Direct File was rolled out gradually as a pilot program. It was also only available for taxpayers in 12 states.
My guess: since the tax code is so complicated, they probably wanted to support the simplest and most common filing cases in the first release. Handling all the edge cases would delay the launch, and prevent them from collecting feedback. If the feedback and demand was positive for v1, they could expand the surface area in the future.
Assuming I am reading this Census table correctly, 2023 Table A-2 [0] says 76% of the US has a household income under $150k. So as an initial deployment, covering 3/4 of the country as the first filter is not terrible.
Eyeballing it, I bet those specific restrictions are in place because:
$168.6k is suspiciously the same as the (2024) social security cap, so they probably didn't handle that edge case.
$250k is the start of NIIT, so they probably didn't handle that case either.
Thanks for the actual answer!
Direct File was rolled out gradually as a pilot program. It was also only available for taxpayers in 12 states.
My guess: since the tax code is so complicated, they probably wanted to support the simplest and most common filing cases in the first release. Handling all the edge cases would delay the launch, and prevent them from collecting feedback. If the feedback and demand was positive for v1, they could expand the surface area in the future.
Unfortunately, it didn't last long enough
Assuming I am reading this Census table correctly, 2023 Table A-2 [0] says 76% of the US has a household income under $150k. So as an initial deployment, covering 3/4 of the country as the first filter is not terrible.
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2024/demo/income-poverty/...
Tax industry lobbyists