1) It wasn't mandatory so it's hard to take this argument seriously. If there was a concern about it being made mandatory, that could have been addressed by Congress and/or the courts (if there was a legal/Constitutional basis to make it only optional).
2) Amortized cost, it's still under development so the costs are going to be relatively high and has many restrictions which reduce who can use it to file (also publicity, it's still less well-known). Given 1-3 more years the cost per filing would likely have been much cheaper as the annual spending would have likely decreased (as the system matured) and the number of filers would have increased.
EDIT:
> Cheap open source tax assessment & preparation seems like an extremely good use case for AI Agents.
Please no. Why would you use AI agents for something that's really a complicated spreadsheet? Make the complicated spreadsheet that gives you the same results for the same inputs instead of an "AI" that might give different results on different runs.
>2) Operating Direct File cost taxpayers $814/filing in 2024. This is a lot more expensive than commercial offerings - it would be cheaper to just give everyone TurboTax
It did nothing of the sort. This is counting the costs to build a system and then pretending to split them over the number of introductory users in the first few years. The marginal cost of an additional taxpayer using the system was essentially 0.
If the IRS disagrees with how you prepared your taxes, they don’t just say “oh well, we’re not the preparer, we’ll have take your word for it”. They write you a letter and you have to convince them they’re wrong.
The fact they don’t have enough funding (or functional enough systems) to do this for everybody doesn’t change who has the final authority on how much tax you owe.
This sounds like the time one of the wanted Al Qaeda people in Pakistan said in a speech that he would tell the Americans where he was himself if they gave him the reward
1) It wasn't mandatory so it's hard to take this argument seriously. If there was a concern about it being made mandatory, that could have been addressed by Congress and/or the courts (if there was a legal/Constitutional basis to make it only optional).
2) Amortized cost, it's still under development so the costs are going to be relatively high and has many restrictions which reduce who can use it to file (also publicity, it's still less well-known). Given 1-3 more years the cost per filing would likely have been much cheaper as the annual spending would have likely decreased (as the system matured) and the number of filers would have increased.
EDIT:
> Cheap open source tax assessment & preparation seems like an extremely good use case for AI Agents.
Please no. Why would you use AI agents for something that's really a complicated spreadsheet? Make the complicated spreadsheet that gives you the same results for the same inputs instead of an "AI" that might give different results on different runs.
>2) Operating Direct File cost taxpayers $814/filing in 2024. This is a lot more expensive than commercial offerings - it would be cheaper to just give everyone TurboTax
It did nothing of the sort. This is counting the costs to build a system and then pretending to split them over the number of introductory users in the first few years. The marginal cost of an additional taxpayer using the system was essentially 0.
And it was very limited who could even use it during that selected time period!
If the IRS disagrees with how you prepared your taxes, they don’t just say “oh well, we’re not the preparer, we’ll have take your word for it”. They write you a letter and you have to convince them they’re wrong.
The fact they don’t have enough funding (or functional enough systems) to do this for everybody doesn’t change who has the final authority on how much tax you owe.
(For completeness I should point out it’s the tax court that has the final authority.)
1) - you can and should just firewall the departments
2) - by that argument it was easier to just give a $10M dollars to each Al-Qaeda member
This sounds like the time one of the wanted Al Qaeda people in Pakistan said in a speech that he would tell the Americans where he was himself if they gave him the reward
> Cheap open source tax assessment & preparation seems like an extremely good use case for AI Agents.
How? If you can't argue that your reliance on the agent was reasonable when filing an incorrect return, the agent is worse than useless.
If you can argue that, you can provide the same defense for an incorrect return that you filed knowingly.