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?
The IRS offers free tax services, you can find them under
That’s a damn fine URL. Thanks for sharing ❤️
Honestly, I’d never use open source software to do my taxes. There is no reason to and puts all the risk on me to assume all the calculations and tax rules in the software are up to date. That’s very risky. If all the risk falls on me then I might as well learn the tax system I’m filing for. If I’m not wanting to do that then I’m not paying someone to fill out my taxes, I’m paying them to assume the risk of filling them out wrong.
If I put in all my information in correctly on turbo tax and that system fails to file correctly then they are liable even if I don’t get added audit protection.
So for me, there is no reason for this software and I’d honestly discourage people from using it.
My experience: I’ve done my personal taxes myself for 7 years and my own business taxes for 5 years then hired someone to do both for the last 5 years.
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.
