The Inflation Reduction Act included $15 million set aside for the IRS to conduct a study determining how to create a system that would allow taxpayers to file directly with the agency at no cost.
It’s not surprising that the folks who make money off a complicated, often confusing and intimidating system are fighting a change to make it easier. From The New York Times:
Democrats have long pushed to make filing free for everyone, seeing that as a way to make the process easier and less costly. But that ambition could upend the business models of the multibillion-dollar tax preparation industry, which earns hefty fees for helping people navigate the tax code.
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Interest in such a system intensified after a 2019 investigation by ProPublica that found the tax preparers that were working with the I.R.S. to provide free filing were actually pushing taxpayers toward paid services.
So what’s the House Republicans’ excuse? The folks who want to impose their authoritarian values on the rest of us now claim to stand for independence and nonpartisanship. More from The Times:
Top Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee wrote a letter to the I.R.S. early this month expressing alarm about the study and claiming that political bias was already taking place. The research is being conducted by the left-leaning New America Foundation — which has supported the idea of free tax filing — and that has raised concern that the Biden administration has decided to move ahead with the plan. The Republican lawmakers, Representatives Jason Smith of Missouri and David Schweikert of Arizona, warned that the administration wanted to hand the I.R.S. control over both the filing and auditing of tax returns and requested documents and communications related to the study.
“The perception is that the administration has already predetermined that a government-directed e-file system should exist regardless of what might be found in a truly nonpartisan, independent, third-party review of the feasibility, the cost to develop and operate such a system, the I.R.S. capacity to run such a system, or taxpayer opinions on the matter,” they wrote.
It's just a matter of time until those fake champions of the little guy start whining that free tax filing is too woke, just like affordable health care and common-sense gun laws.
