IRS Direct File on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

IRS Direct File on GitHub

chrisgiven.com

744 pointsnickthegreek318 comments

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

I figure that the source code is not the hard part of the IRS making this available to the public, but the interoperability with the revenue system, and its verified adherence to the current tax code. Couldn't those things still be killed by the administration even if the source code is available publicly?

Right, politicians and officials working on behalf of the tax-filing lobby could introduce lots of changes to the tax code with a view to making this software useless.

The point of open sourcing from a dying ship is that the groups that can modify this software and resell it all start from it as a baseline. Is TurboTax all lean mean code available at a low enough price while still meeting profit expectations if it needs drastic changes?

I mean… in some sense, it might be nice is the company doing your tax preparation is not too lean and mean, their whole point is to eat the hit if they screw it up, right? The math is not actually hard.

But, realistically, I guess if a self-service tax prep company messed up your taxes, they’d make sure you end up in arbitration.

The form you sign to authorize efiling says "I declare that I have examined a copy of the income tax return ... and to the best of my knowledge and belief, it is true, correct, and complete." If you think Intuit is going to cover you, you haven't really seen the things they do.

What is this repo's marketing budget by any chance?

Intuit's was big enough to pervert American tax policy for decades.

Intuit can spend all the money they can convince investors to lose relative to last year and expectations, but they'll have a yggdrasil of companies to buy out from a turn-key solution and all their costs fighting OMB will amount to nothing if they screw one buyout up and get an updated software drop for a new round of $5 filers.

The companies Intuit will have to buy out don't have to make any profit per filer, they just have to take filers away from Inuit.

Yeah, absolutely. FWIW, the repo notes:

"Direct File interprets the United States' Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) as plain language questions, the answers to which should be known to taxpayers without need of external instructions or publications. Taxpayers' answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS's Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use."

So in theory it's useful now, but as you say it could easily change.

The tax code is riddled with euphemisms like EITC that don't mean what it says on the tin. There's no way normies can manage that without instructions.

I thought OP's point is that normies who have no idea what EITC is can simply answer a series of simpler questions that don't mention EITC, and the software figures out whether they can claim the EITC.

Yes but there are plenty of companies or people that may want to know how the code works and would be motivated enough to read through the code to understand it and having it there in the public makes that possible.

There are also ambiguous edge cases that can't be answered until someone is audited and the IRS and the Tax attorney hash it out in court.

For example I installed Solar panels many years ago and read the exact wording on the Solar Tax Credit to try to figure out if you could include roof repairs under the panels in the credit. The wording was something like "all costs associated with a solar install". Every installer I talked to said yes, but it seemed dubious so I tried calling the IRS help line to get the answer and the help line was no help at all. A few years later and some court battles lost and that answer is now firmly a "no", making me glad I ignored the installer's advice.

How is tax prep software supposed to handle a situation like that? Some of the for pay options include "audit protection", but I don't know how far that goes. I guess you can attempt to pass all liability on to the customer, but even that seems a bit risky.

And definitely the IRS has its own jargon that doesn't always make sense to the layperson. Why, for example, is a form that you fill out once per tax year called a "schedule"? It doesn't organize anything by date or time!

Schedule can also mean an organised table or list, especially in a formal context.

Legislation very often has a bunch of them at the back, referred to from the main text.

Not to mention "Schedule 40" (and other) PVC conduit ... I assume that this too is a reference to a table of some sort.

> How is tax prep software supposed to handle a situation like that?

More fundamentally: how are the citizens who pay the salaries of the people writing the rules supposed to handle a situation like that?

> A few years later and some court battles lost and that answer is now firmly a "no", making me glad I ignored the installer's advice.

Now I'm trying to remember how long ago I got my panels installed...

While this seems to apply to a good amount of people, it seems the IRS has an informative enough page https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...

However, it is most likely that the people claiming EITC are the least likely to understand the information there

~30-50% of the population has a pretty simple tax return that they could probably do by filling out the form directly by hand...

Some countries have residents' taxes "filed" automatically, you get a letter once a year saying what your withholding is and only need to do anything if you don't like the totals. Majority of citizens are fully automated.

It's almost as if Republicans weren't actually pushing for a smaller, cheaper, government.

Sounds like a business opportunity.

The whole point of the program was to eliminate that business opportunity.

Why? What's wrong with people getting paid to improve upon the government's work?

Nothing but that’s not what was happening.

The idea is that normal people shouldn’t have to pay to do something the government requires everyone to do. I’ve heard multiple non-Americans express amazement that people with simple jobs have to do anything other than confirm or perhaps update the data which the tax collectors already have because they weren’t thinking of it from the perspective of being a useful marketing tool for fearmongering about the government.

I have told this story before here, but it's relevant.

In 2021, I filed my 2020 taxes, and a few months later I get a letter from the IRS saying that I owed $8000 because I forgot to report a large stock transaction. I owed $7000 + a $1000 fine.

I wasn't mad at all about the $7000, I definitely owed that and it was just an oversight on my end, these things happen, and I was able to get the fine lowered by calling the IRS [1], so that wasn't a huge deal .

What did annoy me was why do I have to do anything? If the IRS knows about the transaction and is able to complain about me not paying enough, that suggests that they already have the information that I'm sending them. Why make me buy software and copy information from a piece of paper into that software, just for the IRS to check it against the numbers that they already have?

I understand that you might need to issue corrections, and maybe the software should exist for something like that, but it doesn't seem like it should exist otherwise.

[1] Who at least in my case was actually really polite and helpful! I had heard horror stories but that was definitely not the case for me. The people I talked to were very sympathetic and nice.

They probably know less than you think. (Are you selling stuff at the farmer's market for cash? Did you gift your coin collection to your grandkids?) Making everyone file reduces fraud somewhat – but whether that's worth the country's time and effort is a different story.

You might be right, are there any numbers on that? I feel like primarily-cash businesses already underreport their income.

> If the IRS knows about the transaction and is able to complain about me not paying enough, that suggests that they already have the information that I'm sending them.

You mistakenly assume that simply knowing what is on the 1099-B form is sufficient to determine your tax on the gain. They don't know if you are married or single or head of household (filing status) in the current tax year. They don't know what some of your itemized deductions and other income not reported to them might be (which in turn, along with filing status, determines what marginal tax bracket you are in). They don't know if you are actually just a nominee for someone else's income. These are just a few examples. They don't know any of this stuff until you tell them by filing your complete return.

> They don't know if you are married or single or head of household (filing status) in the current tax year. They don't know what some of your itemized deductions and other income not reported to them might be

I think you're misinterpreting the GP's point. Clearly, at least in our current system, it is essential to tell the IRS the parts of the return that they don't already know such as what are your expenses, deductions, marital status, etc.

But the absurd thing is that the capture of the IRS by the paid tax prep scammers has prevented them from simply showing you what's on your tax transcripts and having you click "Agree" or "Modify" for each one. Instead, you get your own copy of the 1099-B, 1099-DIV, 1099-INTs, and are administered a pointless "honesty test" to see if you'll type in the same numbers they have, or be automatically punished.

