<story><title>How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing</title><url>http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-fought-free-simple-tax-filing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MatthewPhillips</author><text>Ever been to the DMV?</text></item><item><author>theorique</author><text>&lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; government programs have excellent customer service as compared to &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; corporate equivalents&lt;p&gt;I am sure we could find counterexamples here.</text></item><item><author>clarkevans</author><text>Yet, Government programs have excellent customer service as compared to corporate equivalents.  I use one example: student loan servicing.  My loans were serviced by the largest company in the business for years, it was pure torture.  When the department of education offered to assume the loans, I was happy to have the pain gone.  They have been absolutely lovely to work with, clear, transparent and... helpful.</text></item><item><author>MatthewPhillips</author><text>The government is not bad at code because of lobbying, they&apos;re bad at code because of fluctuating budgets, low salaries, and ridiculous processes.</text></item><item><author>rm999</author><text>This stuff aggravates me. My taxes aren&apos;t abnormally complex (single, one state, very few deductions, one w-2), but I get several 1099s for my investments and end up spending an hour filling them in manually, importing CSV files from my brokerages, and double checking the numbers. What annoys me is all the forms clearly state the IRS has also been sent this information; I&apos;m literally filling out forms in a slow, error-prone way just so the IRS can run a simple == check to make sure I entered them in correctly. I feel like it&apos;s something my third grade teacher would force us to do to kill time.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t care about the 30 dollars turbotax charges me, I&apos;ll send 30 dollars straight to the CEO or promise to burn it. What bothers me is that I&apos;ve been forced to do manual data entry - a pet peeve of mine as a programmer - because the government has been lobbied specifically to be less efficient.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lagged2Death</author><text>DMV offices in many states are actually run as private businesses under contract to the state, not by the state government directly.&lt;p&gt;In my state, actual government offices are generally less seedy looking, better staffed, and friendlier than the universally-privately-run DMV offices are.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Deputy Registrars are independent contractors and are selected on a competitive basis as described in the Ohio Administrative Code and RFP. Deputy Registrars receive service fees of $3.50 for each vehicle, driver license and ID card transaction; and $0.90 for each vision screening performed. All fees are established in accordance with the Ohio Revised Code. Contracts are generally for two or three years per Section 4503.03 of the Ohio Revised Code.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bmv.ohio.gov/rfp.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bmv.ohio.gov/rfp.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the private contractors do get the job done, but they do it in a way that&apos;s efficient with employee time, not in a way that&apos;s efficient with customer time.</text></comment>
<story><title>How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing</title><url>http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-fought-free-simple-tax-filing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MatthewPhillips</author><text>Ever been to the DMV?</text></item><item><author>theorique</author><text>&lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; government programs have excellent customer service as compared to &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; corporate equivalents&lt;p&gt;I am sure we could find counterexamples here.</text></item><item><author>clarkevans</author><text>Yet, Government programs have excellent customer service as compared to corporate equivalents.  I use one example: student loan servicing.  My loans were serviced by the largest company in the business for years, it was pure torture.  When the department of education offered to assume the loans, I was happy to have the pain gone.  They have been absolutely lovely to work with, clear, transparent and... helpful.</text></item><item><author>MatthewPhillips</author><text>The government is not bad at code because of lobbying, they&apos;re bad at code because of fluctuating budgets, low salaries, and ridiculous processes.</text></item><item><author>rm999</author><text>This stuff aggravates me. My taxes aren&apos;t abnormally complex (single, one state, very few deductions, one w-2), but I get several 1099s for my investments and end up spending an hour filling them in manually, importing CSV files from my brokerages, and double checking the numbers. What annoys me is all the forms clearly state the IRS has also been sent this information; I&apos;m literally filling out forms in a slow, error-prone way just so the IRS can run a simple == check to make sure I entered them in correctly. I feel like it&apos;s something my third grade teacher would force us to do to kill time.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t care about the 30 dollars turbotax charges me, I&apos;ll send 30 dollars straight to the CEO or promise to burn it. What bothers me is that I&apos;ve been forced to do manual data entry - a pet peeve of mine as a programmer - because the government has been lobbied specifically to be less efficient.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smsm42</author><text>BTW, despite DMV being the common complaint, I&apos;ve been dealing with DMV a number of times and never had a problem. Dealing with the IRS was somewhat nightmarish though - while I can&apos;t complaint about customer service per se (people I spoke to were polite and tried to help me within what they could) the processes and the transparency were quite Kafkaesque. Basically somehow IRS decided I owe them a ton of money, and I spent several months (not consecutively, just how long it took to be resolved) trying to find out why and how to make them realize it&apos;s not true. I never found the answer to the why question but when it got to the question of me owing them something like 17 dollars (there also were cents, I just don&apos;t remember the exact sum) I just paid it up to put the whole thing behind. I still don&apos;t know why exactly they wanted it and what was wrong (my return was pretty simple and I asked professionals and IRS service people, nobody had any idea).</text></comment>