Maybe if YC is their /only/ investor? I'm not familiar with how YC's initial investment is structured. But your scenario won't exist for many (close enough to all?) startups who have investors. What likely happened is the startup either:
1) raised their money in a priced round. It's therefore unlikely they have unilateral control of the board.
or
2) didn't do a priced round but went with convertible notes. Those initial investments are now interest-accruing debt on their balance sheet.
In either of those scenarios there's going to be immense pressure to not let the business get comfortable.
The whole image is being stretched vertically in CSS ("background-size: 104% 160%;"). You can see the same distortion on the man's arm, the phone, and the pencil holder.
Definitely a "once seen, can't unsee" type of thing but I'll admit I didn't notice it initially. :)
Everyone I know big enough to run a load balancer has had this happen.
The next step in evolution is to have your script look for specific text on a page, which will change 24 months later and have all the perfectly good servers pulled out of rotation.
> The author also doesn't show how the federal income tax is fundamentally different to what an employee would pay
Not disagreeing. For anyone wondering what the fundamental differences are:
1) As an independent contractor you are responsible for 100% of your FICA tax (social security and medicare tax). For most people the tax due is 15% of your income. This is in addition to your income tax. In an employee/employer relationship the employer pays for half of this. It can be a big shock to people who are hit with this for the first time.
2) If you're an employee, your employer is automatically withholding your income tax payments for you and sending them in to the IRS at a regular interval. As an independent contractor you need to be doing this yourself. If you wait until the end of the year and pay as one lump sum you'll likely be penalized.
I never advocated banning anything. The argument is closer to "cheap, high calorie low nutrition food is leading to an obesity epidemic." Tax fraud costs taxpayers billions of dollars[0]. There are surely many ways to combat this, but the correlation between fraud and it being free to attempt fraud en masse is real.
The link you provided points to industry participants in the Free File Alliance[1]. Some skeptics believe the industry has this program to appease the government enough to not pursue tax software created by the government. If you're one of the folks who believe we should have a more european-style system, participating in FFA probably works against that goal (I don't know that that's your stance just throwing it out there for others to consider)
I think it's also interesting from a business case study. I tried to make the argument that tax software isn't cheap to produce. What's the right way for competition to blossom if the cost to users is "free" and the revenue is made up via other less than savory means? Does small-guy competition have to resort to the same tactics?
Oh believe me I don't either. It's horrible an industry can crop up to assist with government inefficiency and eventually become powerful enough to keep the inefficiency in place.
Lots of speculation in this thread. Here's my hypothesis.
Federal tax return fraud is huge. It's a growing problem that the IRS is struggling to cope with and it's been going on for years. State tax return fraud has been largely non-existent... so non-existent in fact that USA Today reported the state of Minnesota got suspicious when there were 2 reported cases of fraud[0].
So what's going on and why is TurboTax being called out by these states? First off, know that when a tax return is e-filed either to the fed (who also handles most state e-filing) or directly to the state, every software provider transmits an identifier along with it. So if you get a bunch of bogus tax returns submitted it's trivial to see where they're all originating from. Second, the rise in federal tax return fraud has grown steadily in relation to the number of software providers offering a free option... the reason we haven't seen state fraud as rampant is because it has always cost money to prepare your state return with software. But what's new this year besides a dramatic increase in state tax return fraud? TurboTax's Absolute Zero campaign. That's right, a whole lot more people can file their states taxes for free using TurboTax's software. That may seem great at first blush if you qualify, but an unintended consequence of that is it's now a completely free roll for a fraudster to file a state tax return IN ADDITION to a federal one.
It's trivial for the IRS. They either cut a check (and mail it to an address) or direct deposit it in to an account. Most fraudsters opt for the check option... so much so in fact that one of the new fraud prevention mechanism the IRS introduced this year was to cap the total number of refund checks to any specific address at 10(!).
Unfortunately there isn't an existing easy way to find out if your SSN has been used to file a tax return. When you file your taxes via efile[0], the IRS system will reject the tax return if a tax return with the same SSN has already been filed for that processing year.
If this happens to you you're forced to file by mail.
[0] Doesn't matter who you use to do your taxes. Even an accountant that has access to e-file.
I would guess this is happening largely because Intuit started offering free state filing to a greater subset of users. This has been an ongoing problem at the federal level, but just started this year with the various states. Strong correlation between fraudulent returns filed and it costing $0 for a fraudster to take a shot.
No you're not held liable, but it's a giant pain in the butt proving that you're the actual owner of your SSN. It also significantly delays your refund (if you're due a refund).