9 ms·

For the record, the IRS (in partnership with various tax companies) already providers for free filing for people making less than 66k/year. https://www.irs.gov

• int_19h 8y ago
  The whole point of doing it this way - via the tax companies' own services - is to make it an advertisement for those companies, so that once somebody starts earning more, they would preferentially pick them. It's also a form of mild lock-in, since already having their return history etc there makes filing that much easier, creating an incentive to pay. In the meantime, the same lobbyists who created this scheme are trying to prohibit IRS from developing its own free filing system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725