Yes! That’s exactly my friend’s experience last week. He googled the error messages to eventually find some discussion forum explaining what was wrong.
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No. And Irony is still on unpaid leave
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LOL! I swear that was a typo, I’ve actually maintained decent form today! I swear! Hahahaha
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Its more due to lack of funding. The IRS is so starved for money right now its not even funny. Tax enforcement is kind of in the shitter. There’s just no money there to build a public utility tax filing thing that’s any more involved than what we’ve got. Which is essentially just a fillable PDF with a connection to the e-file servers.
And thus the endless feedback loop of spending cuts and privatization is born. Starve a government agency for funds, then point at how bad they did that thing that wasn’t properly funded. Then point as BUSINESS to fix it. Then point at how much better BUSINESS did it that and government did it. Then cut more funding or so on.
Lobbying is a factor. But if the money was there there’d be more than the most stripped down version of that. OR we could move to auto-file like every other sensible god damn country and spend less to likely bring in more taxes.
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It’s not just lack of funding. The Free File Act of 2016 legally bans the IRS from offering prefilled tax forms or any tax preparation services to the public except those low and middle-income families who qualify for the free E-file service. Even if the IRS was fully funded and had a team of highly skilled software engineers at the ready they wouldn’t be allowed to make a free public version of TurboTax.
Basically, congress cut a deal with H&R Block and Intuit so they wouldn’t raise too much of a ruckus when the IRS started making it easier for (some) Americans to pay their taxes.
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Not just me, then? Good to know.
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That is a beautiful* double negative.
* No sarcasm intended.
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I have to give autocorrect partial credit because ac really didn’t like it, convincing me on the wording.
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The Republicans have been consistently starving the IRS of funds. Why is this any surprise?
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C’mon, don’t remind me of Torchwood Miracle Day!
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When I tried to use any of the e-files, they skip right over weird little forms that I need. It’s not big ticket stuff (claiming a $20 credit here, a $13 deduction there, etc.), but I’m just not a big ticket person all the way around. So I paper file, too. Well, when I bother to file…
Whenever I talk to other people IRL about taxes, I appear to be the only one who reads every page of the manual, looking for loopholes & copying them to a file. Thus, the obscure claims. Thus the five letter audits - but I was able to back up all of my claims (except one - I had concede defeat and pay a $17 penalty at the end) and that was what mattered.
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Not really a penalty as such, but if you’re late enough filing, they’ll send you your refund plus interest for the time that they had held it. That’s taxable interest income, so next year you’ll owe taxes on your tax refund’s interest. 
Interestingly, while I don’t know what rate they paid, I made way more interest on the last delayed refund than I ever have on a considerably larger savings account in the bank.
Unrelated, I wonder why so many people use the tax software. If you can do a 1040EZ, that’s a simple form that’s actually quicker and easier than signing up for a service or installing software.
Even if you can’t do the EZ (I couldn’t this year due to some things like the interest mentioned above), it’s still pretty simple unless you run a business or were a blind railroad worker who got black lung disease or something. Basically all the instructions are ‘copy this number here, add this, subtract that’.
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Agreed. It’s not differential calculus, this is math you should have mastered by 6th grade. It seems like if you’re wandering around loose in the world, you could follow written instructions. But I’ve had a lot of short-term jobs where the entire office reacts as though you’re performing sorcery if you can follow the directions to replace a toner cartridge or load software. “Press the Enter key” [click] GASPS!
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In this case, an inside job. The GOP have lead an assault on the budget of the IRS, which means they can’t afford to update their computer systems.
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