H&R Block’s entire business model is premised on taxes being confusing and hard to file. So, naturally, the tax preparation company has become — along with Intuit, the company behind TurboTax — one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. For example, the Obama administration has pushed for automatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from H&R Block and Intuit. EITC is good for a lot of people but there’s massive fraud involved too. The credit raise with income up to a point, then drops off quickly to zero. Big incentive have your income at the peak point, whether it should be or not. Tax prep friend said there was a steady stream of people who wanted to use only a certain combination of their W2’s so they would end up at the peak. Also, tax preparation companies have found that the real money is in the anticipation loan market. It should be banned. I quit H&R back when they presented me with a bill for $450 after filing married-singly with 1 child. Spit-take, and I said “no thank you” and left. Been using TurboTax for a while after that, but probably going to switch to just using online guides and fill it out myself. So sick of giving so much money to these companies just to have them turn around and use that money to try and force myself and others to use their services or risk losing out. Fark them and fark their parasitic shareholders and board of directors. Then I quit using TurboTax because they’re always releasing patches up-to-and-after April 15th. Oh, and the bank they use for channeling a refund ganks you for quite a bit as well. Oh, and let’s not even discuss nuances in the tax laws that TT can’t keep up with. Switched to a CPA who found errors with my TT returns. TT users as well as those who use tax-in-the-box places (Jackson-Hewett, H&R Block, etc) bring him a lot of business. He also understand tax strategies, such as how I prefer to owe no more than $500/year. The progressive tax brackets aren’t difficult to figure out. There are tables in the back of the publications for the poor folks who can’t afford $50 for a professional to calculate it. The complexity is with all of the deductions, credits and shelters. Want to make the tax code simple? Eliminate them. The only personal income that should be tax free is what you send for alimony and child support payments. College, health care, retirement investments and mortgage interest should all be taxable. If you’re self-employed, you get a different points for your brackets to account of unreimbursed job costs. Done. Itemized deductions should be reserved for non-personal entities such as corporations. Yeah not so easy. You want to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction and fark over all the people who factored that into the price they’d pay for a house, while causing a brand new mortgage crisis that would be worse than the last one? Nice? Probably 90% of people in the UK never have to even see a tax return, let alone fill one out or sign it. HMRC calculate everything with the data they get from employers, since employers pay your income tax directly to HMRC. If you have paid too much they just send you a refund cheque out of the blue. And every year they send you a statement of what tax you’ve paid that year. But like the health, where powerful US insurance and healthcare lobbies kill off any move towards universal healthcare the US tax industry lobbies to kill off any moves to make the tax return simpler or, god forbid, automatic. You should have done this a century ago before the tax industry became powerful and entrenched. It’s too late now. First off, flyover country gets the same benefit as everyone else. Their houses are just cheaper, much like everything else in flyover country. Which is a huge benefit to them when it comes to tax burden and is why we should adjust tax bracket rates partially to reflect cost of living in a particular area (someone making $300k in Iowa is a hell of a lot richer than someone making $300k in San Fran). But i digress. The point is nobody who is paying a mortgage gets the benefit of MID. Because the tax benefit factors into the everyone’s budget when they decide how much they are willing to borrow on a house. It isn’t like folks bought a house and all of a sudden the govt gives them a break. The MID a has existed for a long time and people determine what they can pay including consideration of the tax break. And should we fark over investors who bought muni bonds yielding 3% because the tax exemption made them equivalent to a 5% taxable bond? Okay, that’s a dick move but even if your okay with it all of a sudden all municipalities and hospitals and water district and states have to pay a shiat ton more interest when they issue debt. Long story short a lot of the complexities of the tax code should never have been implemented but now that they are here will require a long phase out period. (NYSE: HRB) The IRS should just start a site and say “don’t like it? Tough shiat”