The tax prep software companies (Intuit, H&R Block, etc.) have successfully lobbied to make such a system illegal and keep the system as complicated as possible

The tax prep software companies (Intuit, H&R Block, etc.) have successfully lobbied to make such a system illegal and keep the system as complicated as possible. There has been some movement to make this simpler but I don’t have much hope it will actually bring about meaningful change. Free file forms is a joke and hardly better than filling out PDFs (or paper) manually.