Eh, government should not be in the business of maintaining digital infrastructure, regardless of how capable it might be. As much of it as possible should be contracted out to 3rd parties.
Eh, government should not be in the business of maintaining digital infrastructure, regardless of how capable it might be. As much of it as possible should be contracted out to 3rd parties.
Profit motives in infrastructure are a bad idea. See Thames Water in the UK, for instance. It always introduces a perverse incentive where if the company in control of the infrastructure can extract an extra million in profit by making everything less efficient and costing everyone else involved a billion, it's still in that company's interest to do so.
This is a prime example of that. H&R Block, etc, benefit from there not being direct file by around $3bn in revenue or around $750m in profit. Rough sums on the time saved by direct file if everyone used it is 8h * average wage * taxpayers, which seems to be approximately $44bn. i.e. in axing direct file, it has "created" $3bn in economic activity to the private infrastructure-owner (the intermediary between you and filing your return), but at the cost of $44bn in lost time & therefore lost activity (the other things you could have been doing) to the rest of the economy.
Infrastructure is not the economy. Infrastructure is the thing the economy runs on top of / has to use. Given that it is the role of government to govern the economy, it is the role of government to ensure that the infrastructure is running well (be the custodian of the infrastructure).
Arguing the other side, digital infrastructure shouldn't be such a complicated domain that it is out of the reach of governments. This is the authority we trust to build our roads, water/sewer system, electric grid, and virtually every other meaningful physical infrastructure. Why should digital infrastructure be out of bounds?
The only alternative is inserting a third party, one that has full access to all your financial information, an extraordinary level of trust for a private sector that has shown unrelenting loyalty to investors over customers. That shouldn't be necessary for the average filer, assuming a bare minimum of competence, like one might assume for the only country to put a human on the moon and bring them safely home.
>This is the authority we trust to build our roads and virtually every other meaningful physical infrastructure in our civic life.
Trusting the government to be able to do something is not the same them actually doing it, nor is it the same as them doing it well. With roads the people using them have much more incentive in maintaining them than the government. What a person experiences driving down the road everyday is just a statistic to the government.
How about the electric grid and our water/sewer systems, is it reasonable to trust the same entity that manages those vital services to build a basic web form?
> Trusting the government to be able to do something is not the same them actually doing it, nor is it the same as them doing it well.
You are absolutely right. My point is not that the government has proven its competency in this domain, it is whether we should expect it.
>we should expect it.
The monetary incentives for the most governments don't exist to run projects efficiently, so I don't think it is realistic to expect it. The government can just print money or steal money via taxes to cover up inefficiencies. And since government bureaucracy tends to force things to move at a glacial pace that will be reflected in how it executes projects.
This is so wrong I literally don't know where to start.
Governments have as much incentive as anyone else to save money. I shouldn't even need to type this but raising taxes is unpopular and tends to cause people to get voted out of office.
People need to stop repeating thise weird talking points about "the government" and its incentives. It's a big, complixated entity made up of literally millions of people all of whom have different motivations and incentives and non-government employees affect those not just in the super obvious way by voting but by every interaction we have with anyone who works there.
>raising taxes is unpopular and tends to cause people to get voted out of office.
This is missing the point. If you got rid of taxes altogether it would reveal what really is being propped up tax money as opposed to actually being valuable enough to exist on its own.
>complixated entity made up of literally millions of people all of whom have different motivations and incentives
Which is why it's important to get the big incentives correct. Otherwise one of these actors will waste resources since expecting people to do the right thing without incentives does not scale.
> With roads the people using them have much more incentive in maintaining them
Are you implying the random people driving down a road also do the maintenance on it? What? How is this any different from literally any other government service?
>Are you implying the random people driving down a road also do the maintenance on it?
I'm implying that the people and businesses along a private road pay another company to come in and do maintenance. Unlike government modes you don't have to wait until whenever the government feels like fixing road.
We actually have public roads that are built and maintained by private companies, they are toll roads. If you don't mind paying separate tolls everywhere you travel, this would be a fine solution.
Explain your reasoning at least.
The government has to maintain some infrastructure to get this sort of thing done. Whether digital or analog. And if it contracts it out, it needs to oversee it. So no matter how it is done, the government has to pay.
Don't you care about the actual outcome at all? Even if the government does a better job, you still prefer a third-party organization?
You could just light the money on fire instead and get the same result. Contractors routinely screw the tax payer. I once had a job in one of these third parties where the entire operation was effectively defrauding the tax payer by claiming 1hr jobs would take 40.
