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The IRS is working on a plan that would allow taxpayers to file directly with the government online, but tax preparation companies plan stiff opposition. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

The IRS is working on a plan that would allow taxpayers to file directly with the government online, but tax preparation companies plan stiff opposition.

The IRS is developing a system that would let taxpayers send electronic returns directly to the government for free, sidestepping commercial options such as TurboTax.

The agency plans a pilot test of the program next year.

Many other countries already offer taxpayers a government-run filing system. But the IRS plan is likely to face stiff opposition from the $14 billion tax-preparation industry.

"A direct-to-IRS e-file system is wholly redundant and is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem," said Rick Heineman, a spokesman for Intuit, the company behind TurboTax. "That solution will unnecessarily cost taxpayers billions of dollars and especially harm the most vulnerable Americans."

Americans already spend significant time and money preparing their taxes. The average individual filer pays $140 per year, according to the IRS.

While an alliance of industry players offers a free-filing option through the IRS website, only about 2% of taxpayers use it.

"That's because the tax prep companies sabotaged the program, so they could keep raking in money," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said last month.

Last year, TurboTax paid $141 million to settle a complaint that it advertised free tax preparation, then steered customers into costly upgrades. The company did not admit to any wrongdoing.

IRS commissioner Danny Werfel stressed that filing returns directly with the government will be strictly optional.

"Taxpayers will always have choices for how they file their taxes," Werfel told reporters during a conference call Tuesday. "They can use tax software. They can use a trusted tax professional. They can use a paper tax return. We'd rather they file electronically, sure. But they have that choice."

Many Democrats have long favored a direct filing option. Legislation passed last year gave the IRS $15 million to study the idea.

"Democrats are committed to the proposition that it shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars and many more hours of time simply to follow the law," Senate Finance Committee chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said during a hearing last month. "When it comes to filing taxes online, the status quo is unacceptable."

Advocates gather in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 2023, to call out tax prep companies like Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block for blocking simplified filing and to support the IRS in its exploration of alternative free tax filing in Washington, DC. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Economic Securi hide caption

Advocates gather in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 2023, to call out tax prep companies like Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block for blocking simplified filing and to support the IRS in its exploration of alternative free tax filing in Washington, DC.

Through surveys, the IRS found significant interest in a government-run filing system, but also challenges.

One survey found 72% of taxpayers would be "very interested" or "somewhat interested" in a system that allowed them to file returns directly with the government at no cost. The option was most popular with younger people, those with limited English skills and people who do their own taxes.

"If the government is requiring me to file, they should offer a free service," one survey respondent said.

Other participants were concerned, however, that the tax collector might not provide them with the largest refund or the smallest tax bill a potential conflict that's been highlighted by commercial tax preparers.

The IRS estimates that setting up and operating a direct file system would cost the government between $64 million and $249 million annually, depending on the number of users and the complexity of returns it could handle.

One challenge is how to integrate state tax returns, which would make a IRS-run system more attractive. The system could also be a stepping stone to having the IRS fill in parts of a tax return itself, using information from employers and other sources.

The next step in the process is to let some real taxpayers try using the system next year.

"The best way to be successful is to begin with a limited scope pilot that allows the IRS to test functionality for some taxpayers, evaluate success, and use lessons learned to inform the growth of the tool," Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo wrote, in a letter authorizing the test.

The scale of the experiment and the kinds of taxpayers who will be eligible is yet to be determined.

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The IRS is working on software to allow taxpayers to file online - NPR

RIB Software launches free-to-use RIB Carbon Quantifier for optimized carbon quantification in construction.

RIB Software, a leading multinational provider of innovative technology solutions to the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, has partnered with non-profit organization, Building Transparency, to develop the RIB Carbon Quantifier.

Through a direct link with Building Transparencys Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), the application allows users to quickly, easily and consistently allocate carbon environmental product declaration (EPD) values against their imported estimate data, including resource quantities.

This comes as studies highlight the industrys impact on the environment, with construction constituting a staggering 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions and accounting for 36% of global energy demands.

Ren Wolf, Chief Executive Officer at RIB Software, says there is a growing need to reduce carbon emissions within the engineering and construction sector to combat the damaging effects of climate change.

Until recently, the construction industrys response to reducing building-related emissions has focused on energy efficiency by reducing operational emissions - the energy used to heat, cool and light buildings.

