That one is actually third party, originally Intuit, now `On-LineTaxes, Inc`. The system that IRS was charged with creating would basically amount to this, and

That one is actually third party, originally Intuit, now `On-LineTaxes, Inc`. The system that IRS was charged with creating would basically amount to this, and it might be that they simply buy the system and make it an offical IRS product. They already had sufficent control over FFFF to force Intuit to divest after Intuit exited the free file alliance. I unlike many people who seem to be hoping for basically ISR Turbotax or nicer, I really cannot see the IRS offing a more guided walkthough style system instead, since that is far more complicated than maintaining basically digital versions of the paper forms. In some areas TurboTax and the others get into more or less the business of offering tax advice, which may even be incorrect. Those businesses can afford to reimburse you if their wizards result in incorrect totals due to a misunderstanding. The IRS on the other hand would need to make sure that the wizards never accidentally misclassify anything, even for incredibly rare esoteric cases. This could be done by possibly asking many extra seemingly irreleavnt questions to rule out all these edge cases, or to dumb the whole system down making it closer to just electronic versions of the forms. The result the IRS would pick is pretty obvious, go with the simpler almost-identical to the paper forms options.