You are absolutely correct, billable hours are perverse incentives and wrap rates border on predatory, but this status quo is Congressionally mandated and buy commercial as a policy is generally bipartisan.
You seem to be under the impression that the government itself doesn't have the same problem. Government agencies often over bill, over budget. They have an incentive to pad everything and to never lower costs because their budget will be lowered otherwise. Contractors on the other hand, have to compete with other contractors so while they can try to over bill, if they bill too much the government has an incentive to switch contractors.
Neither system is perfect.
> Neither system is perfect.
Yes, thats why people arguing that private companies are always better are so annoying.
You get that you're actually agreeing with this post right?
> They have an incentive to pad everything and to never lower costs because their budget will be lowered otherwise.
Sure, but in the absence of widespread corruption (which until now, the US has been relatively clear of) they don't just get to go home with that budget in their pocket. They're still paid on standardized pay scales. Any extra budget still gets spent on the actual org or project, with the exception of random things like travel or office supplies.
The contractor takes home every extra dollar as profit.
I don't disagree at all that neither system is perfect, of course, but just saying.
Do you think the government should allow electronic filing of taxes?
Because if the government is going to accept returns electronically instead of through the physical mail, then it should accept them without requiring an intermediary.
Interestingly, it does this for corporations, but not for individuals.
Gee, I wonder why.
Personally, I think that (a) the government needs to have my PII to process my taxes, and that (b) having the government require me to also hand my PII to a third party in order to pay taxes is a big fucking security nightmare.
The electronic filing sites are available to "the public" both as a webform and as an api. They're just buried and never mentioned.
No. They are fucking not.
The site that was killed was the IRS direct file site.
The webform is through the free file alliance, aka Turbotax and friends.
The API requires you to jump through a million hoops. Heaven help you if the reason you want to use the API is because you are behind on your taxes, because that will signal that you are not of good character.
Speaking of being behind on your taxes, you have to use paper for any but the last three years of returns anyway.
I was talking about free fillable forms, but when I did some research I learned its not actually owned by the irs. Now I'm confused.
The confusion is deliberate.
The Republicans are trying to strangle the IRS and outsource everything.
The IRS, despite its many shortcomings, consistently tries to help people get their taxes filed.
So when the Republicans were in charge, and the IRS wanted to ensure that people could just fill out their forms, but the Republicans in congress wouldn't directly support filing through the IRS, the IRS came up with a workaround. It was a workaround both for them and for Turbotax et al, because it sort of acted like a pressure relief valve.
The workaround allowed people to file their taxes for free, so the IRS was, well maybe not happy, but certainly mollified. The workaround kinda sucked for the taxpayer experience, so Turbotax was happy. And the workaround was implemented by private companies rather than the US government, so the Republicans were happy.
But you definitely have to hand your data over to a third party to use this workaround -- effectively the same evil (cough, Turbotax, cough) party you were trying to avoid in the first place.
When the democrats were in charge, they effectively torpedoed the workaround with DirectFile, so of course when the Republicans got back in charge, they had to axe that.
By the way, you mentioned an API. Free file fillable forms does not have one. The only one I know of is the one that the tax program vendors use. Yes, it is publicly documented, but to use it you have to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops.
At exorbitant costs or lackluster execution, with plenty of campaign donations along the way
Was direct file exorbitant expensive? Or lackluster? What about all the 18F work?
On the flip side, plenty of private companies are expensive and corrupt.
I think it's possible both can be good and both can be bad.
> As much of it as possible should be contracted out to 3rd parties.
This is the case pretty much.
Comments that start with “Eh” are a real turnoff.
Direct File was a service not infrastructure
We have such a long history of really famous examples of big, successful government mega projects: hoover dam, interstate highways, manhattan project, apollo program... even the freaking panama canal was a government project.
What happened to us?
Crazy environmental and labor regulations is what happened.
I wouldn’t class this IRS project as anywhere near the the magnitude of complexity or impact of the projects you mentioned though.
> Crazy environmental and labor regulations is what happened.
Mainland Europe has “crazy environmental and labour regulations” and manages to build cheaper and faster. So no, your pet hate is not the reason.
When was the last time Europe built anything approaching the Hoover Dam, Manhattan Project, or the Panama Canal? You’re not serious, are you?
Counter-question, when was the last time Europe needed such environment damaging mega projects?
Contracted out like the healthcare.gov original launch fiasco for the AHCA?