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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

DirectFile was quite good for the one year I was able to use it and addressed your concerns. Don't worry, that's since been taken care of.

https://apnews.com/article/irs-direct-file-tax-returns-free-...

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I can totally see the minds running TurboTax spending a lot of money to make this happen.

Intuit spent $3.8 million on lobbying against Direct File in 2023, HR Block another $3 million. In total, the tax prep industry has spent $93 million lobbying against the Free File program since 2003 (through 2023, couldn't find a more recent source).

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/02/turbotax-maker-intu...

It's sad to see how little money needs to be spent to make the lives of millions of tax payers more miserable.

Just goes to show how cheap our politicians really are. In both heart and bank.

Not "our politicians", republicans

Democrats keep trying to make taxes in America better, including prominent democrats literally calling for the investigation of Intuit's bribery here.

Then people elect republicans.

Independent analysis of official state reports contradicts you. It’s easier to look at states than to analyze which federal rep submitted which amendment or rider

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/worst-run-stat...

That's $3 million of direct, fully disclosed funding. There are many other ways of bribing officials, and it gets easier every day.

Just a heads up, your URL 404’s

Thanks. Fixed. I stripped what I thought was a tracker without testing.

The fun part is you can change the text before what you thought was tracking to anything you want:

http://apnews.com/article/apnews-declares-trump-stupid-4bb0b...

This is true about a lot of sites and I'll often remove the unimportant part when saving or sharing urls for brevity sake. E.g.

https://apnews.com/article/4bb0bca02fab9b3d06ae6f45ac67b7ab

This is true for most news websites as well as online shopping sites

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