4 ms·

There is nothing stopping any private organization from making free tax filing software.

• saagarjha 8y ago
  Other than the fact that it costs time and money to write this software? And as other commenters have mentioned, people have tried to do this in the spirit of “open source”. It’s just that the problem it’s solving is something that can be viewed as an artificial one.
  • Spivak 8y ago
    This I think is the core of the argument. Saying that the government should compute your taxes for you is essentially arguing that the cost of tax prep should be paid by the IRS/your taxes. Unless you believe that the IRS can do it better/more efficiently than the current group of companies providing the service then we might not really gain anything.
    • gst 8y ago
      That's a good point! Most of the data already known to the IRS is available in an electronic format anyway. I fire up TurboTax, electronically import my W-2, the tax statements from my bank, etc. and I'm 90% done. And the remaining items (various deductions, reporting my foreign bank accounts, etc.) are things that the IRS itself probably also wouldn't know right at the beginning of the year.
    • maceurt 8y ago
      The IRS already computes your taxes. They use it to check your filings.