While previously effective, this approach overlooks embodied carbon emissions associated with material and construction processes across a buildings lifecycle, which represents a quarter of the carbon emitted during the life of a building and 11% of all global carbon emissions.

It is therefore critical to increase efforts to quantify, monitor, evaluate and ultimately reduce the embodied carbon emitted throughout the lifecycle of a construction project - and the driving factor for why RIB Software developed the Carbon Quantifier application, explains Wolf.

Through a seamless integration with Building Transparencys premier, free-to-use EC3 tool, the RIB Carbon Quantifier application is set to be the first of its kind in the industry to assist the built environment in extracting and quantifying embodied carbon data more quickly and efficiently, optimizing carbon quantification and reducing estimate delivery times.

Through this powerful partnership of technology, industry professionals will now have access to an additional toolset to optimize the efficiency in the quantification and measurement of carbon, thus better facilitating design and procurement decisions, helping the global AEC industry in achieving a lower embodied carbon footprint.

Stacy Smedley, Executive Director of Building Transparency, says reducing embodied carbon emissions is one of the biggest opportunities in the fight against global warming. Partnerships, like ours with RIB Software, are critical to driving action in the building sector and identifying new solutions that make it easier to prioritize low-carbon decision-making on projects. Its exciting to have our EC3 data and its large carbon impact database be utilized and leveraged for tools like the RIB Carbon Quantifier.

The primary features of the RIB Carbon Quantifier include the easy extraction of embodied carbon data from Building Transparencys EC3 database against estimates; keeping a repository of each estimates embodied carbon data for cross-referencing and facilitating easier allocation of carbon values for future projects; the ability to easily export aligned quantified data back to EC3 for analytics, reporting and dashboarding; and providing users with a direct integration with other estimating products within the RIB portfolio of products.

Wolf says the need to accelerate decarbonization practices in the AEC industry is critical, and using an application like the RIB Carbon Quantifier will not only allow users to optimize carbon quantification, but will ensure they avoid unnecessary energy spent and emissions generated from associated projects and processes.

At RIB, we are driven by transformative digital technologies, industry best-practice and trends that help propel the industry forward and make engineering and construction more efficient and sustainable, he concludes.

For more information about the RIB Carbon Quantifier, emailcq@rib-software.comor visitrib-software.com/en/home/carbon-quantifier.

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Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, speaks with CNBC on May 16th, 2023.

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Twitter is accusing Microsoft of using the social media company's data in ways that were unauthorized and never disclosed.

Alex Spiro, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and attorney for Twitter owner Elon Musk, sent a letter to Microsoft on Thursday laying out the claims, including that the software company "may have been in violation of multiple provisions" of its agreement with Twitter over data use.

It's the latest rift among tech companies in the growing debate over who owns data that can be used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning software. The New York Times first reported on the letter, a copy of which was obtained by CNBC.

After Musk led a buyout of Twitter in October and appointed himself CEO, the company started charging for use of its application programming interface, which enables developers to embed tweets into their software and services and access Twitter data.

The API was previously free to use for some researchers, partners and developers who agreed to Twitter's terms. Twitter API-driven apps include Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Sprinklr.

According to the letter from Spiro to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the company's board, last month Microsoft "declined to pay even a discounted rate for continued access to Twitter's APIs and content."

As of April, Microsoft had at least five products that used the Twitter API, including the Azure cloud, Bing search engine and Power Platform low-code application development tools, Spiro wrote.

The agreement restricts excessive use of Twitter's programming interfaces. However, for one of the Microsoft services using Twitter data, "account information outright states that it intends to allow its customers to 'go around throttling limits,'" Spiro wrote.

A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged receipt of the letter and told CNBC the company will review it and "respond appropriately."

"Today we heard from a law firm representing Twitter with some questions about our previous use of the free Twitter API," the spokesperson said in an email. "We look forward to continuing our long-term partnership with the company."

Musk has been openly critical of Microsoft's tight relationship with OpenAI, the creator of the chatbot ChatGPT. Musk was an early backer of OpenAI, but the company has since raised billions of dollars from Microsoft, which is embedding its AI technology into many core products.

"Microsoft has a very strong say, if not directly controls, OpenAI at this point," Musk told CNBC in an interview this week. Nadella recently challenged Musk's claim in an interview with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin, saying Microsoft has "a noncontrolling interest" in the startup.

