The article mentions that the tax software maker opposes the government doing this, but doesn't mention public opinion. What does the average American think about this?
And then people in less-complicated situations get intimidated and think they need tax-prep software. Or they're lazy like me and use TurboTax so they can click through everything in an hour and be done with it.
That's not a good reason for tax filling to be hard, unless the tax agency itself doesn't know how much a person should be paying.
so it would seem that a) for at least the nominal taxpayer, it’s entirely possible that the government has your information already; and b) unless i get back into consulting or otherwise complicate my income, my tax guy just set himself up to request those transcripts every year!
Like most problems, the average American has (for political purposes) ~zero mental engagement with this. Vs. those for-profit corporations (and a variety of other interest groups) are intensely engaged. And it's all-too-frequently reported that any politician who wants to be (re-)elected to America's Congress needs to be intensely engaged with wooing interest group support and campaign fundraising.
Summed across the whole economy, the total $X being paid to America's "Tax-Industrial Complex" is vastly more than the total $Y that it'd cost to have an efficient government-run system.
I'd much rather my money go to the government than to tax preparers, though.
That all depends on the government's execution. If they can deliver a system that is more convenient to use, cheaper (no, government services are not "free") and provides better results, then I'm all for it.
If it would be free overall, it would take no time to develop or support and would already be rolled out.
If people want easy taxes then they can hire someone. That seems to be the market solution to most problems.
Presumably the IRS has embraced electronic computer technology internally and no longer does business only on paper.