I was confused by this too.... I've never filed my own taxes; I've always paid a tax preparer. I've always thought that I could file them myself for free if I wanted to, but just felt more comfortable paying someone who does it professionally and knows more ins-and-outs of tax law. Is that not true - can I not file myself for free if I make more than $66k/yr? I looked here [1], and it looks like I can? It's still not entirely clear to me...
You definitely can, you'll just have to fill out a bunch of complicated forms (accessible via the "Use Free File Fillable Forms" button on the page you linked), which is what you pay your accountant to do, and that anyone has the option to purchase TurboTax software to assist with.
The article leaves this out.
Yes, it would be great if the IRS were able to provide software as slick as Intuit's to assist with this, and it would also be nice if Intuit didn't use so many dark patterns, and at the same time they've built a product that makes self-filing far easier to do correctly than any other option out there.
Maybe, but if you're in the over $72k category (I guess the article is from 2019 and the threshold has changed) it's literally just electronic versions of the paper forms which I consider a huge waste of my time and mental energy. Intuit doesn't charge you _and_ make you do the work. Intuit charges you _instead_ of making you do the work, just like you'd pay an accountant for. The IRS doesn't even offer guidance on which forms you need.
> If you choose Free File Fillable Forms as your Free File option, you should be comfortable doing your own taxes. Limitations with Free File Fillable Forms include:
> It won't give you guidance about which forms to use or help with your tax situation
> It only performs basic calculations and doesn't provide extensive error checking
> It will only file your federal return for the current tax year
> No state tax return option is available
I don't want to "do my own taxes". That's the whole point of paying for a service that makes it easier. And also it's not even available right now:
> Free File Fillable Forms reopens Feb. 12, 2021 at noon ET.
I am not sure if you got that quote from the paywalled article, but I was just looking at TurboTax this year, and they have removed the income requirement. But having experience with others dealing with Turbotax; I have nearing zero expectation that they will not be immensely unethical or at the very least be intentionally grey in their ethics.
What I mean by that is that even for people who were eligible for doing their taxes for free last year, they offered additional services like e-file (literally sending a file akin to the effort and cost of sending an email) at some ridiculous price, and then for those having to do state taxes both charging for the state return software (understandible) and the state e-file … but at rates that ended up tallying up to higher than if the "free" filer had just bought Trubotax with state and free e-file at some discounter or in some cases even at higher rates than the full price.
What a lot of people are not aware of is just how utterly evil that these "tax preparer" companies are in their practices, they aren't just unethical or even corrupt, they are deliberately evil and even criminal in their methods. The leaked emails from TurboTax illustrate that. They actively sabotage efforts to, e.g., make it possible for citizens to simply upload the tax return or even just the tax form output from the software so that the utter nonsense e-file has to be used that the companies have a gate around.
It's just one of the many ways and things that are modern forms of company stores, traps that are intentionally and deliberately constructed to ensnare and entrap and pilfer from people for little to no value. It's quite literally BILLIIONS of dollars that are drained from the middle and lower classes to file taxes … information the IRS already has.
But I don't, so...they didn't trick me?