The IRS Has an Answer to TurboTax

From a prior discussion [0] my concern is some of the weird external contracting going on, which hopefully will change soon:

> So apparently using this thing requires people to sign up and interview through ID.me, a private company with some controversy around facial recognition stuff and a non-governmental domain in Montenegro.

> There's a certain flavor of very banal insanity here, as the US government (A) tries to outsource a core competency of identifying taxpayers in its jurisdiction and (B) promotes a domain name that should instead be a bad-answer in anti-phishing security training.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39688798 ("Direct File officially opens in 12 pilot states")

One reason these portals aren't so great is in the article: all in one applications and too many external contractors.

One of the things i like about the german system is that one group develops and the others can use it. The german electronic tax system delegated the authorization to the state (npa) and the local irs branches and only the bavarian irs developed it, no need for 16 different ones.

Finally the intuit tax software monopoly can go away. Excited to see how it turns out.

I wonder how much they spent on it lol

With the advent of AI agents, I expect my taxes to be completely automated with only pictures of my W-2 and other input documents. Taxes are so tedious but also extremely rule-driven, a perfect match for AI systems.