This is not really true. Intuit et al. make money from pretty simple tax laws that apply to most people, who use their consumer-grade prep software. The idea wa

This is not really true. Intuit et al. make money from pretty simple tax laws that apply to most people, who use their consumer-grade prep software. The idea was the government could prefill your taxes and for this huge segment of the population that would be it; the rich or complicated returns could still be filed by accountants and specialized software. Intuit makes a huge amount of money off these relatively simple returns though, so instead lobbied to provide "free" tax software to the same target segment. It turns out their free software is anything but and they used it as a marketing ploy to funnel poorer people to paid versions. Having the IRS predefine your taxes would be far more efficient and wouldn't cost rich people any more. The tax code is complicated because of it's scale and interactions; neither impacts most of these basic returns.