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Anyone used Open Tax Solver to do your taxes? (US) (opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'd been vaguely aware of campaigns by tax-prep companies to stop the IRS from offering its own tax-prep software. I was going over some of my old tax info today, and started to wonder if there were any open source tax-prep programs.

What I found was Open Tax Solver. I get the impression that it's more clunky that using commercial tax-prep. Does anyone here have firsthand experience with it?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The IRS has a free file program. You might want to start there. If your above those income limits then they have free fallible forms you can use. Beyond that commercial tools, the easiest thing is to go to your state site and see what they accept because that list will likely be shorter then the federal list of program. "FreeTaxUSA" will probably be on the list. That is what we use and it is worth a look. Basically free US filing, but state filing is a nominal cost. Personally I think those that use TurboTax, H &R Block, and Tax Act at this point are nuts. These market leaders are just not cost effective and unless you need some special feature they have, they make little sense. So may other choices.

The other direction is to just make up a big spreadsheet that does your taxes for your and fill in the new rates and rules every year. We also do that. Our process typically is to fill out our spreadsheet, then signin to FreeTaxUSA, and enter the data, then resolve any differences. The other place I had to have taxes is for retirement planning and so I wrote my own Python code to simulate our taxes as part of a Monte Carlo simulation.

The thing about taxes, they are quite simple for one person as we all typically have certain types of income and expenses. Writing tax code for everyone is a huge ever changing thing. Not something that FOSS is likely to be very good at just because of the time urgency and staffing factor.

By the way, thanks for the link. I'll probably look at it at some point.