What if doing your taxes wasn't awful? Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF is offering a twist on the traditional tax preparation service with a dating simulation game that also prepares your federal income tax return.
If that sounds out of the ordinary, it is. But then, it's no secret that doing taxes isn't a favorite activity for most folks. A recent WalletHub survey found that 15% of Americans would rather swim with sharks and 13% would rather drink expired milk than do their taxes.
Why not make the process more enticing? Tax Heaven 3000, referred to as TH3K, proposes to do just that, pitching itself as "The Dating Sim That Does Your Taxes."
While I'm not in the market for a date or a tax preparer, I was intrigued by the concept and decided to give it a whirl.
The game features Iris, a pink-haired protagonist with a name that sounds like a certain tax agency. Her character profile describes her as "a delightful girl about town who knows a lot about income taxes."
When you meet Iris, she takes an immediate liking to you, and asks if she can see you again. At each "date," she asks questions about your life, including your finances, which she jots down in her pink notebook.
There are some choose-your-own-adventure-like moments, such as deciding where to meet and what you might order at the coffee shop, but they are inevitably a pretext to answering questions about your life, including the basics like your name and address. It moves on to marital status, dependents, and educational levelit's part of the date, of course, as Iris also checks your eligibility for tax benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and American Opportunity Credit.
MSCHF's dating sim/tax prep program takes shots at the market leader in tax software. At one point, its pink-haired protagonist even warns a user not to "get involved" with TurboTax.
The game eventually asks for more detailed information, including your Social Security number, W-2 information (which you must upload), and bank information. As we clicked through, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the information I was asked to provide.
(Don't worryI didn't provide my real information for many reasons, including that the tax preparation piece only works for single filers without any dependents.)
The idea of handing my personal and financial information over in a game felt weird. But maybe that was because of the graphics and ludicrous storyline. The game asks for the same kind of information that tax software programs requireit just asks as part of a fictional interaction.
The game offers a nod towards that very issue on its site, saying, "All of TurboTax's cutesy loading animations are fake graphics; TH3K simply makes the fiction the point." The site goes on to say, "For some reason the game-to-real-life interface has tended to remain in the purview of corporate metaverse fictions. TH3K is a dongle that adapts from a visual novel to the IRS." A dongle is tech speak for a small piece of computer hardware that connects to a port on another device to provide additional functionality.
"All of TurboTax's cutesy loading animations are fake graphics; TH3K simply makes the fiction the point."
The game does not connect to the internetyou can download it and walk through the various scenarios without a connection. And the information that you input is used to generate a PDF of your federal tax return, which you can print and mail to the IRSthe program doesn't e-file the return for you. While that may alleviate some privacy concerns, it can add to your tax filing anxiety: the IRS advises that wait times for processing paper returns are significantly longer. For example, while you can check the status of your refund online after just 24 hours of e-filing your return, youll have to wait at least four weeks after filing a paper return to get information about your refund.
Additionally, the game does not prepare any state tax returns.
In contrast to TH3K, TurboTax collects your information and connects to the internet. However, the company notes that they encrypt any of your data that they store, and when your return is transmitted to the IRS or state agencies, they use SSL encryption "that exceeds IRS standards." Other protections include protecting your account with biometrics and auto email notifications.
Those levels of security are intended to protect taxpayers. Thats because tax-related identity theftwhen someone steals your personal information to commit tax fraudcontinues to be a concern for the IRS. Scammers use a variety of ways to steal personally identifiable information, like your Social Security number, to file a fraudulent return to claim a refund.
But it made me wondereven with those protections, would I still hand over my information if the interface looked different? Put another way, would I hesitate to provide those answers if the platform asked me questions about my financial and tax details as I played video soccer or Angry Birds? It's definitely an interesting question.
Would I hesitate if the platform asked me questions about my financial and tax details as I played video soccer or Angry Birds?
