Snail Mail Your Taxes

Presumably, you've already filed your taxes this year. I have.

But while I was printing out my return, it made me think of ways to use annual (and quarterly) tax filings for digital sabotage without straight-up lying in a misdemeanor or felony capacity.

Digital sabotage? Learn more about how you can help!

The Premise

The lobbying arm of tax preparation giants has essentially made using their services required. We could have a majority of this work automated for us, but like most things in America we've decided that paying for the convenience is the better roadmap than the rest of the world.

• The government is mulling dropping free-file
• Intuit knows how to lobby

So essentially we have a corporate power using their free-speech money to make our lives a living hell during tax-time.

Mail In Those Taxes

Look, you can't not do taxes. You'll be in more trouble than you want if you ignore it long enough. But we can use a form of malicious compliance.

1. Do your taxes by hand or use a local tax-preparer
2. Mail your taxes in; don't submit them electronically.

The first option removes profit from the corporation who has used their influence to make taxes harder and more expensive, and the second option forces the government to spend more resources doing our taxes (even if they just scan them, at a large enough scale we can introduce inefficiencies.)

So, in summary?

Fight corporate greed and gum-up the system by preparing your taxes by hand and sending them in via mail until better, lower-cost, and potentially automated options are made available to us.

Options that work for us, and not for corporate profit machines.