Every spring, more than 100 million Americans pay a private company to tell them what they already owe to the government. In most developed countries, this would be considered absurd. The tax authority already has your wage data, your interest income, and your basic deductions. It mails you a pre-filled return, you check it, and you sign. The reason this doesn’t happen in the United States is not that it can’t. It’s that Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has spent 25 years and tens of millions of dollars making sure it doesn’t.
The lobbying record is on paper
According to public lobbying disclosures and reporting by ProPublica, Intuit has spent over $40 million lobbying Congress since 1999, with tax-filing simplification as a recurring target. The IRS has tried multiple times to launch a free, government-run filing tool, and each time the private “Free File Alliance,” coordinated with industry, has either undermined or rerouted those efforts. Internal Intuit documents revealed in 2019 show employees describing “free” search-result tactics designed to keep eligible filers away from the actual free option, steering them to paid products. The FTC eventually banned Intuit’s “free” advertising in 2024 as deceptive. None of this is alleged. It is settled in regulatory record.
How other countries handle the same problem
Estonia takes about five minutes to file taxes online, with the form pre-filled by the government. Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Japan, and the Netherlands have similar systems for the majority of taxpayers with simple wage income. The IRS has the same data US employers are already required to send: your W-2s, 1099s, mortgage interest, and brokerage statements. It could mail you a draft return tomorrow. Republicans and Democrats have both proposed return-free filing at various points, and it has died at the lobbyist’s desk every time. The American filing experience is not a natural feature of complex tax law. It is a deliberate consumer product, sold to you by the company most invested in keeping it that way.
The real cost of all this
Americans spend an estimated 1.7 billion hours and over $30 billion every year on tax compliance, according to IRS Taxpayer Advocate reports. Most of that money flows to Intuit, H&R Block, and the broader tax-prep industry. Beyond the dollars, there is a quieter cost: millions of low-income filers eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit never claim it, partly because the filing process is too daunting. The IRS Direct File pilot in 2024 finally tested a free government option in a handful of states. It worked, and it was expanded for 2025. Industry resistance was immediate and well funded. Whether it survives the next administration is genuinely uncertain.
The takeaway
You are not bad at taxes. The system is engineered to be difficult enough to require a paid intermediary, and that engineering is the product Intuit sells. Every year you use TurboTax, you are paying the toll on a road the company helped keep paved badly on purpose. If Direct File is available in your state, try it. If it is not, ask your representative why. The money saved would belong to taxpayers, which is exactly the problem.
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