Obviously, Direct File was ideally situated to offer this feature since IRS has the data themselves, and simply populating the numbers is a highly efficient way of ingesting the data into your return.

It’s not an honesty test, it’s a result of how the US income tax system evolved. Originally the IRS had far less data and everyone filed paper returns. For example, it was only in 2008 that Congress required brokers to track and report cost basis on 1099s to cut down on people overstating their basis to decrease their cap gains.

Under Biden, the IRS tried to make w2s and 1099s available. If you log into the IRS website with your information, you can download the w2s and 1099s the Service has in your name.

Antitax activists have fought these steps every step of the way because the less annoying tax filing is, the less people will buy their antitax arguments.

The IRS isn’t captured by these predatory tax preparers, Congress is. The IRS can’t do a lot on data without Congress specifically authorizing it. And the Republican Party is in bed with the antitax activists who are in bed with the tax preparation companies.

Tax account transcripts have been available long before Biden was president.

Use Form 4506-T to request them.

Transcripts are for previous returns. I was saying you can grab the w2 and many of the 1099s the IRS received for you this tax year before you file your return by logging into the IRS website.

I'd be surprised if they don't know that I'm married, considering I've mentioned that I'm married on every tax return for the last nine years, so they could send me a form with all the stuff that they do know about and ask if they need me to correct anything, or if I have anything else to declare. They could ask "Are you still married? Are you still married to the same person?" and update stuff.

It might be that if they sent you the "here's all we know, please add anything else" thing, people would not add things that costs them more tax, safe in the knowledge that they don't know about it.

If it’s for shares bought before 2011, they don’t even have the basis.

(They can detect that you had a sale for which they got a 1099-B but you didn’t list on your Schedule D. That doesn’t mean they have enough information to fix it.)

The shares were RSUs granted to me in 2019.

I’m 100% with you on that big point - the process just be “here’s what we have for you, do you have any missing data?” and 99% of people can just click “ok”. Your comment about the agent reminded me of a former coworker whose mother was an IRS auditor: she commented that most people assumed it was going to be some horrible ordeal and were surprised a) that she was a normal suburban mom rather than the Gestapo and b) ended up finding deductions such that close to half of the people she talked to came out ahead.

You might have other information they don't have. Example: private transactions that resulted in a capital loss and would offset that gain.

Sure, hence why I would be perfectly happy for them have a system where I can amend stuff. I'm just saying that the default should be to "send me letter in mail, I verify it looks fine, I sign it and send it back". The entire process for most people could be like ten minutes.

It IS 10 mins for most people.

https://www.freshbooks.com/hub/taxes/duration-to-file-taxes

> It takes an average American taxpayer 11-13 hours to prepare their taxes, according to the IRS.

It took me two hours this year, and my taxes are generally pretty simple. I had exactly one W2 job last year, I have a mortgage, my wife does school, I sold some stock, I had some T-Bills, and I declared my wife's education.

I'm not doing anything clever to try and lower my tax burden, it's an extremely straightforward "run it through tax software" process, and it still took me two hours.

>What did annoy me was why do I have to do anything?

There are two reasons. 1) Because Intuit owns enough reps to keep their business existing. 2) They have a fairly easy time doing that because the Republican party explicitly believes that taxes should be painful to discourage America from having functioning taxes.

All the "IRS might not know everything about you" is distraction. That's not a problem in any of the countries that have no trouble sending you a preliminary document for you to amend or accept. It's FUD.

For a long time the IRS was literally barred from doing what TurboTax does.

Solving a government-created problem shouldn’t be a business opportunity, the government just shouldn’t create the problem.

IRS should send me an itemized bill using every piece of information it already has, I then take that to my accountant that generates a diff based on information they don't have, and then done.

You pay the bill they send you, you are done.

Yes but making taxes easy (or even trivial) will make people less angry about having to do them. Can't have that.

Haha and in case anyone doesn't now, this was an actual GOP argument. :-D

Just, as a person outside of the US: the idea that you would need an accountant at all for a private person that isn't a billionarie, is like, crazy.

I have a reasonably simple personal economy and it takes me all of five minutes to file my taxes in Sweden. My parents have a much more complicated setup (small private business, own a couple of properties, several deductions, etc.) and it basically is pretty straight-forward for them as well, certainly they don't need an accountant.

TurboTax, Intuit and anti-tax Republicans has really fucked with the US expectation of how complicated taxes needs to be.

As a person who lives inside the US, I'm perfectly happy that the government doesn't have perfect information about me, and that I can spend $100 on an accountant who will help save much more money on taxes

> I'm perfectly happy that the government doesn't have perfect information about me

Yes, keep telling yourself they don't (for what it matters)

In fact if you get a W2 the IRS already have it

If all your income is in a W2, then sure. I have a business that's about the second simplest corporate structure (I'm a single-member LLC, which is probably only slightly more complicated than a sole proprietorship). It would take very little imagination to come up with funny games one could play if one were inclined to evade taxes (I'm not, and I don't)

Just think what someone with a gazillion dollars, some trusts, and "charitable foundations" could do.

Which means your cries for privacy only apply for rich people and you're okay with that because you have some money.

With the risk of sounding a bit redundant: privacy is important for private stuff

But if by law something needs to be known by the government: just go for it

A silly analogy: your medical info is private, but it's in your best interest that a condition like 'diabetic' or 'allergic to something' have a lower level of privacy

> With the risk of sounding a bit redundant: privacy is important for private stuff

> But if by law something needs to be known by the government: just go for it

This seems a bit flipped, the only reason something needs to be provided to the government “by law” is that we’ve passed a law that says it needs to be. That it is required by law is not a reason for it being required of course, that’s circular. The reason the law was passed is because we decided it was in the public interest for the government to collect that data.

If we decided it was in the public interest to collect more income info about wealthy people, then we could make that required by law. I think the comment you responded to is suggesting that we should change what is required by law.

Your analogy is better. There’s a reason you might be ok with less privacy there.

If you think the ability of have an LLC and claim business expenses differentiates the US from Sweden... you're an American.

> Solving a government-created problem shouldn’t be a business opportunity, the government just shouldn’t create the problem.

Every company has to file tax returns and pay employee taxes already, and employs accountants and finance people for that purpose.

Piggybacking, I think the "hard part" also includes the decades of success that the tax prep lobby's had in protecting its business interests at the cost of US citizen's welfare. Although the number of states that provide free direct filing has grown from last year -- which I only remember to be substantially less than the 25 who do so today -- it's unclear what the problem is with the remaining 25 including DC where I live

I do not know of this capability currently, but if it has enough for eFile, it can also be used to generate a paper return.

For years prior to last good commit. The rules change every year.

I wouldn't say interop is a huge deal, the main time and cost sink is translating the recursive Gordian knots of tax law into a logically cohesive structure that can be evaluated programmatically. And then you (ideally) must prove its correctness.

Imagine pair programming with a tax lawyer. I'd rather eat my own hands.

