TurboTax and other tax companies don’t just lobby to prevent a free filing solution, they also lobby for more complicated tax laws to create a greater need for their product
"We need to incentivize [green tech|solar panels|electric cars|homeownership|child care|education|capital investments|...]" just translates to more complicated tax laws.
Even if 100% of that is to make taxes complicated. Is their lobby somehow driving the complicated tax code and if we just tell them "cut it out" or have the government spin up its own TurboTax, something that other private companies have not been able to do successfully at scale, it'll somehow stop?
I don't get the point other than people don't like paying for stuff they think should be free. But my point is there is a real cost to helping people fill out their taxes, and I'd prefer that's done on the private side as government isn't historically good running at running tech companies. Either way you pay, just one you have a choice and it's explicit how much it costs and the other is another murky inefficient government run agency.
https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/turbotaxs-intuit-spent-re...
It is normal for governments to use incentives to drive their policy objectives. If they want to incentivize home ownership for example, the resulting increase in complexity of the tax code may be a reasonable trade off.
Intuit is just trying to get a government guarantee that their business model will continue to exist, without their being any positive public policy angle to compensate for the negative externality. In other countries free tax filing is the norm, because although they have the same types of incentives to promote policy objectives, the government has not allowed themselves to become captive to someone like Intuit.
For example, I have filled my taxes in myself (for free) in the UK for about 20 years now. It used to be a (simple) paper form. Then around 15 years or so ago it changed to be web or paper (your choice) and now they strongly incentivise web over paper. For the last 2 or 3 years all the important details of my income and pension are already filled out automatically from the record they get from my employer and I only need to fill in the capital gains and charitable giving parts of my return.