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Comment by daswerth | Hacker News Reader

https://www.irs.gov/about-irs/strategic-plan/direct-file

Not to be confused with IRS Free File

Hah, saw that you edited the url. These government naming schemes are designed to fail. Why do they pick these absolute terms like "free" when there will clearly be some new thing that will be better? I'm waiting for the next version of REAL id, a realer id.

For real. I did some reading to try to understand the rationale. I _think_ Free File is a general program which lots of "services" can participate in, including TurboTax. Direct File is akin to (but maybe not actually the same as) a IRS offering in the Free File program.

As engineers I feel we should show a little bit of sympathy for difficulties involving naming ;)

In all seriousness though, Free File pretty much does what it says on the tin (allows low-income taxpayers to file for free); it has existed since 2003; and it has been pretty successful all things considered (Intuit and H&R Block's best efforts notwithstanding). I think it's a reasonable name.

Typical government product launch website. As far as I can tell, they don’t provide a link to where the service will be available or date of availability despite it being tax season. I guess you are to check back if you’re potentially eligible or sign up for the newsletter.

Thank you for the link.

I found the Free File thing but it didn't quite sound like what you were talking about :)

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