DirectFile wasn’t meant to handle complicated edge cases. Most filers have a w2 and a few 1099s, use the standard deduction, and claim a few common credits (e.g., child and earned-income). They could file for free in a few minutes with directfile.

> Taxpayers' answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS's Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use

The interoperability with the revenue system is provided by a different project, and this API is also used by turbotax and the like. It won't be going away.

The interoperability is not the hard part.

It could easily go away, if there are claims of people abusing the API, or using "unlicensed software to use the API" causing errors. By licensed, I mean "approved to use the API".

There could also be pushes to monetize the API, "Why is this service free!?". Meaning they'd likely require a need to be incorporated, setup a commercial account with them, and have payment method on file, and on and on.

My point is, I can think of dozens of sneaky ways to make that pesky API go away, and I'm not even trying.

What I'm getting at is that the interoperability is not the hard part of this project.

You're confusing technical ease with political desirability.

No, just that this interoperability already exists, and is not a hard part for this project.

Imagine this source code becoming the unit tests for the legal code. Future tax-code changes would be accompanied by corresponding changes in GitHub. Inconsistencies would surface as new code and tests break the old ones. As courts introduce new nuances to the law's interpretation, new unit tests would follow.

This wouldn't replace human judgment; nobody in power would allow that. But even the capriciousness of politics can be expressed as Boolean logic (var isDeductible = taxpayerIsMe && !taxpayerIsYou). The tests could at least memorialize all the pork.

good luck with that; interpretation make things like this very difficult, if not impossible.

I agree that this would be nice, however. as a non-lawyer and someone who considers themself to be not a "real" developer (even though I write software every day) I have often wondered how alike law and code are, really, when it comes to defining intent via a keyboard.

I would prefer it if any change to the IRS rules must be accompanied by a reference implementation and lots of tests.

Tell me how you will write a unit test for determining the percentage of your utilities that is deductible on Schedule C.

Or a unit test that determines whether the discussion during a meal with a customer was "substantially about business matters".

What percentage of US citizens expense business meals? This is all about automating the simple cases.

Anything more complex is an input to the system, the system can still be tested.

You're conflating determination of factual and legal questions (out of scope) with modeling the decision tree (in scope and useful).

The function you ask about would be "getDeductiblePercentage()," and the unit tests would return various hard coded numbers. Actually determining that value for a real taxpayer is still hard.

Being able to show how information flows through the US tax code would be useful, even if it doesn't solve all the problems that arise from its intricacy.

The interpretation aspect isn't solvable in code, but it's representable. That's what I was getting at with the Boolean comment. A branch point might be "bool answerUnanswerableQuestion()" and the unit tests would mock it as true and then false. Even if the question isn't deterministically answerable in real life, at least the code can show what happens when it is answered.

Is this common in Java?

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/9dd76a786ea69...

It is if you’re doing government style work and you want have a job for life creating code that nobody else can read.

Or if you’re in the business of selling extremely wide aspect ratio monitors.

It is nested sure but the entire thing fits on 1080p monitor

Well... depending on your default level of zoom.

After staring at code for 12 hours a day for a few decades my zoom is 125% by default.

Careful, at this rate your zoom level will be an unreadable 900% after only a few centuries...

So long as you abandon the concept of windows and run your text editor in full screen mode. Good luck with side-by-side diffs.

Better make those monitors curved

That's reactive programming in Java, where you return a callback to be run when an operation completes.

The giveaway is the Mono<T> return type.

My eyeballs bleed, and I'm pretty comfortable with Java for many years.

I see the most of it stems from reactive-style programming (reactor.core.publisher.Mono).

Maybe they just tried to fit into one screen? Anyway I'd ask to simplify it, if I was a their team lead.

100% test coverage (fingers behind back).

I've seen similar things, in Java as well as some other languages. It's obviously not the preferred way of doing it.

Unreadable+undebuggable has been the preferred way of doing it for as long as I have seen software

Seems perfectly readable to me, and I haven't used Java professionally in over a decade. What specifically do you find problematic?

The ~12 levels of indentation and 5 layers of nesting are doing my head in personally but maybe my brainspace is too small.

I think this perspective explain the issue well: you pretty much cannot unit test this (unless you consider the whole function a unit). It becomes very unclear what each lambda expression is about, the deeper you get.

I can tell you as a person working in a spring boot webflux shop that is pretty bad code. You really don’t want to nest that much. Using atomic references outside the reactive flow is a huge red flag that they don’t know how to program in webflux properly. Not that webflux is easy to use at all and the dx is garbage.

With virtual threads it's difficult to see WebFlux being used in new projects.

I agree. Unless you actually need back-pressure, which almost every use case I've seen does not, it's just obfuscating simple API calls.

> Not that webflux is easy to use at all and the dx is garbage

My experience with pretty much any Java framework ... It's sad because I do think (especially since Java 8) that Java is a great language for many things. But the community as this insane tendency to create incredibly convoluted pattern-on-top-of-pattern tooling.

Yes. I think micronaut is kind of the sweet spot right now.

If you are a non-Java developer, it does look daunting. But in my opinion it’s much much better use of the Java streams api and reactor library that I have seen compared to most shitty corp firms.

The atomics are goofy, but reactor can often lead to messy code structure when you actually need sequential blocking behavior.

Yes and no. This is a common pattern, but implemented very lazily. Most of this can (and probably should) be refactored out to separate classes/functions.

But no, I don't think this would faze most Java devs. It's ugly and bad practice, but more or less acceptable depending on personal taste. It works, at least.

Point of interest: LLMs tend to go too far in the opposite direction with code like this. They will break everything apart into functions or classes, even trivial one-line lambdas. I find that even more obnoxious than the monstrosity you linked.

> .onErrorResume

I dislike Java but if it can get me back to the On Error Resume Next days I might reconsider.

Is this what people have to do when they don't have the C# async/await autogenerated state machine?

Yup. Although to be honest it probably doesn't need to be reactive.

Looks like callback hell, but in Java. Async/await would solve it, but it's Java.

I saw an internal “sso” auth app that iterated a byte array and concatenated the values into a string instead of base64 encoding it when I worked at HP/HPE/DXC

Wow, that's frustrating code. I feel vindicated in using an ultrawide to code with. When I mentioned on here I use it because sometimes you have to work on code with super-deep indents I got downvoted to negative infinity for shitty code management.

Fuck no, it's not. But I've seen it because it gets promoted by some smartass tech lead chasing so called webscale performance. But they never do comparative benchmarks against regular blocking code for fear that it would demonstrate the true nature of their head trip. Then they leave to go shit elsewhere and leave other people to deal with the consequences of their hubris.

It's very common to see from devs that don't really grasp reactive programming. You often see similar things in Angular projects because of RxJS.

Really puts that whole "our wonderful journey" "our incredible team" post into context, haha.

Just another shitty Java middleware that never amounted to anything, 200000 lines of code that don't express even a handful of ideas.

