IRS Kills Off Popular Free Direct File Option For The 2026 Tax Filing Season
IRS Kills Off Popular Free Direct File Option For The 2026 Tax Filing Season
www.forbes.com
IRS Kills Off Popular Free Direct File Option For The 2026 Tax Filing Season
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You just knew when these assholes kept using obviously-coordinated terms like "waste, fraud and abuse" and kept parroting phrases like that when Elon was doing stupid shit like waving around a chainsaw while in a k-hole, that this is the kind of thing they are talking about.
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Of course, this saved americans money. The only thing they like doing more than starving poor Americans, is making people pay more for shit so their corporate owners make money.
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This didn’t happen overnight. For over 20 years, Intuit has fought tooth and nail to stop Americans from having a truly free, government-run tax filing system. Back in the early 2000s, they lobbied Congress and cut a deal with the IRS. They were promising to offer a “Free File” option so the government wouldn’t build its own system. Then they turned around and buried that option so deep most people never found it, even using code to hide it from Google.
When people did try to file for free, they were steered into paid versions with deceptive “free, free, free” ads. They were so deceptive that Intuit had to pay $141 million in settlements. Now, after decades of manipulation, Direct File is being terminated. This is exactly what they’ve wanted all along. It’s the result of relentless lobbying, lies, and corporate greed, all to keep Americans paying for something that should have been free from the start.
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Agreed. Probably for most filers, the IRS (and state governments) could just automatically do the work. They already have most of or all of the data. The idea that you have to pay some no-value-add middleman for the "privilege" of filing your taxes is crazy.
For people that have more complicated scenarios, and are trying to take every single deduction, have to hire a CPA and so on...that's maybe where these middlemen provide something of value.
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We should file all of our taxes ourselves through the paper option. No digital taxes this year. It's not that hard if all you have is a W2, it takes longer but it also will mean you file for free and more importantly takes the government longer to process it. You can get the papers for free from the library.
Throw dirt into the gears.
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I do. And if your situation doesn't change much from year to year, it isn't horrible. For complex situations you're fucked, but you can't do complex filing for free anyway.
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I DONT Understand why Voters REJECTED this at the Polls last night!
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Maybe this is a "whoosh", but this is something the IRS (under Trump) decided to do. So no voting was directly involved.
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Blue States should use this as an opportunity to create an open-source tax filing coalition. That way, if they need to prevent taxes from reaching the feddies or want to secede, some of the infrastructure would already be in place.
Also, it would just be nice to get tax filing done without hassle.
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You guys need to stop thinking that states have any control over how much money gets sent to the IRS. Federal taxes are paid directly to the federal government by individuals and businesses, they're not collected by the states and sent on to the feds. States have no mechanism to stop sending money to the IRS, because the state itself isn't the entity that sends money in the first place.
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There's a lot of "that can't happen" that actually been happening lately.
Why can't this be one of those things
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This ignores reality. When you boil it down, a government's legitimacy is measured in whether people are willing to do something. A something can include refusing taxation, or setting up the means to redirect it into more deserving hands.
Your argument is questionable, because it denies history. America as we knew it, was founded on the principal of rejecting a king's will.
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I predict a lot of people are going to just not file taxes, and I expect the IRS won't have the resources to do anything about it.
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Unfortunately what’s been shown in the past is the less resources the IRS has, the more likely they are to just go after the smallest issues, they can automate and garnish wages on people who don’t have the resources to fight it. Then they just avoid the rich because they don’t have the resources to go up against well paid tax attorneys
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If you don't have vehicles to manipulate your assets like the rich, they will need only glance at your papers to see the mistake. The IRS loses money hiring auditors and experts to understand if a business is a business or a charity a charity, those are the common tricks the rich use.
You aren't going to hide what your employer paid to you and how much tax you paid the IRS. Even putting in your IRA or house deductible is easy to automate and thus easy to check.
Cash app has free filing though, would recommend.
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If you get paid cash, you will
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Have you ever had to glance at millions of papers?
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The Trump Administration: Fuck you America. Eat shit and worship me.
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Why, because fuck you and yours.
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Because the tax preparation companies paid them a lot of money.
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Well funk. I used this the first time last year. Every year prior I got ass fucked by intuit. I guess this year I'm going back to papers and mailing it.
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OFC they did
Those fuckers -
Man, I wish I owned a government, must be cool to make your money by forcing your serfs to give you their money for free stuff
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Trump was reached for comment, and he shared "because fuck you" as the reason.
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I think he'd be more likely to say "what are taxes?"
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Of course they are.
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Does this mean we don't have to pay taxes?
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I tried to use it, but it was useless anyway.
I cannot think of even but one single thing that Donald Trump has done to benefit the working class. Not even a single thing, no matter how small or petty.
He's getting rid of the Mexicans taking their job...
The jobs that none of them want to do in the first place...
For wages none of them would accept...
Wait...
See, for me this line of thinking is troublesome. It implies we have to or should rely on the exploitation of desperate people willing to work for pennies on the dollar because they have no legal recourse.
Fuck ICE, this administration, and everything else that's going on but let's not normalize the exploitation of desperate people to keep the machine churning.
I'd prefer we get rid of the CEOs that are giving our jobs away.
This seems alright, no?
Unironically yes, and it's sad that that's the case. However, he did issue a similar EO in 2019 which didn't do much; the administration claims that it lowered costs on the most expensive procedures by 6%, but whether that's true or not the cheapest procedures became about 3% more expensive. Something like 20% of hospitals and insurers were ever in compliance, which Trump of course blames the Biden administration for; and attempts to make the EO a law went nowhere on the Hill.
But yes, healthcare price transparency is a good thing. Still, I'm a bit suspicious; because the insurance companies actually welcomed the EO when it was first signed. I can't figure that one out.
Some of them burned a few calories standing up from the couch and walking into the polling station to vote. They've burned through more savings to pay for groceries and everything else because of all the trumpflation in both terms, but they at least burned off most of a French fry.
He killed NAFTA, which was good for Mexican workers (NAFTA exploited Mexican labor)
I have no idea why anyone would ever think Donald Trump of all people would ever want to do that.
Banned those harmful artificial food dyes.
Aaand that's about it.
"Harmful"
I prefer my substance control to be based on evidence, not vibes.
Has that actually happened though? I thought they were just talking about doing it.
I don't even think America is about us. Republican or Democrat I honestly think we are played out. It's basically a repetitive good cop bad cop lifestyle.
People should remember what real humanity is and live for that more and America less.
For now, the good cop team wants me to have documents that will let me leave the country. The bad cop team is denying me a passport.
He doesn't need to because that's not what his supporters want. They want racism and hatred and that's what he provides.