Turbotax is Blitzing Congress Again to Make Tax Filing Harder

Every year, Americans spend billions on tax prep services, paying a heavily concentrated industry of giant, wildly profitable firms to send the IRS information it already has. Despite the fact that most other rich countries have a far more efficient process, many Americans believe that adopting this process here is either impossible, immoral, or both.

That puts tax preparation in the same bucket as other forms of weird American exceptionalism – like the belief that we're too untrustworthy to have universal healthcare, or that we're so violent that we must all have assault rifles to protect ourselves from one another. (...)

It's a no-brainer, or it would be – if it wasn't for decades of lobbying by the massively concentrated tax-prep industry – wildly profitable corporate giants like HR Block and Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, who spent 20 years lobbying congress, spending millions to ensure that Americans would have to pay the Turbotax tax in order to pay their income tax.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

... The point of getting the IRS to send you pre-populated tax returns isn't to deny you the opportunity to pay excellent, knowledgeable tax-prep specialists if you need them – it's to spare most of us from the needless expense of paying Intuit and HR Block to perform the rote form-filling by which they rake in billions in profits.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. This is the first year I've stopped using TurboTax and it's really no big deal. Yeah, you fill in a few more blanks (like, name and address - horrors!), and probably should look closely at a couple sections in the IRS tax booklet, but beyond that, the pleasure of screwing Intuit and Block is more than worth it.]