I don't really know Java, but .flatMap(...) seems to be equivalent to C# .SelectMany(...) which famously can be interpreted as a monadic bind operator.

The C# query syntax

  from x in xs
  from y in GetYs(x)
  from z in GetZs(y) ...

is equivalent to

  xs.SelectMany(x => GetYs(x).SelectMany(y => GetZs(y).SelectMany(z => ...)))

which is similar to monadic do-notation in Haskell.

So since there is monadic Scala code elsewhere in the project, I wonder if this is a result of someone thinking in Scala and translating it into Java in their head.

Aside from the code, there's also a ton of great design documents and notes under /docs/design [0], including detailed process diagrams for many of the user flows (unfortunately not directly viewable online since they're within zip files; see flow1.zip and flow2.zip)

0: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/tree/main/docs/des...

Found the repo over here if anyone is curious.

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

Who among us has not accidentally made a new repo as just a submodule pointer instead of actually committing the files? https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/commit/2f3ebd66932...

It's also fun that, because this is from the US, they can't just use CC0, but instead need to clarify that this must be public domain, separately from the worldwide CC0.

Another way of saying this: Creative Commons, based in California, USA, did not publish a license that can be used by one of the largest domestic authors of software.

Less snarkily, I do wonder about the discrepancy there.

Category Error. Public Domain is not a license. It is a state of being.

Creative Commons is a worldwide organization, not a jurisdiction-specfic organization. Creative Commons does not have the authority to harmonize laws worldwide.

https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/pdm/

https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0/

In other words, think of Copyright. A Copyright holder can apply any license they like, and change the licenses for new versions whenever they like. Public Domain is explicit forfeiting the Copyright, which means authors cannot enforce any license (and anyone can just take their work and declare it it's theirs, apply licenses etc).

PS: AFAIK, however, Authorship rights are different from Copyright, and cannot be given/passed as Copyrights, at least in US.

It's not that they can't, it's just pointless to offer a licence for something that's in the public domain.

Also it's important to remember these works are not in the public domain because someone declared them to be, they are simply because they are works carried out by the US government. Similar to how copyright is automatic, it's not applied only when you put the copyright symbol, that's just informational.

Favorite quote(s)

>But as I told the team as the end closed in, “We took a pipedream, and made it a policy choice.” No one can claim with a straight face that Direct File is impossible anymore; bringing it back requires only that our elected leaders make a different choice.

>What I mourn the most, though, is the dissolution of the team, the disregard for the vast impact they were poised and eager to deliver. The team itself is what I am proudest of from my time working on Direct File. Their manic dedication to the mission. The care they consistently took to get it right. The trust and love they had for each other.

I moved this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44187512

> Exempted Code

> Not all source code, documentation and metadata used in the development of Direct File is included in this repository. Specifically, any code or data that is considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Federal Tax Information (FTI), Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU), or source code developed for National Security Systems (NSS), as defined in 40 U.S.C. § 11103, is exempt. Due to these restrictions, certain pieces of functionality have been removed or rewritten.

Very curious about what these pieces are that were removed

It's probably a boilerplate notice put on all releases. Sometimes they aren't even allowed to explicitly state that something was excluded, so they have to put that notice on all releases, so there's no way to infer which releases have exclusions.

Sadly this program is being killed by the current admin. This repo looks great. The scala fact graph is super neat and there is clearly a lot of care that went into making the tutorial for it.

I'm sure everyone working on this knew it was doomed before the first line of code was written, and that it would be killed as soon as the next (R) was in charge. It was a great accomplishment to get working software released before that happened, but I'm sure nobody was kidding themselves into thinking it would last. The pay-to-file tax lobby is too strong and corrupt.

I don't know about that. Inertia is a strong force but it goes in both directions. Had this administration been a Democratic one four years might be long enough to establish it strongly enough that it would be very difficult to remove. Look at the Affordable Care Act. Imperfect though it was, Republicans have pledged over and over that they're going to get rid of it but when it power it seems they just can't.

I hope you're right, but this administration so far has found almost no limit to the number of projects, lives, roles and institutions it can destroy or at least attempt to destroy. And the party that is supposed to be acting as the Opposition is basically letting them do whatever they want unhindered. Unless you consider "holding up little signs and making frowny-faces" to count as "doing something."

> Opposition is basically letting them do whatever they want unhindered

what do you propose they do, being entirely out of power?

I feel like the Dems need to be doing a lot of PR, the public needs to hear them attack the Low-IQ autocrat every day. Maybe they're doing this but the media aren't reporting it, in which case they need to engage with the media better...

Without this engagement, even if it's just futile noisemaking, the voters will surely think in the next election cycle "why should we vote for you, when you haven't done anything the last 2 years?"

What do you see as "the media"? The media landscape is so fractured, everyone has their own "feed".

I have seen Dems constantly attacking Trump, if you haven't consider the news you consume may simply be different. There is not one mainstream to push anymore.

My main media is Reddit, Youtube, and a few other sites so I do in fact see some fight coming out of the D's. There should be much more given the severity of these various issues, but I see some hope. It is sad that legacy media has almost completely given up on reporting most of this stuff, though.

as for the "mainstream social media", I'm not sure how effective the instagrams, tiktoks, etc. are at delivering these messages. I know some congressmen on are on there. Perhaps not enough, though. Or perhaps they don't get how to reach their people.

Where are Dems supposed to make this noise? They don't have 120 million subscribers like Joe Rogan does.

Where is the bullhorn the democrats are supposed to be using that isn't literally owned by a rich guy who benefits from lower taxes when the democrats are not in power?

Twitter is owned by Elon. Facebook by Zuck.

The right did not grow their propagandists and build their bullhorn overnight. They have been planning and moving their chess pieces for decades. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Laura Ingraham... This network and its audience was carefully and strategically built and cultivated over at least 40 years. It's going to take actual planning, hard work, and long hours for the other side to catch up.

In the Senate, they could force filibusters on everything, and impose maximal procedural roadblocks on everything. They did this successfully for a Duckworth-sponsored anti-trans bill, which could not muster 60 votes to break the filibuster.

In the House, or rather out of the house, they could get their media circus in 10,000% better shape than it is in right now, and consistently deliver a powerful, viral, troll-y, and savvy message about Trump, 8 times a day, across many different media environments.

This has veered fully into politics, but... In addition to that bare minimum obstruction they should be doing but aren't, they could also be working on the policy and people that they see winning in 2028. Where is the Democrat's own "Project 2029" document? The Heritage Foundation has been publishing their detailed, written plans since at least Reagan. Where is the Democrat's version of Trump that can win back rural populists? Why isn't he on TV every day hyping up their base like Trump hypes up his base?

It's about the IRS, so politics is inevitable.

I do agree that that is the biggest issue in both DNC and RNC though. There's been a clear divide between what DNC wants to run and what the actual democrats want out of the party. Polls suggest from the latter that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is one of the biggest role models of a proper opponent in 2028, but it's been clear the DNC has been fighting against that for almost a decade now, for a variety of reasons.

