I disagree wholeheartedly that there isn’t much to study. Direct File was actually a resounding success, especially when you consider how much difficulty governments tend to have shipping good software products. There is a lot of good information in here that government entities can learn from.

It didnt happen because Intuit lobbied against it like their business model was in existential crisis. The canary is that inappropriate power imbalances will ruin even the most hard one feats of human collaboration and effort. Its like learning about why jaywalking became a crime, or why recycling is a consumer’s respobsibility. Edit: So I'm about as original as a model can be as I went to go fact check myself and I basically cliff noted an AI summary for yall pre-gen.

I doubt this is the reason. In this particular case, it's more likely that a company such as Turbotax paid a sufficient sum of money to the President or one of his family members in exchange for this consideration.

Then there is that to study

Congress authorized a study, not a full blown system, or even a working prototype. No taxpayers should have ever been allowed to use it to file a tax return.

Despite Congress appropriating only $15M to do the study, the program managed to blow through at least $41M, likely more.[1] This included advertising costs in some states to encourage taxpayers to use the system.

This would be like your boss asking you to send him an email about the pros and cons of adding a feature, and you going and implementing the feature, pushing it to production, and then asking customers for feedback on it.

Whether or not the feature was a success is 100% irrelevant. That’s not how things should be done. We are a nation of laws, and even if the program was a smashing success, there needs to be accountability.

1. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/Report-Replacemen...

It was a pilot and was open to a small subset of taxpayers. It was intentionally not benefiting from economy of scale to incrementally deliver value rather than probably badly trying to hit every use case the first go around.

The cost per filing criticism is generally posited in bad faith, by people who don’t understand incremental software delivery, or both

Even if that's true, there's no reason it can't be streamlined over time. The true scaling problem is profit. The government has an interest in accurate tax collection -- not collecting a service fee.

da troof soshul bot?

the billion dollar tax prep industrial complex as a group spends the most lobbying dollars on tax policy -- in particular, suppressing any effort eliminate or even reduce filing complexity -- and lobbying ops like theirs don't happen because their service's value to tax payers speaks for itself

This ignores the time cost of having to find the right private company to file your taxes (everyone loves price shopping!) and manually funnel all your data into it, data the government probably already has. Tax prep costs me at least an entire day of my time every year.

P.S. When citing that you had AI do a basic analysis of something, specifying what you analyzed and which AI you used would be nice so other people can reproduce it or dig deeper.

The government inefficiency is in doing the small pilot program and using those costs as per filing costs. Of course it's going to cost more if you only do a handful of them. The first iPhone cost a hojillion dollars to make, but Apple sells them for $1,000 and make a ton of money at that price point because they've made millions of them. This is so true for government spending that the shipyard building aircraft carriers did a press release begging congress to buy two at once because it would be cheaper than buying one and then waiting a long time and then buying a second one anyway.

https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Media/News/Article-View/Article/...

> The biggest issue with Direct File is the conflict of interest created by having the government who benefits from your tax payment also prepare the return for you.

The amount of distrust in the USA is truly bonkers. What about the conflict of interest for the tax preparers, actual companies with profit as a motive wanting nothing more than to pretend it's all complicated.

As the document says, the government prefilling your return is commonplace in many countries. And it actually makes sense when they already have the data. Less work for the taxpayer, fewer mistakes resulting in fewer cases in need of investigation. Everyone wins here...

> This risk is particularly high given that the program was intended for and marketed to low income filers who typically rely on their tax preparer as an advocate to ensure their tax payment is as low as legally possible.

Over 30% of returns don't even owe federal taxes [1]. So when they file, and get a $1000 credit, it's really crappy to then have to pay $100 or so of that to a tax preparer.

> to make it politically unpopular to shut down

So the government doing something people like is... Bad?

1: https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-doesnt-pay-incom...

Profit motives in infrastructure are a bad idea. See Thames Water in the UK, for instance. It always introduces a perverse incentive where if the company in control of the infrastructure can extract an extra million in profit by making everything less efficient and costing everyone else involved a billion, it's still in that company's interest to do so.

This is a prime example of that. H&R Block, etc, benefit from there not being direct file by around $3bn in revenue or around $750m in profit. Rough sums on the time saved by direct file if everyone used it is 8h * average wage * taxpayers, which seems to be approximately $44bn. i.e. in axing direct file, it has "created" $3bn in economic activity to the private infrastructure-owner (the intermediary between you and filing your return), but at the cost of $44bn in lost time & therefore lost activity (the other things you could have been doing) to the rest of the economy.

Infrastructure is not the economy. Infrastructure is the thing the economy runs on top of / has to use. Given that it is the role of government to govern the economy, it is the role of government to ensure that the infrastructure is running well (be the custodian of the infrastructure).

Arguing the other side, digital infrastructure shouldn't be such a complicated domain that it is out of the reach of governments. This is the authority we trust to build our roads, water/sewer system, electric grid, and virtually every other meaningful physical infrastructure. Why should digital infrastructure be out of bounds?

The only alternative is inserting a third party, one that has full access to all your financial information, an extraordinary level of trust for a private sector that has shown unrelenting loyalty to investors over customers. That shouldn't be necessary for the average filer, assuming a bare minimum of competence, like one might assume for the only country to put a human on the moon and bring them safely home.

Explain your reasoning at least.

The government has to maintain some infrastructure to get this sort of thing done. Whether digital or analog. And if it contracts it out, it needs to oversee it. So no matter how it is done, the government has to pay.

Don't you care about the actual outcome at all? Even if the government does a better job, you still prefer a third-party organization?

You could just light the money on fire instead and get the same result. Contractors routinely screw the tax payer. I once had a job in one of these third parties where the entire operation was effectively defrauding the tax payer by claiming 1hr jobs would take 40.

Do you think the government should allow electronic filing of taxes?

Because if the government is going to accept returns electronically instead of through the physical mail, then it should accept them without requiring an intermediary.

Interestingly, it does this for corporations, but not for individuals.

Gee, I wonder why.

Personally, I think that (a) the government needs to have my PII to process my taxes, and that (b) having the government require me to also hand my PII to a third party in order to pay taxes is a big fucking security nightmare.

At exorbitant costs or lackluster execution, with plenty of campaign donations along the way

> As much of it as possible should be contracted out to 3rd parties.

This is the case pretty much.

Comments that start with “Eh” are a real turnoff.

Direct File was a service not infrastructure

Contracted out like the healthcare.gov original launch fiasco for the AHCA?