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Direct File won't happen in 2026, IRS tells states
- cozzyd 11mo agoAs long as they don't kill FreeFillableForms...
- tinktank 11mo ago[sorry](https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...)
- teraflop 11mo agoThat's about it being closed for the 2025 tax year (because the filing deadling has passed), not about the program being shut down.
- beej71 11mo agoIf they do, I'm filing paper. Clowns.
- jabroni_salad 11mo agoYou know, the IRS is basically defunded, even not counting the whole shutdown thing. I wonder how many people need to file handwritten by mail before it becomes a significant problem
- beej71 11mo agoGut feel is if 10% of taxpayers did it the system would be pretty well DOS'd.
- cyberax 11mo agoIRS will absolutely go after regular people who just have a W-2 and maybe a couple of 1040 forms. It's easy to verify automatically. But if you're a rich person with dozens of companies and complicated trusts? Yep, nobody is going to be looking.
- soared 11mo agoThis is incorrect - the higher your income the higher percent chance you have of being audited. (Also higher for very low income <25k) https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12521#:~:text=The%20IRS%20generally%20audits%20a,and%20the%20COVID%2D19%20pandemic. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12521#:~:text=The%20I...
- cyberax 11mo agoBecause it's technically not "audit". They just send you an automated letter if they find any discrepancies: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/understanding-your-cp2000-series-notice https://www.irs.gov/individuals/understanding-your-cp2000-se... And they _will_ find them. For example, one year I forgot to add a line from one of 1040 forms to my return. I got a notification from the IRS about a year later that I have under-reported taxes. And with the defunding of the IRS, they'll severely limit the complex audits.
- archagon 11mo ago"The IRS unit that audits billionaires has lost 38% of its employees since January, new data shows" https://www.icij.org/news/2025/03/the-irs-unit-that-audits-billionaires-has-lost-38-percent-of-its-employees-since-january-new-data-shows/ https://www.icij.org/news/2025/03/the-irs-unit-that-audits-b... "After mass firings, the IRS is poised to close audits of wealthy taxpayers, agents say" https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2025/03/after-mass-firings-the-irs-is-poised-to-close-audits-of-wealthy-taxpayers-agents-say/ https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2025/03/after-mass-firings-...
- mixmastamyk 11mo agoIt started requiring phone numbers and things and I stopped using it in favor of my own spreadsheet.
- simoncion 11mo ago> It started requiring phone numbers and things... a) You're already trusting them with every piece of information in your tax return. It'd cost like five cents to use that information to discover your phone number... if they're malicious, you're already fucked. b) When? At the end of the process where you're doing stuff like attesting that you're not lied on your tax return? I don't remember them demanding a phone number up front, and I also don't remember whether or not I refused to provide a phone number at the end.
- cozzyd 11mo agoThe 1040 has a spot for phone number too...
- simoncion 11mo agoThe 1040 has a spot for both a phone number and an email address. The 1040 instructions make it completely clear that both are optional. You have the option of entering your phone number and email address in the spaces provided. There will be no effect on the processing of your return if you choose not to enter this information. Note that the IRS initiates most contacts through regular mail delivered by the United States Postal Service.
- mixmastamyk 11mo agoNo, I didn’t enter PII into it, just let it do math, downloaded, and printed. Wrote contact info by hand. (The efiling never worked for me, always complained about something esoteric.) They’re just values as far as it’s concerned. And it is dumped every October. But phone # validation up front is too much, an overstep. Like I said, I just used it for the calc ability so a spreadsheet works as well. Bit of work the first year, then tweak.
- voidhorse 11mo agoIsn't it great to have a government that serves corporations and not its people!
- hyperrail 11mo agohttps://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file <- Direct File's web app source code is public-domain and published on GitHub! Obviously the 2025 version will be out of date for the 2026 filing season, though public code means it can always be revived by anyone else. (previous HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 )
- thayne 11mo agoDoes the "Modernized eFile API" still exist?
- voxic11 11mo agoafaik yes, its what the for-profit companies like turbotax use as well. While its "modernized" in comparison to older systems it was originally created in 2004 (and you can tell because it has XML galore).
- nikodunk 11mo agoFascinating repo, thank you for sharing!
- jordanb 11mo agoMoney well spent https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trump-210621550.html?guccounter=1 https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-makers-turbotax-gave-trum...
- grandpoobah 11mo agoSuch a cheap bribe holy crap.
- cbgb2 11mo agoMaybe lobbyists should be punished by having their skin fully tattooed blue like smurfs. This way, you’d have to really be into lobbying to suffer the tattoo pain and permanent branding.
- foxglacier 11mo agoOr voters should take some civic responsibility and stop voting for corrupt politicians. Americans seem to be either unable to make their own decisions without paid advertising to direct them or they're afraid of "wasting" their vote on candidates that didn't spend enough on advertising.