Spiro did not name OpenAI or mention its ChatGPT and DALL-E applications or large language models in the letter. He did press Microsoft for any details about, "a description of any token pooling implemented in any of the Microsoft Apps, including the time period(s) when any such token pooling occurred and the number of tokens that were pooled."

Musk and Nadella have had other interactions of late.

Last year, Musk approached Nadella as he was raising money for his Twitter buyout, according to text messages that became public via court filings. Nadella wrote in one text to Musk, "will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!" Teams is Microsoft's chat app.

Read the full letter from Twitter to Microsoft, here.

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Read the letter: Twitter accuses Microsoft of using its data in unauthorized ways - CNBC

Imagine being handcuffed in front of your neighbors and family for stealing watches. After spending hours behind bars, you learn that the facial recognition software state police used on footage from the store identified you as the thief. But you didnt steal anything; the software pointed cops to the wrong guy.

Unfortunately this is not a hypothetical. This happened three years ago to Robert Williams, a Black father in suburban Detroit.Sadly Williams story is not a one-off. In a recent case of mistaken identity, facial recognition technology led to the wrongful arrest of a Black Georgian for purse thefts in Louisiana.

Ourresearch supports fears that facial recognition technology (FRT) can worsen racial inequities in policing. We found that law enforcement agencies that use automated facial recognition disproportionately arrest Black people. We believe this results from factors that include the lack of Black faces in the algorithms training data sets, a belief that these programs are infallible and a tendency of officers own biases to magnify these issues.

While no amount of improvement will eliminate the possibility of racial profiling, we understand the value of automating the time-consuming, manual face-matching process. We also recognize the technologys potential to improve public safety. However, considering the potential harms of this technology, enforceable safeguards are needed to prevent unconstitutional overreaches.

FRT is an artificial intelligencepowered technology that tries to confirm the identity of a person from an image. The algorithms used by law enforcement are typically developed by companies like Amazon, Clearview AI and Microsoft, which build their systems for different environments.Despite massive improvements in deep-learning techniques, federal testing shows that most facial recognition algorithms perform poorly at identifying people besides white men.

Civil rights advocates warn that the technology struggles to distinguish darker faces, which will likely lead to more racial profiling and more false arrests. Further, inaccurate identification increases the likelihood of missed arrests.

Still some government leaders, including New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, tout this technology's ability to help solve crimes. Amid the growing staffing shortages facing police nationwide, some champion FRT as a much-needed police coverage amplifierthat helps agencies do more with fewer officers. Such sentiments likely explain why more than one quarter of local and state police forces and almost half of federal law enforcement agencies regularly access facial recognition systems, despite their faults.

This widespread adoption poses a grave threat to our constitutional right against unlawful searches and seizures.

Recognizing the threatto our civil liberties, cities like San Francisco and Boston banned or restricted government use of this technology. At the federal level President Bidens administration released the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights in 2022. While intended to incorporate practices that protect our civil rights in the design and use of AI technologies, the blueprints principles are nonbinding. In addition, earlier this year congressional Democrats reintroduced the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. This bill would pause law enforcements use of FRT until policy makers can create regulations and standards that balance constitutional concerns and public safety.

The proposed AI bill of rights and the moratorium are necessary first steps in protecting citizens from AI and FRT. However, both efforts fall short. The blueprint doesnt cover law enforcements use of AI, and the moratorium only limits the use of automated facial recognition by federal authoritiesnot local and state governments.

Yet as the debate heats up over facial recognitions role in public safety, our research and others show how even with mistake-free software, this technology will likely contribute to inequitable law enforcement practices unless safeguards are put in place for nonfederal use too.

First, the concentration of police resources in many Black neighborhoods already results in disproportionate contact between Black residents and officers. With this backdrop, communities served by FRT-assisted police are more vulnerable to enforcement disparities, as the trustworthiness of algorithm-aided decisions is jeopardized by the demands and time constraints of police work, combined with an almost blind faith in AI that minimizes user discretion in decision-making.

Police typically use this technology in three ways: in-field queries to identify stopped or arrested persons, searches of video footage or real-time scans of people passing surveillance cameras. The police upload an image, and in a matter of seconds the software compares the image to numerous photos to generate a lineup of potential suspects.

Enforcement decisions ultimately lie with officers. However, people often believe that AI is infallible and dont question the results. On top of this using automated tools is much easier than making comparisons with the naked eye.

