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Other than the fact that it costs time and money to write this software? And as other commenters have mentioned, people have tried to do this in the spirit of “open source”. It’s just that the problem it’s solving is something that can be viewed as an artificial one.

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This I think is the core of the argument. Saying that the government should compute your taxes for you is essentially arguing that the cost of tax prep should be paid by the IRS/your taxes. Unless you believe that the IRS can do it better/more efficiently than the current group of companies providing the service then we might not really gain anything.

That's a good point!

Most of the data already known to the IRS is available in an electronic format anyway. I fire up TurboTax, electronically import my W-2, the tax statements from my bank, etc. and I'm 90% done.

And the remaining items (various deductions, reporting my foreign bank accounts, etc.) are things that the IRS itself probably also wouldn't know right at the beginning of the year.

The IRS already computes your taxes. They use it to check your filings.

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