The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30M Americans
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
At least in Canada for the last couple years, our tax software can download all that from the tax agency and plug that into your forms automatically. And for most people, that’s all the info there is.
There aren’t a lot of “elections” or “decisions” to actually make when filing.
And there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t happen automatically because you •could• have the same investments across multiple brokers, but that’s not the majority either.
I pay private agents all the time to avoid having to deal with terrible governments interfaces and find shortcuts, wins for me.
The problem is with your own government accepting bribes to keep things complicated and preventing new competing companies to enter the market, lowering costs and improving the experience.
> Filing taxes is surprisingly complex, thanks in part to the lobbying efforts of Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, which in 2016 alone reportedly spent $2 million on lobbying to keep the tax code complicated. It’s not just Intuit, either. ProPublica reports that H&R Block spent $3 million lobbying in 2016, some of it on the same effort.
which is to say, that worry shouldn't stop anyone from trying their site.