AI-powered law enforcement aids also psychologically distance police officers from citizens. This removal from the decision-making process allows officers to separate themselves from their actions. Usersalso sometimes selectively follow computer-generated guidance, favoring advice that matches stereotypes, including those about Black criminality.

Theres no solid evidence that FRT improves crime control. Nonetheless, officials appear willing to tolerate these racialized biases as cities struggle to curb crime.This leaves people vulnerable to encroachments on their rights.

The time for blind acceptance of this technology has passed. Software companies and law enforcement must take immediate steps towards reducing the harms of this technology.

For companies, creating reliable facial recognition software begins with balanced representation among designers. In the U.S. most software developers are white men. Research shows the software is much better at identifying members of the programmers race. Experts attribute such findings largely to engineers unconscious transmittal of own-race bias into algorithms.

Own-race bias creeps in as designers unconsciously focus on facial features familiar to them. The resulting algorithm is mainly tested on people of their race. As such many U.S.-made algorithms learn by looking at more white faces, which fails to help them recognize people of other races.

Using diverse training sets can help reduce bias in FRT performance. Algorithms learn to compare images by training with a set of photos. Disproportionate representation of white males in training images produces skewed algorithms because Black people are overrepresented in mugshot databases and other image repositories commonly used by law enforcement. Consequently AI is more likely to mark Black faces as criminal, leading to the targeting and arresting of innocent Black people.

We believe that the companies that make these products need to take staff and image diversity into account. However, this does not remove law enforcements responsibility. Police forces must critically examine their methods if we want to keep this technology from worsening racial disparities and leading to rights violations.

For police leaders, uniform similarity score minimums must be applied to matches. After the facial recognition software generates a lineup of potential suspects, it ranks candidates based on how similar the algorithm believes the images are. Currently departments regularly decide their own similarity score criteria, which some experts contend raises the chances for wrongful and missed arrests.

FRTs adoption by law enforcement is inevitable, and we see its value. But if racial disparities already exist in enforcement outcomes, this technology will likely exacerbate inequities like those seen in traffic stops and arrests without adequate regulation and transparency.

Fundamentally police officers need more training on FRTs pitfalls, human biases and historical discrimination. Beyond guiding officers who use this technology, police and prosecutors should also disclose that they used automated facial recognition when seeking a warrant.

Although FRT isnt foolproof, following these guidelines will help defend against uses that drive unnecessary arrests.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those ofScientific American.

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Police Facial Recognition Technology Can't Tell Black People Apart - Scientific American

Porsche has added integration for Apple Maps to include charger locations for U.S. Taycan models, giving CarPlay users yet another reason to stick with the software. The car was already equipped with Porsche's native charging planner, which can suggest stops based on information like the vehicle's state of charge (SOC), expected traffic conditions, and average speed. But the reality is that most owners seem to prefer third-party software like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. As for Android, a Porsche spokesperson told Car and Driver that the Taycan does come with Android Auto capability as standard, but it doesn't have the EV SOC integration or charge stop suggestions that the new CarPlay system does.

Porsche

The new integration means that Taycan owners won't need to leave CarPlay or settle for using the native navigation system when trying to map out charging stops. On top of doing a lot of the same quality-of-life things the native system does (like analyze SOC and expected traffic), the Apple system can also analyze elevation changes along a given route to get a more accurate estimation of battery usage. According to Porsche, if you allow the vehicle's SOC to deplete to a low enough margin, the new software will automatically offer a route to the nearest compatible charging station.

The system relies on both CarPlay and the information fed to it from the vehicle. That means the normal Apple Maps app on your phone won't give the same charging recommendations. The system should work with any Taycan, but according to Porsche, any models from 2021 or earlier will need to go to a service center for a free software update. Porsche also provided a link for setup and FAQs for the software, which can be found here.

This content is imported from poll. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Associate News Editor

Jack Fitzgeralds love for cars stems from his as yet unshakable addiction to Formula 1. After a brief stint as a detailer for a local dealership group in college, he knew he needed a more permanent way to drive all the new cars he couldnt afford and decided to pursue a career in auto writing. By hounding his college professors at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he was able to travel Wisconsin seeking out stories in the auto world before landing his dream job at Car and Driver. His new goal is to delay the inevitable demise of his 2010 Volkswagen Golf.

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Porsche Taycan Gets EV Charging Station Finder in Apple Maps - Car and Driver