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Comment by larkost | Hacker News Reader

From the second sentence of the article:

"will be made permanent for the 2025 tax season with all 50 states and Washington D.C. invited to participate"

It seems very much that this is an opt-in thing, state by state. I would suspect that the results of this will be most Democratic-leaning states at least trying to opt-in for next year, and many Republican-leaning states refusing loudly during this election year, then quietly starting to opt in in a few years.

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States part of the pilot program (i.e., 2023 tax year): Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington (state), Wyoming as per https://www.irs.gov/about-irs/strategic-plan/irs-direct-file....

Looks like exactly half and half, Democratic/Republican to me ...

But, who knows maybe next year ...

If you look at the tax situation across the states, the party split makes a bit more sense. Of the states involved in the pilot program, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and (to some extent) Washington do not have individual income tax. Also, Arizona and New Hampshire both have a flat rate income tax, which I readily admit knowing nothing about, but which I presume simplifies them being part of the pilot. So California, Massachusetts, and New York are the only states which have a variable tax rate and also opted in, and are also all about as Democrat leaning as it gets.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-income-tax-ra...

I can speak to Arizona and New York: they both have state taxes but didn't have any existing web portal that could be integrated with Direct File.

They were in the pilot because the organization I worked for, Code for America, offered to build them one: https://codeforamerica.org/programs/tax-benefits/state-tax-f...

We reached out to other states as well, but those were the two that ended up being most impactful + most cooperative + easiest to implement :)

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