RNC has a similar issue, once Trump is gone. There's already cracks forming in various different interests of republicans, but they all loosely rally around Trump. If/when Trump kicks the bucket, I don't see who can hold that cult of personality. Vance has very low charisma, and Mike Johnson seems too establishment (for voters that very much voted against establishment). I don't really see a protégé that is carrying whatever that MAGA mindset people want out of the movement.

I tend to believe that the MAGA movement will stop and end when Trump is out of power. I think people will return to being okay with boring politics and not attention grabbing personalities once he exits the picture. On both sides. That's also why I don't think AOC has a chance, she will have trouble appealing to moderates and conservatives.

> There's been a clear divide between what DNC wants to run and what the actual democrats want out of the party

There's a pretty easy way to reconcile this - run a fair primary election. Rigging it against Sanders in 2016, and not running one at all in 2024, both expectedly led to disaster. You're never gonna win if you don't even have the full support of your own party.

There was a 2024 Democratic primary [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_Party_presid...

I feel like this is a correction made if not in bad faith then to muddy the waters. Some states held primary elections, others canceled them, and the incumbent didn't participate in any meaningful way. So yes, many states held 2024 dem primary elections, but not all the states, and the party did not treat it as a legitimate primary.

No, this isn't politics. It's basic patriotism. I share or have shared a good portion of the criticisms that Trump is using to rile people up. Just because he is talking about these issues does not mean that he is doing anything meaningful about them. It's the same old pattern of politicians pretending to care about people's concerns, to just steal, loot, and enable more corporate control for sponsors. The differences with Trump are his degree of shamelessness and that his sponsors seem much less aligned with overall American interests.

Notice that Trump explicitly ran on disclaiming Project 2025, even though once elected Project 2025 has been a solid 50% or more of the organizing principles for his administration. So it's a bit misleading to suggest that some Democratic equivalent ("Project 2029", say) would necessarily be part of the electoral platform and outreach. Of course, it would be nice if it was.

My understanding, from some interviews earlier that I can't point at right now, was that the plan is: 1. Stay quiet for a while to avoid being the boy who cried wolf. Let Trump's actions speak for themselves. 2. Prepare behind the scenes. 3. Start campaigning closer to next election.

No clue who they'll run with. Americans have been pretty clear that women are still second-class citizens and should not attempt to reach too high, but hopefully it'll at least be someone a few decades younger.

I think it's less about trying to get wins (most understand that congress dems are the minority) and more about resisting these anti-citizen acts as much as possible. Having 4 or 5 democrats vote on an R bill a few months back really put a nasty taste in people's mouths. Among all the crazy cabinet appointments that some voted on

Basically, the democrats want fighters. We're well past bi-partisan tasks where we should just faciliate any kind of bill that comes up. Because very few are reasonable.

> Basically, the democrats want fighters.

Trump called and got Jan 6th.

Democrats called and nobody could be bothered to show up to vote.

fllibuster so hard the majority finally decides to nuke it

Practically, anything besides what Schumer does?

The House budget bill is likely to separate more people from health insurance coverage than the ACA increased it by. It may not be an explicitly "repeal the ACA" act, but practically speaking, it will have a similar effect.

I don't think so - the destructiveness of the current administration is really unprecedented.

A couple of decades ago tax code transparency and making it easier and cheaper to file your taxes would have been a very Republican policy. Point taken that the current administration is particularly destructive, but I wouldn't expect Democrats to be very staunch in support this either. The tax/accountant lobby would influence both parties.

But Democrats created the program? Why do you expect they wouldn't support it?

We've clearly had a more neoliberal congress body in the last decade. So their principles (or outright bribes) to focus on privatization of services would get in the way of such acts.

Tax return on a postcard is still in the Republican area of ideas, but they can't seem to get enough actual Congressional Republicans to come on board. It's frustrating. The problem to me is that the Democrats have become so uncompetitive in large swathes of the country, that too many center/moderates/status quos adapt Republican cover to get into office.

I'm sure Democrats can complain about their Senators in the same language.

It may be a Republican talking point but it's never really been an agenda item for them. All this Direct File stuff is Democrat effort.

All software has an expiration date.

It is not typical for an (R) administration to aggressively reverse every decision made by their predecessor. Historically, citizens, businesses and government agencies could all expect significantly more stability from one administration to the next.

> it was doomed before the first line of code was written

The Direct File system was live more than a year ago, I thought: https://www.usds.gov/impact-report/2024/directfile/

…or did you mean “eventually doomed” rather than “doomed to not ship at all”?

The bill was introduced by the Republican party (Nick Langworthy, co-sponsored by William Timmons). Don't spread misleading/fake information.

That would be the current ruling party

That is the current ruling party. Nobody is trying to kill the SHARE It Act. The Direct File was a pilot program. There are other options: https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-free-file-do-your-taxes-for-f...

It was a massively successful pilot that half the country used. The other option is free fillable forms which is dogshit.

No, I think you have it mixed up. It's quite clear that the authority came from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which was was well known to have passed without a single Republican vote. It's also quite clear that in the context of the top-level comment, "this program" mentioned means the Direct File as it operates, not the release of source code.

> The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law in August 2022.1 Section 10301(1)(B) of the IRS provided the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with $15 million to establish a task force to design an IRS-run, free direct electronic filing (e-file) system commonly referred to as “Direct File” ...

https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2025-03/20...

You're bringing up an unrelated law that didn't even exist at the time of the launch of Direct File in early 2024.

I was under the impression that the OP was talking about the SHARE It Act.

Why was the IRS-Public[0] group created for this, instead of using the existing irsgov[1] group?

[0] https://github.com/IRS-Public

[1] https://github.com/irsgov

Related discussion from last week:

IRS Direct File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 - May 2025 (62 comments)

There's quite the mix of languages involved!

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Language                     files          blank        comment           code
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    YAML                           452            158            693         161655
    JSON                           396              1              0         155975
    JavaScript                       7             21           4513         123150
    TypeScript                     741           7913          19645          80869
    XML                             66           5208           1006          60935
    Java                           725           7380           2283          37863
    Scala                          272           3275           1423          25395
    CSV                            146              0              0          25335
    Markdown                        86           5019             21           9228
    SVG                             12              5           1749           9130
    HTML                            39             52              4           4073
    Maven                           16             61             87           1963
    SCSS                            47            380             85           1662
    Scheme                           5            121              0            864
    Python                          13            185             96            668
    Bourne Shell                    17             94            127            541
    DOS Batch                        2             30              0            268
    CSS                              1             17              0             81
    Properties                       9              0             24             60
    Text                             3              1              0             35
    TOML                             1              6              0             26
    Dockerfile                       1              8              1             19
    INI                              1              0              0              7
    SQL                              4              0              0              5
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUM:                          3062          29935          31757         699807
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Other than the flourish of adding some Scala to enterprisey Java there is absolutely nothing atypical about this bog enterprisey application. It’s a JS/TS/Java app, nothing else stands out.