- mptest 11mo agothis is just a more abstract "bootstraps" argument. schooling in this country has been systematically attacked and deconstructed, and as the burger reich's leader says, "i love the poorly educated". this is not "dum timmy votes for dum thing" it's "countless $ and effort and man hours have been devoted to making the american populace dumber" Why? look at any polling breakdown for how the educated vote vs the uneducated.
- whoooboyy 11mo agoTry telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc. Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
- charcircuit 11mo agoWith the rise of AI there is no excuse on why tax software should be so hard to make.
- estimator7292 11mo agoThe entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
- wilg 11mo ago1% of returns filed by tax software have errors, which is infinitely more than 0%
- charcircuit 11mo ago>it can NEVER produce a wrong answer As the government it should be possible to reduce the negative impact of making mistakes. >Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming. Then start simple. You don't have to cover all of tax law at the start.
- esprehn 11mo agoPeople file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.
- dlcarrier 11mo agoNo tax software or expert will never produce a wrong answer, because too many questions have no guaranteed right answer, due to inconsistent interpretatios within the IRS. Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.
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- sublinear 11mo agoWhat was wrong with using Free File Fillable Forms in the first place? It's the real deal forms just online and with nothing obscured or sugar coated. I use it every year, and while I wouldn't exactly say I enjoy doing my taxes, I do enjoy being fully aware what I'm filing and not being forced to do it on paper just because others have obtuse opinions or are lazy.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo agoWhy does anyone want a better option when a worse option is available…
- daemonologist 11mo agoI've used the fillable forms before; the problem is that to fill them out with confidence - to even know with confidence which ones you should be filling out - requires more knowledge of tax law than the average person can reasonably be expected to possess. Now, the various self-filing software products also feel a lot like guessing, but at least they walk you through which guesses are mostly likely to be correct and can catch the most egregious errors.
- dlcarrier 11mo agoThe form that you fill out has a very tearse description of the field, but the actual instructions are in a separate document. For example, form 1040 is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf and the instructions document is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf The instructions make it very clear when a field in the form should be used and what should go in it.
- _vertigo 11mo agoYes, obviously, everyone knows that. When all you have to file is a 1040, reading one of the instructions documents is fine. When you have to use several forms it start to add up.
- girl2 11mo agoThis wont bode well.........
- polski-g 11mo agoTurbo tax is free for federal filers with no business income, same thing as this service. Except now no taxpayer dollars were spent on maintaining this. This would have been useful if it also did state taxes, which turbo tax is not free for.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tombert 11mo agoWasn't part of the impetus for the free file program because TurboTax actively hid the free filing options? I am pretty sure that state filing would have happened in the future if the Trump admin hadn't killed it; you have to start somewhere, federal is as good a place as any. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/ftc-sues-intuit-its-deceptive-turbotax-free-filing-campaign https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/... https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hides-its-free-file-page-from-search-engines https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...
- loco5niner 11mo agoThey were rolling out matching services state by state. Something like 12 last year. And Turbo tax is NOT "free for federal filers with no business income". Just look at the Costco Turbotax stands every year.
- beej71 11mo agoThe federal government doesn't do state taxes. Luckily for me, my state rolled out its equivalent of Direct File a couple years ago, and it's fantastic. Just like Direct File was.
- dmoy 11mo agoNo business income (including no Uber/doordash/etc due to schedule SE?), no dividends over $1500, no itemized deductions, no capital gains, no nanny (like you hiring a nanny), no unemployment income, no gambling winnings, no alimony, etc etc
- uvaursi 11mo agoDirect File won’t happen in 2026, Intuit tells IRS
- dh2022 11mo agoThis is the correct headline
- leotravis10 11mo agoVery related discussion from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267
- delfugal 11mo ago[flagged]
- terminalshort 11mo agoYeah, it's incredibly dumb to pay Turbo Tax when you could just fill in the forms yourself for free. But that has nothing to do with Direct File.
- chneu 11mo agoNot only are Americans dumb, they're incredibly ego driven and stubborn. That means Americans always think they're right. Everyone else is doing it wrong. You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else. I'm American. If you don't buy into the insane status-symbol ego culture, it's daily insanity of excess consumption and selfishness. The worst part is no one wants to hear this. There's a crazy culture of "Saying anything is mean". We shove our heads in the dirt all the time.
- AnotherGoodName 11mo agoMeanwhile in pretty much all other nations you go online to the free website, see your employer contributions already filled in and acknowledge they are correct for the year, add any extra income, check boxes for relevant deductions and you’re done.
