Online Tax Returns

I filed my Ohio Tax Return online in about 20 min­utes last evening. It was a piece of cake, you cre­ate an account and can then save your return as you work on it. I high­ly rec­om­mend using I‑File if you live in Ohio. They’ll even direct deposit your refund.

Of course, bureau­cra­cy increas­es by orders of mag­ni­tude as you go up the scale and instead of hav­ing such a sim­ple and sim­i­lar process avail­able [that is, oper­at­ed and offered free by the gov­ern­ment] through the IRS, you have to pick from a list of approved pri­vate tax pre­par­ers who have “free” soft­ware avail­able for use [and hid­den fees like crazy]. The Feds would do well to steal a play from Ohio’s book, at least for the 1040EZ. They did have fil­l­able pdfs of the forms, which was nice, but I still have to print it off and mail it in with my check, [so much for the state refund] instead of being able to com­plete it all online.

On the oth­er end of the spec­trum, my city/county tax­es still have to be done ful­ly through the snail mail. The mid­dle road still seems to be the best.