Listing every config language and a few lines of CI or whatever scripts shit is misleading.

I see nothing other than typical boring enterprise/big gov crap here (which is fine, and expected).

off-topic: would you share how you compiled this info?

Looks like https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc

> Please note: As of two weeks ago, I no longer work at the IRS. I am writing solely in my personal capacity.

It's too bad the current Administration is going to kill DirectFile and has fired all the people who were working on it.

TurboTax isn't "trying to kill" it they have successfully killed it. Intuit donated $1M to Trump's inaugration fund, and the Trump administation subsequently ended support for Direct File (which I'm assuming is why it was open sourced). The IRS will no longer accept returns directly. 18F itself was disbanded by doge, so even though the code is open source no one is going to continue to develop it.

This isn't true - you can still submit through Direct File: https://directfile.irs.gov/

For the 2024 tax season yes. Funding bill removes it for 2025 onward.

Yes, but you may want to reword this part, since it implies that DF is already shut down:

  "The IRS will no longer accept returns directly."

> "The IRS will no longer accept returns directly."

Where are you finding that quote, I don't see it on the Direct File homepage [0]

EDIT: Ah, I see now, it was from paxys's original post [1], I assumed it was meant to be an official quote from the IRS somewhere.

0: https://directfile.irs.gov/

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183593

This was in the post I was responding to.

I'm confused, the post you responded just says:

> For the 2024 tax season yes. Funding bill removes it for 2025 onward.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183593

Sigh. How much did cutting direct file really save?!

Irrelevant. Those in power don't actually care about saving money. They care about doing what their deep-pocketed donors want them to do, as well as fulfilling their ideology, however misguided and backward it may be.

It was never about saving. The new budget literally adds $2.4 trillion to the federal defecit.

It adds $2.4T MORE than otherwise would've been added (which is already a lot) over a decade.

So it's adding an extra $240B in deficit per year (on top of an already ~6-7% of GDP deficit).

It makes it more expensive. But the important figure was the million dollar bribe.

It was cut because tax preparing companies pay the politicians to cut it.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/intuit-inc/summary?id=D0000...

Interesting, thanks for reinforcing the point. I would note the two columns 'From Individuals' (which includes all employees) vs. the 'From Organization' column. Worth noting that the R-affiliated GOPAC is the only listed recipient that actually recieved funds from the organization.

Of course, this page doesn't include the $1M inauguration donation, so it's still incomplete.

I suppose we all see what we want to see and have reasons to explain away any dissonance. $1m to an inauguration committee for an already elected president might counterbalance the disproportionate donations to democrats during campaign season from execs, employees, and their family members. I mean, bet on the wrong horse, amends must be made, right? Money goes where the power is. If it hadn’t been Trump, Intuit would be working Joe Kamala. The data is the data.

> we all see what we want to see

Yup, and what I see is that Intuit, Inc. gave to exactly one PAC, that donates exclusively to R candidates. Tesla employees also overwhelmingly donated to Kamala Harris[0]; does this mean Tesla and Elon were backing Kamala to win?

> If it hadn’t been Trump, Intuit would be working Joe Kamala.

They didn't donate to him in 2020, so I'm not sure why I should assume this.[1]

[0]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/tesla-inc/summary?id=D00005...

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20210110001759/https://bideninau...

Seems around 1M is the price for pardons or changing of tariffs in favor of the donor.

Disbanding 18F was a crime. This made it abundantly clear that the E doesn't stand for efficiency.

Love that the repo has two commits and they're both "initial commit"

i've done that when i forgot to add some necessary files in the initial initial commit. since the adding the forgotten files did not include any changes warranting a different message, it lets me know i was a knucklehead and the commits are meant be considered the same commit. it's much faster than looking up to see if there's a way to amend an existing commit with additional files, and then going through the process of actually doing it. my use of git is add/commit/push/clone/switch/fetch. after that, it's 100% look it up and hope i'm not going to bork my repo by following some SO thread

For what it's worth, you can still do it with those commands, though I understand part of the point is that you don't necessarily remember all of the options for them. But in this case, it should be simple:

  git add .
  git commit --amend -m "initial commit"
  git push -f origin HEAD

I don't know when `--amend` was added. I used to do a squash rebase but this is much nicer.

    git commit --amend --no-edit

> I used to do a squash rebase

This probably wouldn't apply to the "initial commit" problem, but I almost always use fixup instead of amend, ex:

    git add foo.code
    git commit --fixup {commit_with}
    git rebase -i --autosquash {main_or_whatever}

Unlike amend, you can target an older commit rather than just the very-most-recent (great if you're separating the rename/refactor from the rewrite) and you can delay the second step of actually changing history until you're sure stuff is in a good state.

This is particularly useful for the review process: All the changes during the review process can be "fixup" commits, allowing reviewers to easily see what did (or didn't) change since their last interaction. At the same time, all the fiddly fixes and back-and-forth stuff won't be in the final history, only a smaller number of "real" commits that future maintainers would care about.

--amend was added in 2006 :-)

https://github.com/git/git/commit/b4019f045646b1770a80394da8...

The government required them to scrub the commit history. Hilarious that they used that message for the second commit.

IRS knows what a bifunctor is. What an amazing day https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/9dd76a786ea69...

I enjoyed walking through some of their docs which documented decisions and deliverables. Thought for sure it would have just been a dump of source code with little to no context.

Wait, the USA/IRS is not providing a free platform for individuals to fill their tax?

Anyone can download files for all the forms and schedules, then fill print and mail for the cost of postage.

I can't tell if you're "/s" but this strikes me as "anyone can download the SMTP RFCs and roll their own mail server" but that's not the same as actually running a mail server due to the monstrous amount of non-functional requirements that have been applied to that space over the years

To the best of my knowledge, the tax filer is responsible for knowing the law, which includes amendments made almost every Congressional session, the court rulings upon both of those things, the judicial meaning of the English words used in all that corpus, and then one can get into the pdfs and their printing and mailing. Or all of those lawyers and enrolled agents can be rented at tax time in order to outsource some of the liability, and thus that's how we end up with the current cesspool of a system we have

Very few taxpayers need to tread into the obscure corners of the tax code, regulations, court cases, and so on.

In fact, the tax forms and accompanying instructions are written at a level that anyone with a high school education should be able to understand. Examples are often included, along with call-outs for "Tips" and "Caution" to highlight key points.

Further, there are dozens of publications that go into more detail and cover probably 90% or more of all the scenarios one would encounter. Pub 17 in particular is a beginning-to-end handbook that covers Form 1040 and the common forms/schedules and the entire filing process, with references to other pubs when appropriate, again all written at a high-school level.

These are available in both PDF and HTML formats. Recall that electronic filing has only been around for a few decades, so prior to that everyone used to fill and file on paper The IRS has long history of providing the necessary instructions to do so at a level accessible to the vast majority of users.

It is also a fact that the tax software providers use these same instructions and publications as the specifications that their software must meet. Literally, they will hold up release of various forms for filing using their software until the IRS finalizes the accompanying form instructions.

