’d be ok with that.
I am. For free too! open source and local model capable (albeit most small models and hardware setups can't do it yet). I have some evals provided on document ingestion.
https://github.com/captaincole/OpenReturn
Check it out
https://getprimemeridian.com
And if you want to maket his with me, message me! I kind of loathe the industry and would love to help.
I've been hacking on one.
Of course even with software the government can't help itself but produce a degenerate amount of documentation that you have to parse through before doing anything. I really hope AI helps out in this regard, i.e. they should train their own models or fine tune one to produce correct answers almost always. Then it's a matter of following the AI instructions. Of course that's probably too good and efficient for the US government.
The PRs are mildly entertaining, as are all the ones they've closed. Doesn't seem to be run by someone who knows what they're doing?
In the first PR:
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/pull/1
elijah-wright commented on Jun 3, 2025
> because this is the first pull request and something many people will see, I would like to say that I learned from a former project manager at the IRS that development on Direct File has stopped since January. the source code is only public because of federal law. it's not likely that this is going to be merged but it's possible that the components of Direct File might be used elsewhere
I wouldn't be surprised . I worked as a developer placed at a state government agency. Many of the people who worked there seem to have no natural drive to do good work.
Maybe their first exposure to Git? I only had ClearCase experience and was a noob when finally moving away from defense work.
Is this even legit?
I expect IRS DirectFile to return and made permanent with recent Congressional regime change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004511
I'd not expect that until 2028 and a little later after that.
The team that managed DirectFile was laid off in DOGE. Further, the current admin has been happily violating the Impoundment Control Act. Congress is going to have to sue to get them to start enforcing the law and I don't expect that to work its way through the courts very quickly. Further, I'd not be surprised if the supreme court decides that the Impoundment control act is unconstitutional for some reason or another.
It should be made permanent.
Not picky how long it takes, just start grinding towards success and don’t stop grinding until it’s been implemented and locked in from future harm with policy whenever possible.
That's fine, I was mostly just putting out what I believe are reasonable expectations on what the new congress can accomplish.
I have high expectations for them and I do think they should create/pass legislation for the IRS to create and maintain simplified filings. But I also realize that it's a uphill battle for them to get the lame duck Trump admin to implement such a law.
I think expectations for congress is to pass popular laws but don't be disappointed when the Republicans filibuster, Trump vetoes, or his admin fails to execute on such legislation.
We're working with the IRS commissioner who spearheaded IRS Direct File to bring it back. https://getprimemeridian.com
I expect this will make Trump very unhappy and he will veto it. I would be very surprised if Congress could override the veto.
Ok but is the IRS API endpoint that gets the filings in json/xml/etc still open and "free to use"?