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IIRC the free tax filing thing being killed is just classic lobbying, the owners of Intuit and other paid tax filing companies have myriad political connections
by kevingadd 1y ago
IIRC the free tax filing thing being killed is just classic lobbying, the owners of Intuit and other paid tax filing companies have myriad political connections and spend a lot of money to protect their interests.
- 0xEF 1y agoCorrect. It's the same conversation every year, well before Elon came along. The big players are TurboTax and H&R Block. TurboTax specifically has led the charge for over two decades to prevent you from ever filing your taxes for free. It's a racket, and an extremely profitable one for them, so there's no way they're going to willingly give that up without some new and enforceable laws being passed.
- jalk 1y agoWasn't it auto-filling that got killed recently? IIRC TurboTax has to provide free filing service along with their paid services, but they employ a ton of dark patterns to steer people into the paying parts
- 0xEF 1y agoI think so? I'd have to look it up, but I believe you're right. They _definitely_ employ a lot of dark patterns, though. Glad you brought that up, because not enough people are taking the "dark patterns" thing seriously enough, in my opinion. It is absolutely wild what you can get people to do without even realizing it with some good front-end development, and none of us are immune to those tricks.
- wnevets 1y agoNo, it was DOGE and Musk that killed it [1], Elon even bragged about "deleting" [2] the team that created it. If you want to argue that lobbying got DOGE/Musk to do it that's fine but they're responsible for its death. [1] https://www.livenowfox.com/news/irs-direct-file-doge-cuts https://www.livenowfox.com/news/irs-direct-file-doge-cuts [2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/business/musk-irs-direct-file https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/business/musk-irs-direct-file