Joined 13 years ago
1) raised their money in a priced round. It's therefore unlikely they have unilateral control of the board.
or
2) didn't do a priced round but went with convertible notes. Those initial investments are now interest-accruing debt on their balance sheet.
In either of those scenarios there's going to be immense pressure to not let the business get comfortable.
1) Prior year AGI
2) Electronic filing PIN
They can also issue a taxpayer a special Identity Protection PIN. If you're issued one of these you MUST use it.
There are two groups of people that don't need to "authenticate" at all:
1) Anyone who didn't file the previous tax year
2) Anyone filing by mail
Definitely a "once seen, can't unsee" type of thing but I'll admit I didn't notice it initially. :)
The next step in evolution is to have your script look for specific text on a page, which will change 24 months later and have all the perfectly good servers pulled out of rotation.
It's horribly convoluted but it /is/ possible to do so:
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disa...
I've been running it this way for about 18 months now after having a few important emails get gobbled up by their spam filter.
Many SPF docs recommend using SOFTFAILs, including Gmail's docs [1]. What's your recommended SPF setup for his use case?
Not disagreeing. For anyone wondering what the fundamental differences are:
1) As an independent contractor you are responsible for 100% of your FICA tax (social security and medicare tax). For most people the tax due is 15% of your income. This is in addition to your income tax. In an employee/employer relationship the employer pays for half of this. It can be a big shock to people who are hit with this for the first time.
2) If you're an employee, your employer is automatically withholding your income tax payments for you and sending them in to the IRS at a regular interval. As an independent contractor you need to be doing this yourself. If you wait until the end of the year and pay as one lump sum you'll likely be penalized.
The link you provided points to industry participants in the Free File Alliance[1]. Some skeptics believe the industry has this program to appease the government enough to not pursue tax software created by the government. If you're one of the folks who believe we should have a more european-style system, participating in FFA probably works against that goal (I don't know that that's your stance just throwing it out there for others to consider)
I think it's also interesting from a business case study. I tried to make the argument that tax software isn't cheap to produce. What's the right way for competition to blossom if the cost to users is "free" and the revenue is made up via other less than savory means? Does small-guy competition have to resort to the same tactics?
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/leonardburman/2012/05/28/billion...
Federal tax return fraud is huge. It's a growing problem that the IRS is struggling to cope with and it's been going on for years. State tax return fraud has been largely non-existent... so non-existent in fact that USA Today reported the state of Minnesota got suspicious when there were 2 reported cases of fraud[0].
So what's going on and why is TurboTax being called out by these states? First off, know that when a tax return is e-filed either to the fed (who also handles most state e-filing) or directly to the state, every software provider transmits an identifier along with it. So if you get a bunch of bogus tax returns submitted it's trivial to see where they're all originating from. Second, the rise in federal tax return fraud has grown steadily in relation to the number of software providers offering a free option... the reason we haven't seen state fraud as rampant is because it has always cost money to prepare your state return with software. But what's new this year besides a dramatic increase in state tax return fraud? TurboTax's Absolute Zero campaign. That's right, a whole lot more people can file their states taxes for free using TurboTax's software. That may seem great at first blush if you qualify, but an unintended consequence of that is it's now a completely free roll for a fraudster to file a state tax return IN ADDITION to a federal one.
[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2015/02/...
