increasing the vibrancy of the tax ecosystem
Non American here - why does taxation have an ecosystem of middlemen in it? Is this the capitalist innovation and efficiency I hear so much about?
Because the tax preppration lobby group lobbied for decades to make the tax system difficult to navigate and hard to understand. If people have to choose between sitting down on their own time, with paperwork you might not have, and go through either *free tax prep or self prepare, or pay $200 for a seasonal tax prep employee to file for you, using the same software.
Sorta, there’s also another group of people that have a vested interest in making taxes as painful as possible. The Republican Party, because they want taxes to have such a negative association with them so that it’s easier to sell their platform of tax cuts, budget cuts, ect. ect.
The thing is that the federal IRS, and most (if not all) state level tax offices already know how much you owe in part because banks and employers are legally required to send your total money income info onwards to the IRS and such. So we could absolutely do away with the system we have in favor of system where the government sends you a bill and you check the government’s work rather than the current system of the government checking your work while knowing full well what the answer actually is. But we don’t adopt it because the tax prep businesses will cry about jobs being lost, and a lot of politicians don’t want that technicality hanging over their head so we’re stuck with the dogshit ass system we got.
LibreOffice Tax Filing, lets goooo
It is kinda wild that there’s no meaningful FOSS tax software out there given every working person (and even some who don’t) have to do taxes
Tax software is useless for most Americans if it can do E-file, and you have to be a tax software company partnered with the IRS to do that.
If you print and paper file it takes ages to get your tax return. The biggest moneymaker for TurboTax is return anticipation loans, where they instantly give you your money(minus an obscene amount of interest for money that is guaranteed to be repaid).
