#taxslayer

[mitchipedia]

Cory Doctorow: “If you were unfortunate enough to e-file your US tax using HR Block, Taxact or Taxslayer, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsenually shared with Facebook, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don't have Facebook accounts.”

[anonymousdandelion]

Reasons in favor of using TaxSlayer — or another of the IRS Free File Guided Tax Preparation Options — if you need to file US taxes and don't want to fill out the forms yourself:

free filing for federal taxes if you earn less than $73K a year; state taxes may be free as well depending on state

easy to use and relatively intuitive (as much as anything tax-related can be, anyway)

fills out the forms for you based on the information you enter, but you can still look the forms over before filing if you want to double-check

avoids giving money to the evil of TurboTax

no special software installation required; all you need is an internet browser

Reasons in favor of using TaxSlayer specifically:

whoever came up with the name was unequivocally a marketing genius

• you might not particularly want to DO your taxes, but I'm willing to bet you want to MURDER them

[agent-brian]

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[beyondthetemples-ooc]

Whew, OKAY.

Cutting it close this year, but I finally got my taxes filed. (Under an extension, of course. I think the money I paid in April to get the extension is part of why my return is so big... because I do actually get a return this year, but I had to Pay Something to get the extension, according to what I could figure out.)

Also: Who knew having so many health issues means a healthier tax return? (Thank you, HSA! The "high deductible" part of my employer's health insurance plan sucks, but I'm really starting to see the beauty of the tax benefits you get with an HSA.)

[ranger-kellyn]

finally remembered to file my taxes. if you're in the usa and haven't done so, you should consider filing your taxes since April 15 is getting closer and closer

[omresult]

Bobby Bones Show TaxSlayer 2024 Sweepstakes - Chance To Win $3,140 Cash Prize

Entering into the Bobby Bones Show TaxSlayer 2024 Sweepstakes and chance to win $3,140 cash prize. So, all United States residents enter the Sweepstakes before January 28th, 2024 to fix your chances to win. Sweepstakes Entry Page Sweepstakes Rules How To Enter : Any purchase or Payment not make you winner, odds of winning of this Sweepstakes Depends on valid entries. First of all open the…

[elfwreck]

So. Um. Good year to calculate your own taxes instead of using an online service.

Dammit.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tax prep services send sensitive financial info with Facebook

If you were unfortunate enough to e-file your US tax using HR Block, Taxact or Taxslayer, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsenually shared with Facebook, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don’t have Facebook accounts.

A blockbuster investigative report from The Markup and The Verge reveals that major tax-prep services illegally embedded the Facebook tracking pixel in their sites, configured so that it transmitted as much data as possible to the surveillance giant.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23471842/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing

In their defense, the companies say that they didn’t know that they were sending all this data to Facebook, and that they were using Facebook’s surveillance pixel to “deliver a more personalized customer experience.”

The companies had set the Facebook tracking pixel to use “automatic advanced matching,” which scours any page it’s embedded in for personally identifying information to harvest and transmit to Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/611774685654668?id=1205376682832142

Facebook claims that it doesn’t want this data and won’t use it, though the company has been previously caught violating fair finance laws by using finance data to discriminate against Black families:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-over-allegedly-discriminatory-housing-ads.html

But it’s possible that Facebook isn’t using this data — or that it doesn’t know whether it’s using this data. Facebook’s own internal audits show that the company doesn’t know what data it collects or how it uses it:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvmke/facebook-doesnt-know-what-it-does-with-your-data-or-where-it-goes

Remember, Facebook claims that it collects your data based on your consent; somehow it thinks that you can consent to collecting and using your data in ways that even Facebook can’t describe.

As infuriating as Facebook’s role in this data theft is, the real scandal is that Americans have to pay for tax preparation at all. In most of the world’s wealthy countries, the tax authorities send taxpayers a precompleted tax-return every year. You can modify this return (on your own or with the help of a tax-prep professional), or you can just mail it back. For free.

This makes sense. The tax authorities already know how much you’ve made. They know what deductions you’re entitled to. It is surreal that you have to pay a professional to fill in a form to tell the IRS a bunch of things it already know about you.

Every attempt to bring free tax prep to America has been scuttled by an unholy alliance of anti-tax extremists like Grover Nordquist (a sadist who wants to make paying your tax as cumbersome and painful as possible) and the multi-billion-dollar, highly concentrated tax-prep industry.

Companies like HR Block and Intuit have spent millions lobbying against free tax prep. It’s money well spent, because tax prep makes billions for these companies. The biggest tax prep companies formed something called “the Free File Alliance” that purported to offer free tax-prep to low- and medium-income Americans.

In practice, “free filing” turned out to be a marketing funnel that tricked people into paying for services they were entitled to get for free. Intuit alone stole billions this way:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks

The monopolists who run America’s tax-prep services claim that “government can’t do anything well” and insist that the private sector will bring “efficiencies” to tax-prep. In reality, these companies literally have no idea what they’re doing — they don’t know what data they’re collecting, nor who they’re sharing it with.

Same goes for Facebook. Companies that are not disciplined by competition or regulation don’t have to be good at their jobs. These companies’ major competence is lobbying Congress to prevent the passage of meaningful privacy laws and laws that would save Americans billions through IRS-prepared tax-returns.

As Harvard tax-law prof Mandi Matlock told Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Colin Lecher, this data Valdez is the “almost inevitable consequence of relying on for-profit companies to handle a government requirement. It’s a process that provides users little choice but to hand over their data to Facebook if they want to comply with the law.”

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Social Woodlands (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H%26R_Block_%285424899168%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: An H&R Block storefront; the 'o' in Block has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar peeks out from behind a pillar.]

[athetos]

The IRS site gave me multiple options for filing my tax return but I picked the taxslayer software solely because it sounds badass as fuck

[glassfullofsass]

um so like fuck turbotax use taxslayer or any of the other free file tools, but I'm a big fan of their comercial with the they/them client

[rynofpentacles]

Quick PSA since T*rboTax is getting worse and more predatory by the year—people with low-ish income (under $60k) qualify for free federal filing, and many for free state (AR, AZ, DC, GA, IA, ID, IN, KY, MA, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NT, OR, RI, SC, VA, VT, AND WV are free if you meet the qualifications for free federal) through TaxSlayer.

It's not quite as easy as T*rboTax, you have to input everything from the documents manually, which is initially intimidating, but it's really not that hard. Not only am I not paying $70 to TT for the privilege of filing my taxes, I'm getting back like $100 more than TT on top of that. And this year is rough for tax returns, we need all we can get.

https://freefile.taxslayer.com

[jyleshay]

First, for-profit tax filing companies lobby to ensure that only they can provide free tax filing services. Then they make it really difficult to find the free version of the service and automatically upgrade customers to a paid version without telling them. In order to get back to the free version, you have to start your return over. And now, they've been caught handing out personal data from your tax return.

Maybe they shouldn't be the only option available for tax filing?

A public, free option for filing a simple tax return should be authorized by Congress and implemented by the IRS. The only parties hurt by this would be for-profit companies who would have to improve their services now that the average consumer has a real choice.

[ryssachrysalis]

Facebook has been receiving users’ financial info from tax preparers - The Verge