Tag Archives: Free Fillable Forms

Why I’m back to filing our Virginia taxes on paper

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One of the little luxuries of life in Virginia is having more time to file state tax returns–ours, unlike those of most states, aren’t due until the first business day of May. And one of the little indignities of life in Virginia is having this annual ritual offer a reminder of how badly our state got suckered by the tax prep industry’s “Free File” con.

Rewind 20 years, and the Virginia Department of Taxation was a leader in providing direct online filing with its iFile site. You plugged in a few numbers from your federal return, the site did the math, and you could then file directly to the department. What was not to like?

A printed-out copy of a Virginia Form 760, with a pen resting on top of it.

The answer for commercial tax-prep providers was “competition.” And in 2010, they sold Richmond on a different deal: They would offer free tax prep and online filing through their apps and sites to lower-income taxpayers (as they had done for federal taxes since 2003 as part of the Internal Revenue Service signing onto this Free File proposition) if the state would first scrap its own tax-prep service.

As I wrote at the time at the Washington Post, the fiscal analysis prepared for the Free File bill introduced by Del. Kathy Byron (R.-Lynchburg) suggested this wouldn’t pencil out for the state unless almost no iFile users reverted to filing on paper. But bipartisan majorities passed Byron’s contribution to crony capitalism, after which Gov Robert McDonnell (R.) signed it into law.

The results of enabling Intuit’s rent-seeking strategy, as I wrote in the Post three years ago, have been woeful for taxpayers and the state: In 2019, more than seven times as many Virginia taxpayers filed on paper than availed themselves of Free File.

And since last year, I’ve become one of those people mailing in a Form 760 as if it were 1993. The clumsy but no-charge Free Fillable Forms option that I noted in my 2020 Post opinion piece–where I called it “the stone tablet of spreadsheets”–vanished from the Department of Taxation’s menu after 2021, which the department attributed to an unnamed software vendor (Intuit, perhaps?) dropping support for the product.

The actual work isn’t that much more than it was two years ago, except that I have to do the math myself after typing in numbers instead of clicking a “Do the Math” button (really!) in Free Fillable Forms. As before, I check my work by stepping through a Virginia return in TurboTax; I know my work isn’t done because Intuit’s app thinks we should get about $50 more in our refund, which also happens to be below the $59 Intuit wants me to pay for the privilege of filing my state taxes through that app. Figuring that out may be a hassle. Dealing with my printer probably will too.

I would love nothing more than for Virginia to renounce this failed experiment and restore something like iFile. But a bill introduced in January by Del. Kathy Tran (D.-Fairfax) to do just that instead died in a subcommittee, because recognizing past mistakes does not appear to be the high-order bit in today’s Virginia GOP.

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I survived yet another year of self-inflicted tax prep

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The annual exercise in accounting self-abuse that is me doing my own taxes ended three months later than originally scheduled and yet still on time, thanks to the IRS pushing Tax Day back to July 15 to make up for the coronavirus ruining everything.

That delay taught me what I’d needed all along to make this math masochism easier: a dress rehearsal a month and a half before the real deadline. Here, my thanks must go to the Virginia Department of Taxation, which extended the deadline to pay state taxes but only by a month–from May 1 to June 1–and left in place the automatic six-month extension to file state returns.

I didn’t want to send too much or too little money to Richmond, so I needed to get our federal taxes close enough to done for me to plug the relevant figures into our Virginia return and get a reliable estimate. I plowed through TurboTax, as usual needing much more time to calculate my business profit after expenses than for any other part of the return. As much as I miss having itemized deductions make a large amount of our tax bill vanish, getting them right did eat up a lot of hours.

(Side rant: My TurboTax labors also went faster than usual because I finally figured out the freakshow workaround required to import statements from some old American Funds holdings. Without that, I would have had to type in those figures by hand because the PDF download this inept investment firm provided was a giant image without any selectable numbers.)

That work yielded nearly-final figures for the federal return that I could flow into a Virginia return in TurboTax. Then I double-checked that result by redoing the state math in Intuit’s woeful Free Fillable Forms online app, what I actually use to file because I refuse to reward Intuit for its rent-seeking strategy of getting states to retire their own online-filing tools.

In past years, TurboTax and Free Fillable Forms have agreed on what I’d owe Richmond or what Richmond owed us. This year, the stone tablet of spreadsheets said we’d owe $10 more than what TurboTax estimated for our Virginia bill. I ignored that at the end of June but went back through all the numbers again this week without finding any reason for the difference. Which is fine–maybe we paid Virginia a Hamilton we don’t owe, but I’m sure my state could use the help these days.

After going over our federal returns one last time Wednesday night, I had them e-filed before 10 p.m. Wednesday, then had the state returns dispatched an hour later. That left one last tax-prep chore: tweaking the Google Docs freelance expenses spreadsheet template that I shared here two winters ago to make it a little clearer which home-office expenses should be added together.

Weekly output: your browser choices, how Virginia got suckered by Intuit

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I didn’t have to file taxes, file for an extension on taxes, or make quarterly estimated-tax payments this week. So it had that much going for it.

4/14/2020: Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox: Which browser won’t crash your computer when working from home?, USA Today

My editor asked if I could assess which browsers would leave the biggest dent in a home computer’s processor and memory, so I tested Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on my Windows laptop, then tested Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari slightly less systematically on my Mac desktop. (I wrote up my methodology for Patreon subscribers.)

4/14/2020: Virginia’s free-file fail, The Washington Post

A decade ago, I tried in vain to use my perch at the Post to stop Virginia from signing onto the “Free File” initiative championed by Intuit and other tax-prep firms that would require the state to scrap its good, free iFile tax-prep app. You can treat this piece for the Post’s Local Opinions section as my I-told-you-so revenge, showing how after 10 years the number of commonwealth taxpayers using the income-limited Free File option remains a small fraction of the number that had used iFile. (The Virginia Department of Taxation provided the numbers I requested almost immediately, so you’re also welcome to wonder why we haven’t seen them in stories before.) This story also notes that the non-income-limited Free Fillable Forms Web app Intuit provides to anybody amounts to the stone tablet of spreadsheets. This is what crony capitalism looks like.