![]() So I don't think their business is much threatened. They have full-service offerings now, there it could be 3-4x from that easily. For the latter - the pre-baked offer would be the way.īTW, that's the cheapest offer TurboTax now does, where you do all the work. It's not all people, for sure, but in those 10% that need non-trivial filing, those would be much more frequent that "one salary, nothing else" fold. And of course state is extra (my tax return, if I choose to file with Intuit, would be at around $120 with current prices). If you want to cover your mortgage, your charity giving, savings, maybe a little stock investments, maybe some side gigs, then you very quickly get to $100. $39 is the cheapest offer (well, beyond free ones). That was when you don't have a taxpayer-subsidized competitor providing an almost-as-good service for free. But there are multiple businesses who already have been doing it for years, so it looks like a solvable problem. Why would you want this as opposed to releasing the source code, which reduces their costs and allows them to get by charging $25, while driving the market price down to that level by reducing the barrier to entry? Moreover, suppose a business could actually get away with charging $100 and that would be enough to cover their costs. Also, the cost of developing the system doesn't depend on how many people use it, and those are only the development costs, not anything else a business has to pay, like marketing, billing or interest on capital. > Let's say you get only 10% of those - since you're not the only person on the market - to pay you $100 (if you save a significant amount on taxes, paying $100 for it would make sense, won't it?) - that's $260M, or about as much as the government says their whole system, for all 100% of taxpayers, would cost. There's no reason why it'd have any influence at all on the level of taxes collected. In fact, if such IRS system is built, they'd probably will make a good buck by providing added value offerings to it, just as they do now for existing tax filing systems.Įven if the system to do that costs double to the high estimate - let's say $0.5B per year, given the government projects are always over cost - it's still about 0.15% of the taxes collected every year. Intuit would do fine with it - yes, they'd lose some income, but they have more then enough other business, both in more complex taxes and other ways of organizing business, they don't need to be able to fleece every single taxpayer. It's just adding an easy option, I don't see anything wrong with that at all. If you don't believe The Man did it right - you should be able to download the data and give it to the same Intuit folks and see if they can do better. Let the business also be able to check it and profit if they find a mistake. ![]() ![]() There could be corner cases where it's hard to do, fine - just do the easy 80% and let the business take care of the rest. But taxes aren't business - it's a governmental function, and there's no reason why the government who levies the taxes can't also produce proper documentation for it and make the compliance easier. I'm usually lean to the side of "keep your government paws out of the business".
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