i am of two minds on this.

FIRST, obviously, there are probably fewer dark patterns in anything than the intuit / us tax situation. there are so many problems with our tax system and the way it eats away at working people while barely touching the wealthiest folks.

i’ve had some unfortunate interactions with the CA Franchise Tax Board in recent years that have made me question whether the IRS will choose to be transparent and treat us fairly if this passes.

I’m certainly no tax expert, so the notion that I may have made a small mistake in past tax years that needed to be corrected is not unreasonable. that i was not provided with any detailed information, or really any communication at all, and the money was siezed from my paycheck without notice. The first time this happened was the second paycheck in the month of december. This sucked, but I was probably wrong, maybe I failed to update my contact address somewhere, and I always want to pay what I owe.

Fast forward to 2021/2022, somewhere in there, IIRC, the CA FTB, during a budget crisis, found that I was short a couple thousand over multiple years from several years back. I had never heard anything about this before, and they came at me for 2-3 years all at the same time. No information on what was incorrect.

CA has an, “Office of the Taxpayer Advocate”, because of course at some point we legislated that there should be someone paid by the state whose job is to help taxpayers who feel they have been wronged. Obviously there’s a weird conflict of interest here, but it’s better than nothing.

My interaction with the taxpayer advocate many years ago involved them trying to tax me for work I performed in an office in San Antonio, Texas, over a year before moving to California.

certainly part of this is about the fact that CA is a bit grabby at the entire lifetime income of anyone who relocates here, which is absolutely the fucking truth, but I also found these situations to give me pause on whether I want to trust the government to tell me whether or not I have correctly paid my taxes.

Even though I am single, live alone, no dependents, and claim 0, somehow I am always off.

If we want to simplify this, get out from under Intuit’s thumb, and have like 95% of the country or whatever not even have to worry about taxes, we have to fundamentally rethink how they are calculated.

Why isn’t my employer liable for not calculating the appropriate deduction? Why is this something I have to worry about? On balance, at this point in my career, a thousand bucks a year isn’t a big deal, the problem is asking me for it all at once, when there’s no great way for me to know to expect it.

I have, for the first time in my life, a small amount of savings, but I still don’t consider it a nest egg. That is my insurance for when I somehow manage to owe taxes even though I have done every single thing that I should do, correctly.

another knock on TurboTax is that they often end up calculating that you owe more tax than you do, and I think it backs up my concern that in those cases, the IRS does not say, “Hello, kind person, you gave us an extra $3,000, we would like to return it to you.”

It’s basically just fucking all bad.