Free Fillable Forms is free for everyone. It is technically a third party. It’s very simple if you have the average tax filing situation.

There are also other services that provide free efiling regardless of income, it’s not just TurboTax.

At the end of the day, you can always do the paperwork if you really don’t want anyone seeing your taxes and mail it. Could it be better? Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.

> In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or

As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.

An additional factor is state taxes really need to be packaged together with the actual solution.

> Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.

Just passionate enough to say that everyone unhappy with Intuit lobbying against free tax filing and simplified tax codes doesn’t understand?

> As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.

This is misleading. The IRS does have this because for most people it does not change year to year. It would also be trivial for them to provide a way to input this data if/when it does change.