Of course, there are options available to DIY taxpayers outside of TH3K and TurboTax. The IRS has a longstandingthough not controversy-freeplatform that allows qualifying taxpayers to prepare and file federal income tax returns online using guided tax preparation software. IRS Free File is a public-private partnership between the IRS and tax preparation and filing software industry companies who provide their online tax preparation and filing for freetypically for taxpayers with AGI of $73,000 or less. Participating partners are part of the Free File Alliance, including Tax Slayer and Tax Act. TurboTax, through its parent, Intuit, opted out of the program last year.
I wanted to ask the creators about their motivationand maybe learn why they singled out TurboTax for criticism specifically. I was directed by Daniel Greenberg, the co-founder of MSCHF, to a Google doc with a press release.
Master of the Meme: MSCHF's big red rubber boots have been worn by dozens of celebrities, including Janelle Mone. Here, they're shown on a guest at New York's Fashion Week this past February.
The seven-year-old MSCHF Collective (pronounced mischief") is known for art with meme potential (such as cartoonishly large red rubber boots) or with a social commentary twist. At Art Basel last year, it attracted notice with an ATM that publicly displayed a users bank balance on a leaderboard after spitting out cash.
MSCHF has put a pointed spin on its tax program too suggesting that its highlighting a double standard when it comes to tax preparation. The site claims, "Corporate tax filing services like TurboTax are (by dint of extensive lobbying) predatory, parasitic bottlenecks that deliberately complicate the tax filing process in order to make it unnavigable by ordinary people." Why? The site claims it's purposeful, warning, "They feed us their poison so that we buy their medicine!"
This is a theme that is apparent throughout the game. At one point, Iris even warned me, on one of our dates, "Don't ever get involved with TurboTax They're dangerous."
A Turbo Tax spokesperson disputed the characterization, saying, Intuit has explicitly called for tax simplification, has done more free tax returns than all other online tax prep software companies combined, has delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in refunds, has a lifetime maximum refund guarantee, and stands for the empowering of individuals to control their financial future. The company pointed me to materials on their website on taxpayer empowerment, including entries on their blog.
Still, TH3K claims that TurboTax is "built on the "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" that ordinary people have about their taxes." Their solution, they argue, is "free software instead built on parasocial desire for intimacy and benign horniness!"
The game did tilt towards innuendo a few times, but nothing that you wouldn't see or hear on televisionmy college-aged daughter rolled her eyes a few times.
There was also a click-through for an "X-rated game patch." With my kids away from my computer, I downloaded the patch. Spoiler alert: It's not X-rated at all. The link takes you to Iris' origin story, of sorts, published on Wattpad, a social story-telling platform (my kids recognized it as a site focused on fan fiction). The narrative, For All of Time and Taxes, takes place just before the 2035 tax season and details the woeful saga of how the main character, a CPA, lost his spouseIristo the TurboTax Task Force. It turns out that TurboTax created Iris, but later kidnapped and retrained her for their apparently evil purposes. The story has over seven thousand reads to date.
Tax Heaven 3000 is available on Windows and Mac, and it is free to play. The press release suggests that you can find it on Steam, a gaming platform, but I couldn't find it. Reports suggest that it was de-listed after it initially appeared.
The game is currently available on the Indie game site, itch.io. There, it comes with a warning: Tax Heaven 3000 is designed to assist in tax preparation only: it is the responsibility of the user to provide accurate information and to ultimately file their return once complete.
Reactions to the game appear to be mixed. Comments on itch.io ran the gamut from, THIS IS A SCAM report it to Everyone opposing this tax software is just a secret IRS officer sent by Jerome Powell to stop the weeb [sic] revolution. Do you think the government wants you to find true love and exciting new tax breaks that will make you rich and romantically fulfilled? Absolutely not.
While the game is free, you could spring for the collector's editionit costs $90 and includes a game box with CD, instruction manual, an IRS mailing envelope, and a 5-foot Iris body pillow printed on plush fabric. If you're wondering who would spring for itas of this writing, it's sold out.
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Swipe Right On Your 1040EZ: Inside The 'Tax Heaven 3000' Dating ... - Forbes