“Government funded services that curtail or eliminate the role of taxpayers in preparing their own taxes could potentially have material and adverse revenue implications.” tax services industry and of Intuit,” Intuit said in its most recent financial disclosure, for its quarter ended Jan. the IRS were to enter the software development and return preparation space, the federal government could become a publicly funded direct competitor of the U.S. Intuit alludes to that threat in its corporate financial filings. (It’s currently available only to taxpayers with adjusted gross income of less than $73,000.) George explained that the goals of the Free File Alliance, or FFA, the consortium of tax software firms participating in the program, included keeping the government out of the tax preparation business. Russell George, then the inspector general for tax administration, traced the program’s evolution for the House Ways and Means Committee in 2006, it was launched in 2003 to “provide free tax preparation and electronic filing services to all taxpayers.”Īfter 2005, however, the program was changed to focus only on low-income taxpayers. The companies’ lobbying, for instance, hobbled an IRS program to provide free tax preparation software and filing to consumers. Tax experts have observed that the commercial software companies share the goal of keeping tax preparation complicated with the anti-tax lobby, which sees the onerous tax-filing process as a way to “fuel anti-tax sentiment,” in the words of Vanderbilt University tax expert Beverly Moran. It is a truth universally acknowledged that preparing and filing your taxes causes pain comparable only to root canal or passing a kidney stone. Column: TurboTax and H&R Block are sued for allegedly keeping Americans from filing taxes for free
0 kommentar(er)
