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Isn't this pretty crazy? The government is saying "hey, you can easily do your taxes for free on our website... But only if you make less than $73k, everyone else needs to either do it the manual way, or pay our buds at H&R Block".

I can tell you, I did my taxes before I made $73k and after I made over that amount and there is no difference in the effort put in to complete my taxes each year. There's no reason there should be an income limit on using this tool from the IRS other than the tax prep lobby.

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FreeTaxUSA.com you can file federal for free, state has a fee of 14.99

It's honestly pretty awful that tax companies exist when the IRS could hire programmers to set up a free competitor to TurboTax or TaxAct very easily.

And, as the flat tax folks tell us constantly, we could drop the entire industry and 90+% of the IRS if we just simplified the tax code. That one's more contentious, but I don't understand why the IRS doesn't spend $500k to develop this. They could even charge $10 a pop and make the money back in a year. Maybe even become the first profitable government agency.

The companies like TurboTax lobby against it and are supposedly actually for having more complicated tax laws so people need to rely on their services.

I read about it a few years ago so the details are foggy.

73k gross or net? What about business / rental income