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Comment by johnneville | Hacker News Reader

140,803 taxpayers used it in 2024.

"Of the $13.0 million spent on pilot development and implementation, $10.6 million is technology and product development costs and $2.4 million is operational costs (customer service, cloud computing, user authentication, etc.)"

"Nearly half of Direct File users reported paying for tax preparation last year, and the Treasury Department estimates that Direct File users saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees"

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107236

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5969.pdf

edit: this comment had a much different estimate earlier based on a less specific source

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It should be expected that the government has a cost to provide for citizens to meet their tax obligations easily, efficiently, and without a private party involved or necessary.

https://bsky.app/profile/vermontgmg.bsky.social/post/3lhcg2b...

> Not for nothing, but Direct File by the IRS was one of the best things the USG has done in years — it allowed millions of Americans to stop paying predatory fees to TurboTax. The literal only people who oppose it are TurboTax lobbyists.

I think Direct File is great, but where is the $200 assumption coming from? A lot of the people using direct file (which is quite basic) were probably using free filing solutions or ones much less than $200.

thanks for the reply. the $200 is a rounding down from $220 for the average fee cost for a 1040 in 2021 according to the national society of accountants.

the second link in my earlier comment provides much more direct data, estimating $5.6 million in tax preparation fees saved compared to operation costs of $2.4 million. i've updated my original comment now to remove my personal estimate.

$220 source: https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/NSACCT/725010a8...

And you have to remember it was only starting to ramp up. The cost per taxpayer would be expected to go down as the program moved from development & scale-up to being the standard solution.

Hmm. $13M is three minutes of additional US money printing.

https://budget.house.gov/press-release/us-national-debt-surp...

Not really familiar with costs at this scale, I'm interested to see HN's take on whether this is considered cheap or expensive compared to other federal projects (both contracted and in-house).

My naive view is that this was a genuinely useful effort being wasted and an operational cost of $2.4M _looks_ like a steal, but would appreciate better comparison from people more informed than me.

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