In most developed countries, filing taxes takes about fifteen minutes. The government already knows what your employer paid you, what your bank reported, and what your broker filed. They send you a pre-filled return; you confirm or correct it. Done. The reason Americans don’t have this isn’t technical or political — it’s that tax preparation companies spent two decades and tens of millions of dollars making sure it never happened. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s in the lobbying disclosures.
The lobbying record is on paper
Intuit alone has reported tens of millions in federal lobbying spending since the early 2000s, with H&R Block and other preparers filing similar disclosures. ProPublica’s investigative reporting documented Intuit’s “Free File” arrangement with the IRS — a deal that traded a free-filing option for a promise the IRS wouldn’t build its own. Internal documents showed Intuit actively steered eligible users away from the free product into paid tiers. The Federal Trade Commission later ruled the company had deceptively advertised free filing, leading to a $141 million settlement with state attorneys general in 2022.
The consumer harm is measurable
The Treasury inspector general estimated that out of roughly 100 million Americans eligible for Free File, only a small fraction ever used it. The rest paid an average of around $200 to file a return the IRS could have handled automatically. Multiply that across two decades and you’re looking at tens of billions in extracted consumer surplus, plus the time cost of households navigating an artificially complicated system. That’s exactly the kind of quantifiable harm that consumer protection litigation is designed to address.
A legal theory exists, even if it’s a stretch
Antitrust suits against trade associations for coordinated anti-competitive lobbying generally lose under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which protects petitioning the government. But Noerr-Pennington has a “sham” exception when the lobbying is paired with deceptive practices. The FTC’s deceptive-advertising findings against Intuit, combined with documented agreements suppressing a public alternative, are the kind of fact pattern plaintiffs’ lawyers build on. Class actions have already extracted settlements; the deeper question is whether state AGs pursue the lobbying conduct itself.
The takeaway
Tax software companies didn’t just sell a product — they spent decades actively preventing the cheaper, simpler alternative from existing. That’s a different kind of corporate behavior than ordinary competition, and the documented record is striking enough that “sue them” is less hyperbole than policy proposal. The IRS Direct File pilot launched in 2024 is finally cracking the dam, but the consumer harm from the years it was blocked is real and arguably actionable. At minimum, the lobbying record deserves a closer look from the same regulators who took the deceptive-advertising piece seriously.
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