You're expecting coherency in the American libertarian mindset. There is none. "why should the government control the means of tax filing! I need to be free to pay a private company to do it!"
Paper sucks. Tax filing helpers (people/software) have always cost money. “The government sucks” and won’t try to help you.
And, oh yeah, ads and tax prep stores everywhere.
No one questions it. They don’t like it, but they accept it. Just like so many other things in the US because we’ve never seen anything else.
Guess what I do? I get all my forms together. Look up the numbers on the forms. Double check the entries on the fillable forms are correct.
Then I get my paystubs, I check the deductions, double check the prefilled form is correct.
So what did it save me over the way US taxes are done? The form prefilled the numbers, that’s it. All the rest is the same. Same collecting forms, same doubling checking math.
And why? Because mistakes are made. My employer sent the wrong numbers in, so the prefilled form was incorrect and would have cost me about $1,000 in extra tax.
If you want to make tax filing better, make the tax code way more simple. I’ve lived in countries where the tax form was 2 pages with 12 entires. That’s it.
Now that is the way to go. I could care less about fillable forms.
I'd wager that ~90% of people where I'm from where we have pre-filled tax forms does their taxes in less than 5 min (ah, looks reasonable, click).
It's your money. You'd be smart to spend more than 5 minutes to make sure it's 100% right
In my case it was $900 difference.
I guess I’m not making those fat tech dollars like you where $900 extra is “close enough”.
Must be nice. But try and remember not every is rich like you. $900 is the difference between paying rent and being homeless for a lot of people.
Paying income ta is made into an arduous task so people are likely to vote against taxes or for repeal of taxes instead of being accepted as a fact of life.