There is this year. Maybe not going forward. I tried to use it but it was easier to print the PDF and mail it. I also recall there were two different systems, DirectFile is one of the two, and it integrates with participating state tax systems.

In Belgium we have "tax on web" for more than 20 years and since a few years 90% of the things pre-filled for simple situations (mainly people without kids)

Same thing in France, and I believe most developed countries by now.

The situation is a bit different for business owners though, and most of them hire an accountant for this task. Doing it yourself can be risky as you may be committing tax fraud without realizing it before you get audited, or you may end up overpaying.

What is the core reason for the government in the US to not provide a simple online tax filing portal like we generally have in Europe.

It is pre-filled with the known incomes so for the best majority of people filling their taxes is a 1 minute exercise.

This also helps, I guess, to have the taxes flow in.

lobbying on behalf of the tax filing industry

additionally, the US has (one of?) the most complex tax systems in the world. In part b/c most of it is carve outs...on behalf of various lobbyist groups / catering to specific voting blocks.

That is still no excuse.

The majority of the population of the US claims the standard deduction and has all their income in the form of W2 or 1099 which is reported to the IRS by the employer. Those people can be served by a return free filing system.

The minority which have more complicated taxes can still file like they do today. But even adding on investment income and housing related deductions the IRS likely has enough information to calculate what is owed.

We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better. I know you weren’t arguing that point but just because the tax code is complex doesn’t mean it is complex for everyone’s situation

Entering your income is easy enough if you're a salaried employee with a W2 form. The time consuming part is searching for and entering deductions. The tax code is ridiculously complex and there are forms for all sorts of deductions.

90% of people take the standard deduction, which takes maybe 10 seconds to enter.

Even if you're pulling in 100% of your income through a W-2 job and you're sure you're not itemizing, you have to consider excluded income, above-the-line deductions, and refundable and non-refundable credits. Oh, and do you live alone or might you claim a dependent,[1] and on and on and on. People spend their whole lives on this stuff and still don't understand the half of it.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xtyyMPczy6nuj_QR4Jy4J8sf8f3...

The same reason the US moves more of the worlds money through commercial and investment services hosted here.

Ask anyone in the EU who has lived in one country and earned a paycheck from a different one.

Anyways, give it time, the EU is currently working to make it's tax system more complicated to solve some of the long standing continental issues, and to make the EU system more like the US one.

The EU doesn't have a federal tax system for individuals.

The EU has tons of binding tax agreements.

But individuals do not pay tax to the EU.

this was supposed to be exactly that

In fact it did do that! Direct File imported W2s, 1099-INTs and other data during the filing season that ended in April.

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

The US tax code isn't created to work like this. Direct file asked many questions about things like dependent children, whether you're blind and whether you have an HSA - all things that are relevant to your taxes that aren't actually available to the government right now.

Secondly, there is the issue of State / Local taxes - the IRS only receives federal tax data making it hard to automatically fill out the whole tax return since efiling products tend to file federal / state taxes together.

This year, direct file allowed people to import their W2s and 1099-INTs automatically based on the information the IRS had: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

These are obstacles not the core reason.

Everyone is talking about having LLMs write software but what about having them delete code? That can be very hard in a legacy enterprise environment. I think dead code detection overlaps with security and that is a good way to sell that kind of code clean up. Having LLMs review your architecture is a fun exercise, being able to incorporate that feedback is a good measure for the dev teams.

In my experience the paper forms are so much easier and more reliable than using tax software. A pen and a form just works. No account logins and passwords, no janky UI, no advertisements, no issues saving your progress... The instructions are much better too. Each box is numbered and there's an instruction manual detailing what to put in that box. If you make mistakes the IRS will simply correct you.

The problem I had with the papers is they don't tell you when you need to have another form. Guided question software will ask questions to determine if you need forms.

This code base is clean and well-crafted. I appreciate the extensive documentation. It’s unfortunate that Direct File was affected by budget cuts.

budget cuts had nothing to do with it. this was a lobbied choice.

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

Seems like an anti-pattern to involve so many unique human perspectives on who owes what. An authority should establish what taxes are owed objectively, and the system should just send out invoices.

If you have a problem with that, build a robust appeal process. Essentially what we have now is an appeal process for every single person.

This ignores the reality that the authority in question doesn't have all of the necessary information. This isn't just a matter of reporting wages and such, it also involves decisions such as accounting information such as depreciation periods, business expenses and many other factors.

Yet the audit arm is revenue positive so the system already works like this.

Given this project is being drained of resources by the new admin, is anyone in the know able to comment on how hard this would be to take, and stand up, as a competitor to turbo tax?

Presumably, any Intuit competitors will be given a 10 year headstart worth many millions, maybe billions?

Is there a reason you'd need to do so? What is freetaxusa.com missing that direct file gives you (other than the fact that direct file is free and supported by the government itself)?

Expat support.

If anyone has any tips for the most cost effective way for expats to file, please share them here.

I'm doing it all by hand because I'm tired of going through the 'free' apps and entering in all my details, and when I get ready to file it end up being hundreds of dollars to file since the other forms (extra 1040 schedules, 2555, etc) are not included.

yes. and you have the right answer. download and print forms. no way around it. or pay $500 each year to the top 2.

freetaxusa doesn't cover the cases for almost everyone here. ever bought stocks? out!

also, you need to submit selfies and have a usa sim card from specific providers.

Need to submit selfies? I don't recall submitting selfies.

I own stocks, all I had to do was fill in the forms on freetaxusa.com based on the forms the brokerage gave me. Just look for non zero fields on the brokerage forms, and fill out the matching box.

If you mean something more sophisticated tax-wise, then I'm sure direct file wouldn't support it either?

Regarding the sim card, I assume that's about two factor codes? IIRC I always logged in through a code received by email.

Where does it say that this project is impacted by the 11% layoffs?

What would it take for an individual or small business to run a version of this locally? To file, you need an MeF account with IRS; does the IRS grant those freely? And to import W2s and 1099s, it seems that there is a DataImportService interface but unfortunately there is no implementation and the APIs to IRS are not public.

If the Biden administration wanted to break the tax software oligopoly, they should have focused on making the government’s own interfaces open.

I wonder whether Cash App's free filing service (used it for the first time last year and it was very good even for my somewhat complicated taxes) is based on this?

Weren't they also working on a system that would send you a prefilled return with all information filled in the IRS already has?

I went to the link thinking that I could now file my taxes with the IRS through GitHub, which I honestly have mixed feelings about.

That's an idea... Make a fork, add a file at taxpayers/${SSN}.yaml describing your return in terms of income/deductions/circumstances, make sure it lints successfully, and then submit a PR for the IRS to review. If it's merged, CI/CD initiates a bank payment/withdrawal. If you get audited, resolve the conflicts and update the PR.

Wow public domain license! Smart move, I assume those disgruntled devs who "joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector" can now easily fork it and compete with TurboTax directly (with, I hope, a much better product at a lower price). Normally that'd feel a bit scummy but in this case I can't fault them for it.

