The Fugue Counterpoint by Hans Fugal

Free File Fillable Forms

If you saunter on over to irs.gov you'll see that there's a new option for free electronic filing: Free File Fillable Forms (0xFFFF). Unlike the partnerships with companies like H&R Block which limit free filing by your income, this is free for everyone. And unlike those companies, you have to do all the thinking and math. Well, most of the math.

I did this with my taxes this year, mostly out of curiosity and because the notion of electronic filing user-filled forms is elegant and I think we should have been doing it for at least 10 years by now.

Alas, the implementation of this elegant idea is pretty shoddy. I went to FreeFileFillableForms.com via irs.gov and immediately hit a hurdle. While trying to sign up for an account, the captchas consistently failed. I'm not stupid enough to miss 5 captchas in a row. Just for kicks I did the audio captcha instead. Wow, that's a thorough captcha—you have to type a whole phrase from a TV snippet from like 1955. I had to try 3 before I even had a good guess on all the words. (I'm betting you only had to get one word right, though.) That worked. Armed with an account I got started.

Or at least I tried to. It redirected me back to the login page. After a few times around the block I decided it was probably some kind of browser incompatibility, so I ditched Chrome and fired up Safari. That worked (it may have solved my captcha problem, too).

The interface is nothing sensible like PDF forms or standard HTML forms. It's a flash-based GUI. Very slick in some places, but very deficient in actual usability. The most glaring problem is that you can't type faster than about 20 words per minute or it goes all dyslexic on you. This is a serious problem. I had to triple check every word and number entered to be sure it hadn't switched the letters around behind my back. Lest you think I'm a paranoid defective keyboardist, I watched it shuffle the letters around, like something out of the new Electric Company. I typed a word while watching the screen, saw it lay down the letters in the order I typed them, then watched in horror as it rearranged the last few letters. My hypothesis is that it's doing some sort of input verification, but doing it poorly and rife with race conditions.

In spite of all my diligence, I missed the fact that it had rearranged my SSN at the top of the 1040, and so when I submitted it the IRS rejected it and I now have to go back in and fix it, recheck every number, and resubmit.

I said you do the math, which isn't entirely true. You follow the instructions and the forms automatically do most of the math. But not until you actually press "do the math" (that's very 1998). But it's not very consistent about how helpful it is. Some forms automatically fill in your AGI, others require you to enter it manually. Some remember your filing status and enter the right number, others require you to do it manually. Basically, you have to try to enter every number and check box, and the only way you can tell whether you should have tried to enter it is by whether it pops up a little red tooltip telling you it's going to do that for you, thanks.

All in all, with those major caveats, it worked well. The overall interface wasn't horrible, the generated PDF when you print your forms is very nice, and I'm sure once I get my return right in spite of its buggy input validation it'll file without issue. If they had just used regular HTML and Javascript like H&R Block does, it would have been more likely to be less buggy and more compatible with all browsers. I can recommend 0xFFFF, but only to the patient and diligent who really want that refund sooner rather than later. Otherwise go with the paper forms.