Elizabeth Zach was on C-Span's Washington Journal -- watch the interview here. She was on because of her article Why the Government Makes Filing Your Taxes Intentionally Difficult, and she made some interesting remarks about who is to blame.
Inthesetimes.com is a progressive online news outlet, and the article contain the obligatory stories of sympathetic people with tax problems. But eventually she addresses the subject of tax return preparation, including the idea that the IRS could prepare tax returns. However, companies that make money from that process have blocked efforts to make the preparation of a tax return more user friendly. From the article:
The tax lobby is spearheaded by the software giant Intuit, maker of the tax-filing program TurboTax. Intuit alone has spent more than $20 million since 2009 in federal lobbying to maintain the status quo. H&R Block has spent $3.4 million lobbying the current Congress and maintains a permanent governmental relations staff. An analysis by University of California at Davis law professor Dennis J. Ventry Jr. found that, in the five years in which California was testing ReadyReturn, Intuit spent more than $3 million on lobbying and political campaigns, including $1 million campaigning for a state controller candidate who opposed ReadyReturn.
Intuit, H&R Block and other for-profit tax preparation companies, such as Liberty Tax, are members of a consortium called the Free File Alliance, which seeks to preempt any IRS free online tax preparation programs with their own services for low-income taxpayers. ...
President Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on a filing system called “The Simple Return.” In one speech Obama stated, “There is no reason the IRS can’t send Americans pre-filled tax forms to verify.” Two years prior, his senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, had authored “The ‘Simple Return’: Reducing America’s Tax Burden Through Return-Free Filing,” which echoed Bankman’s ReadyReturn plans, to make tax filing simpler by having the IRS use all of the information they already have to create a prepared return the taxpayer can approve or reject.
However, even with Goolsbee in his cabinet, Obama never passed any federal simple return legislation. Meanwhile, in 2008, Intuit almost doubled its lobbying budget and since then has spent between $2 million and $3 million per year lobbying Congress. To date, Intuit has lobbied against almost every tax-return simplification bill proposed.
Ms. Zach also says that conservative anti-tax advocates like the difficulty of tax return preparation because it helps make tax payers hate taxes. Maybe. President Trump and then Speaker Ryan put on a show about how they would make tax form preparation simple. But that didn't happen. The simplification of the tax code and preparation of tax forms should be a bipartisan goal, but apparently the anti-simplification forces are too powerful.
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11:50 AM 4/6/2019
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