Here's to hoping they can outcompete TurboTax so brutally that Intuit won't be able to pay for all those lobbyists anymore.

IIRC public domain is actually the "default" for code released by the government

Yes, works of the US Federal Government are public domain. It gets complicated when state governments, contractors, etc. are involved, but Direct File was in-house work by USDS/18F.

Yep, one of the more popular FOSS CNC controllers (LinuxCNC) draws its heritage from a NIST project, and at least one major manufacturer ships a variant of it in their machines.

Although it is written in the "LICENSE" file for purposes of uniformity and GitHub compatibility, a dedication to the Public Domain is not a "license". As you can see, they waive all their rights to claim copyright protection, and therefore, no license is possible; no license is necessary to use it for any purpose.

And yes, "As a work of the US Government" it is dedicated to the Public Domain by law.

TurboTax already has competitors.

FTA:

> Releasing Direct File’s source code demonstrates that the IRS is fulfilling its obligations under the SHARE IT Act[1] (three weeks ahead of schedule!).

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9566

> libs

Guys I knew it

fork this repo so you can own the libs

It's a bit disappointing that a seemingly official project isn't using commit signing for verification and non-repudiation. It's open source, great! But it's also pretty massive (i.e. hard to review everything) and the chance of a bad actor sticking code in something so critical as tax filings.

what could it really do though? any discrepancies will just be settled in an audit. of course, you are providing name, address, SSN, bank account info, but what malevolent entity doesn't already have that data about you anyways? besides, trust us, we're the government is good enough already! /s

Kinda. Since it's Public Domain, there's little to no use in signing the code, because they explicitly forfeited any rights to it.

Public Domain means you can legally take their code, riddle it with malware, and distribute, claiming that's the real and true Direct File source code, and you are its author. What you do with malware is a different legal issue of course.

So I'm not sure proving you are commit owner by signing it is really helpful if anyone can do it as well, and there's no copyright holder to decide who's right.

Copyright doesn't have anything to do with it, even remotely. I don't care who owns it or who claims to own it. But it may be useful to verify that the commit came from the government.

But how do you verify?

Let's say you see a green checkmark on GitHub that confirms the commit was really made by GitHub user @totally_legit_government_absolutely_not_hacker.

Unless you already have their public GPG key in your private keychain, and you marked it as "trusted" previously, there's not really much more info to that.

UPDATE: besides, the government is like a million people, some of them are malicious actors.

Setting aside malicious government employees, the authN part of this seems like something for which technical solutions exist. Governments could operate PKI trusts and link their employees’ development credentials (in the US, this would be a PIV card or something like it) to that certificate chain. Commits, or committer identity, could be signed via that chain. The dual security of “physical/secure individual credential signing via an available-on-internal-government-network-only authority”, with a public authority available for validation, seems like it would be so secure as to be … close enough for government work.

Yep, that would work. I just noted that current GitHub green checkmark doesn't really guarantee anything for the DirectFile repo.

You don't know what they used internally. There are two commits on github which just dump the code from whatever they used for version control for the past two years, and no further development will take place.

The fact graph service uses scala!

Thanks for sharing!

> The source code is only public because of federal law

I doubt contributions are welcome

Ok we now have "law is code".

When can we have "code is law"? Write the code as source of truth and generate the law from it.

That's what a smart contract is meant to represent, and they get taken advantage of every single day.

The law has better properties when it comes to undefined behavior than code does.

> Direct File also incorporates the Fact Graph, a declarative, XML-based knowledge graph data structure that is designed to reason about incomplete information, such as a partially completed tax return. The Fact Graph is written in the Scala programming language; it runs on the JVM on the backend and is transpiled via Scala.js to run on the client as well. Direct File's Fact Graph is not domain-specific, and it may be useful to revenue agencies and as a reference for business rules engine implementations.

Interesting, I want to read more about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183845

Not sure an LLM summary is all that useful

The code that defines how the fact graph works is here: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/tree/main/direct-f...

but the actual tax definitions that deal with facts and derived calculation are here: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/tree/main/direct-f...

See for example the standard deduction and tax rate calculations https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f... https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

I imagine these are based on the MeF (Modernized e-File) schemas because the system needs to transform the input data into XML MeF schemas to submit electronically to the MeF system (See https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-mef-s...)

"A Fact Graph is a DAG, just like Excel." [1] A DAG won't work for everything! For example, the advance premium tax credit (i.e., the means-tested Obamacare health premium subsidy) has a circular relationship with the above-the-line deduction that self-employed people can take for healthcare costs. The IRS says you can iterate until you get stable values. [2]

[1] https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f... [2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-14-41.pdf

Here's the announcement from one of the principal engineers:

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/05/direct-file-on-github/

Thanks - I've changed the URL to that from https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filin... above, since the latter continues to be signup-walled.

If anybody wants to read the 404 article - https://archive.is/U6j4b

You could also just sign up and read it on their site, and consider subscribing.

Journalism is labor

The ad model won.

I'd agree typically but paywalling open source government software just to talk about it is wild behavior.

how is the software being paywalled here?

They're talking about it but to actually see the thing they're talking about you have to pay before the part of the article that links to it is clickable

or you can just google it? it's not like the source code is exclusively held by 404media and you must pay them to view it, or something. would you have the same opinion if e.g. the article was the same but just didn't link to the repo?

If you want indie publications to survive, please reconsider punishing sites that are sign-up walled.

If they intend for a mass market to read their articles, indie publications should find a way to sell a user an article for a fair price. Especially in the context of coming from a news aggregator site, it's absurd that I'm going to buy a recurring subscription for Tax Software Quarterly, Yacht Week, Greg's TV Reviews etc. The number of distinct domains I click through to from HN alone would be hundreds of dollars a month if I'm starting subscriptions for each one.

I hate and block ads, since they literally screw up the functioning of the page now, so I don't think they should "just have ads and be open" -- but I think expecting average non-journalists to sign up for subscriptions to multiple "national newspapers" and a half dozen news magazines is absurd, which is why people here don't like paywalls, and bypass them wherever possible.

if someone is unwilling to pay for access to an entire collection of articles, i'd find it very unlikely that they pay for a single article. unless it's an outrageously low price like 10 cents or something

Well, it certainly should be well under a buck -- I refuse to believe they're earning more than 25 cents per visitor from the circus of bullshit sticky autoplaying video ads festooning the pages anyway. I'd just click "Pay 49 cents" if they had Apple Pay or another 1-click option that doesn't share my information with them, AND it meant zero ads. Of course even the paywalled sites that sell subscriptions mostly don't turn off their ads, so I assume they'd like to double-dip.

I think the video streaming services are a good model to follow. You go on Prime Video and see videos from several decades, dozens of cable & broadcast networks, and hundreds or thousands of distributors and production companies. The rights are a mess, but that's all hidden from view. Now if only text-based media could operate like that...

Let's not forget how IRS only goes after the small fishes in the pond. Billionaires get a free pass from them all the time.

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