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?
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.