Tax Program, such a thing?

[jbaerbock]

So since Tax season is coming up I was wondering if there is a KDE program out there that does Taxes? I just want Taxes to be easier especially now since I'm married and joint filing .

[Beernut]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

Try Taxact you can file your taxes for free online.

http://www.taxact.com/

I am not aware of any tax program that runs in Linux.

[Robin T Cox]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

For US taxpayers:

Turbo Tax online:
http://turbotax.intuit.com/

Open Tax Solver
http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

[jbaerbock]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

OTS look promising I'll give it a look see. And thanks for the online idea, though if I remember a lot of places only allow federal tax for free, state taxes cost extra?

[virtualx]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

If you think about it, this is clearly something that the a government should provide for Free for it's citizens. Nevertheless, such free programs don't exist, which leads to the question of "Why?"
As it turns out the government cut a deal with the For-Profit tax preparation software companies that goes something along the lines of "If you offer free preparation for those living within 3x the poverty level, we won't create our own software"
If you are poor and a contractor, earning income in many states, you are screwed, as no-one will do your taxes without an exuberant fee, and good luck figuring it out on your own.

[jbaerbock]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

Yeah well the government is screwing us with taxes anyway, why not make us pay someone to figure out their messy forms for us too?

[Detonate]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

AARP offers free tax preparation services in many communities. I am a volunteer with that program (Technology Coordinator). The service is open to anyone, except that there are certain returns they won't do. If you have rental property that involves depreciation, or if you have businesses with equipment to be depreciated, they won't be able to help. Certain other very complicated returns may be refused. Their service includes free e-filing.

The software they use is Taxwise, but there is no Linux version.

[jbaerbock]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

Ok thanks, all I will need is basic state and federal filing (jointly for my wife and I).

[geezer]

Re: Tax Program, such a thing?

So since Tax season is coming up I was wondering if there is a KDE program out there that does Taxes? I just want Taxes to be easier especially now since I'm married and joint filing .

Check TaxACT at

TaxACT

Check out the features of the three versions.

If you haven't used TaxACT before and are familiar with doing your taxes and don't need a lot of tax documents, the standard version is free. If you have used TaxACT before and want to import previous values, then the Delux version is cheap.

Just download whichever version you want. Try the standard version first, you can buy the delux version and then only need the code to unlock the Deluxe features and don't have to download a second time.

Download and double click the download file. It's a Windows executable and so wine boots (at least in Kubuntu 7.10) and runs the installation program under wine and installs TaxACT under Kubuntu.

I just did the above with the Delux version. Works great under wine. I haven't tried all of the features of TaxACT - specifically the online upgrade of forms, etc, but the installation went flawlessly. For a second or two, I thought that maybe it had magically booted into Windows Vista somehow. Thankfully it hadn't.

The only time I have booted Windows for the past 7 or 8 years was to do the taxes in the spring. Wine didn't work well enough last year, But then I was running Fedora Core 5 last year. It looks like it can handle TaxACT very well this year. Upgrading to a more modern version makes a difference.

So hopefully this year I can avoid booting Windows altogether this year.

I used TurboTax starting back in the 80's when it was simply a set of spreadsheet templates from an accountant in the Philadelphia area. Used TurboTax until the year they put some really bad installation gimmicks in the executable. Switched to TaxCut and then about 3 years back I switched to TaxACT. The first year I used the standard version and then paid for the Delux version to avoid the hassle of re-entering basic information - worth the few bucks to me for that.

This isn't a commercial for TaxACT - just that I have been satisfied with the product for a few years now - and since it now works under wine - I like it even better.

I'm thinking of sending them a note about moving to Linux using wine libraries - that would be even better.