Direct File won't happen in 2026, IRS tells states (opens in new tab)

Except those corrupt politicians want lobbying to be profitable, so they can profit from it too. And if they ask for too much, they’ll just bribe the next guy or may even try to put their own in office. Can’t have that!

And loyalty seems particularly important with the current administration, because they have an agenda full of things that are illegal or otherwise unsavory and un-American, so they need a nation run by loyal henchmen if the agenda is to succeed.

If you donate to a large charity, there is a good chance some of that $ goes to lobbying, as it should. (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)

If you work at a large company, 100% chance it lobbies, for good reason. Large employers lobby for better mass transit (because parking garages are expensive), more housing (because it is cheaper to lobby than pay employees more so they can afford $$$$ houses), or friendlier business laws (no one likes paying more taxes).

Lobbying is everything from "help us use orphans as a source of cheap protein!" To "keep the national parks funded".

Every time they speak there should be a visual reminder of who they've taken money from.

It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.

Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.

What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.)

The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant.

https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/return-preparer-office...

There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.

You might run into similar problems.

> The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: Recordkeeping, 12 hr., 40 min.; Learning about the law or the form, 4 hr., 17 min.; Preparing and sending the form, 8 hr., 16 min.

Nonparticipating FFI. A nonparticipating FFI means an FFI that is not a participating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, or exempt beneficial owner.

OK, then what's an FFI, a participating FFI, a deemed-compliant FFI, and an exempt beneficial owner? That's 4 other definitions to look up just to learn you should not choose option 1 of 32. If you keep track of this intermediate knowledge, it can help you skip some other options but you have to look ahead and see that possibility and find a way to store all these intermediate conclusions so that when you wake up the next day you haven't forgotten if you're an exempt beneficial owner or not - and by the way, before you even begin, you have to work out if you're a beneficial owner - exempt or not.

Once you've decided you're not an FFI, you look to see if you're a "Certified Deemed-Compliant Sponsored, Closely Held Investment Vehicle", which doesn't have a definition in the guide! What now? Try to find it in the Internal Revenue code?

By the way, the one you called out - "Excepted Territory NFFE" doesn't actually have a definition at all in the guide either and it refers you to "Regulations section 1.1472-1(c)(1)(iii)". Maybe if you're clever, you can set aside these difficult ones in case you discover an easy right answer first, but that gets back to designing a system to manage the intermediate knowledge and design your search strategy. Yes, you can do it, but also it's stupidly burdensome.

The French tax system is pretty simple. Taxes are high, but simple. The website you use to file your taxes is also pretty simple, and every single field has a button that explains what it is about and in which cases you should write stuff inside.

The only annoying parts are if you have accounts outside of France, you have to declare them. And if you get dividends/capital gains in foreign currencies outside of the EU, you have to calculate yourself how much tax you owe using a bunch of tables per country and currency.

The US is not a county optimized to provide quality services inexpensively. It is a business optimized to maximize profits.

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

As for "having most of your tax information", they don't. They know your reported income. You see that on your W2s/1099s/etc. What they don't know is whether or not you had a kid this year, or whether you lost a kid this year, whether you got married or divorced, if your spouse is claiming the kids this year or not, the number or amount of your charitable contributions, whether you have deductible mileage expenses, or a million other things.

And if that weren't enough, you've go municipal taxes too, in a few places like New York and Detroit.

There is a reason Americans spend staggering amounts of time and money on tax preparation. It is simple until it isn’t.

And options are worse.

(The efiling never worked for me, always complained about something esoteric.)

They’re just values as far as it’s concerned. And it is dumped every October. But phone # validation up front is too much, an overstep.

Like I said, I just used it for the calc ability so a spreadsheet works as well. Bit of work the first year, then tweak.

But if you're a rich person with dozens of companies and complicated trusts? Yep, nobody is going to be looking.

It involves reading a lot of instructions, with many references to other documents and other sections. It involves copying a lot of numbers from one place to another, and doing basic math on them to get a new one.

It could be improved a lot just by automatically calculating more fields, and adding more of the "worksheets" that are in the instructions into the forms so it can calculate those for you.

Oh shit, wait.

The instructions for each form published by the IRS every year are already written by professional technical writers to be unambiguous. Do you mean that someone ought to write a simplified english grammar transpiler? I think that would genuinely be interesting. What's missing are the guidelines the technical writers are using, but that can probably be derived.