- foxglacier 11mo agoDoesn't America have uniquely complicated tax that requires you to keep all your receipts to claim all sorts of confusing deductions? How can the IRS know what you spent your income on if you don't tell them? I've had the misfortune of having to fill in a W8-BEN-E form [1] and the first time, I just gave up and refused to work with the client because it was too complicated. The 2nd time, I got an LLM to tell me how to fill it in. Just look at the dense jargon - nonparticipating FFI, deemed-compliant FFI, Restricted distributor, International organiztion (hint, that's the wrong answer), Excepted territory NFFE, Passive NFFE, Direct reporting NFFE. There are 32 of them! What the hell is all that? Well 99% of cases are just one of those buried among the rest but you wouldn't know which without some advice. [1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8bene.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8bene.pdf
- ptmcc 11mo agoThe majority of Americans are W2 wage earners that take the standard deduction.
- thayne 11mo agoFor most people, those deductions are less than the "standard" deduction you can take instead. For most of the people who do itemized deductions, it's mostly just your mortgage payment and state taxes, which the IRS already knows about, and maybe charitable donations. And even if you do have a lot of things to report, why not just report those things directly and let the IRS calculate your taxes, rather than you having to do it, fill out a complicated form, then the IRS does the calculation anyways to make sure you did it right?
- tietjens 11mo agoFor a truly uniquely complicated tax system please move to Germany.
- leotravis10 11mo agoDirect File won’t happen in 2026, Intuit TurboTax tells states[1] There, fixed that for you. [1] Very related discussion six months ago posted by me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724267
- sydbarrett74 11mo agoWhy innovate when you can be a perpetual rentier?
- insane_dreamer 11mo agoThe Trump Administration is hell bent on doing everything it can to benefit large corporations at the expense of the American people. Cash App offers free Fed and State filing and it's quite good (used it last year for the first time). Not many people know about it though.
- chneu 11mo agoFreeTaxUSA
- catapart 11mo agoIf anyone's interested, the CashApp tax prep section (kind of its own app, but its contained within the CashApp app) is a feature they have purchased from CreditKarma when CreditKarma got bought out by Intuit (turbotax pricks). So I had filed taxes with CreditKarma one year, and then the next year the CreditKarma tax service had no information about my previous filing. So I tried out the CashApp app, since I was going to have to fill out all the info anyway, and it actually did have my information from the previous year and I only had to change the new information, rather than re-enter all of my address and employer info, etc. So I also recommend the CashApp app - it's free for basic taxes, it's not helping turbotax and their relentless lobbying, and it's really convenient if you already use CashApp. Of course, all of this is subject to change any specific year. Big companies gonna big company, after all.
- insane_dreamer 11mo ago> it's free for basic taxes, Not just the basics. I found that it could do everything I needed including Schedules C, D and E. IIRC, its limitations are if you're earning in multiple states, or are earning foreign income.
- catapart 11mo agoOh, cool! I never used it past simple single-person filing, so it's good to know that it's still solid for more complicated situations.
- ksimukka 11mo agoOk, fine, I’ll use TurboTax. I live and work abroad and Turbotax requires a US billing address to pay the fee of using Turbotax. :facepalm All the other self-service options do not work and I’m not sure if the risk is worth it to file it myself. To my fellow Expats, what are you doing?
- thayne 11mo agoIf your tax situation isn't too complicated, it actually isn't too hard to fill out the forms yourself[1]. But if you are living abroad, unfortunately your tax situation probably isn't that simple. [1]: Although I find it incredibly frustrating the lengths they go to to avoid negative numbers on the forms.
- chneu 11mo agoDoes FreeTaxUSA work for you?
- LadyCailin 11mo agoI pay $500 a year for an accountant to do my taxes for me. And then tell me I owe nothing. Support the Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad group, they’re working on fixing this.
- ta988 11mo agoIf your accountant doesn't give you the forms AND worksheets, change accountant.
- LadyCailin 11mo agoThey do. The problem isn’t understanding the numbers, they gave me last year, it’s making sure I am doing things correctly for both my US taxes and Norwegian taxes, including following the specifics of the US/Norway tax treaty.
- hobs 11mo agoTurboTax is one of the products of Intuit, the company that's fucking us all over with this - its not fine, stop being ok with it.
- MinimalAction 11mo agoI just looked up https://directfile.irs.gov/ https://directfile.irs.gov/. While it says closed, the testimonies on this site speak to how easy the filing was. Almost feels like it is intentional to keep rest of the site as is with a small banner on top announcing the closure, as a way to hint at this stupid move by the administration.
- MinimalAction 11mo agoUpdate (11:30 ET, Nov 5): This link redirects to a service outage -- https://www.irs.gov/static/maintenance/RUP_Outage.html https://www.irs.gov/static/maintenance/RUP_Outage.html.
- MinimalAction 10mo agoUpdate 2: The site is back without testimonials.
- miki123211 11mo agoWhy won't a non-profit pick up the open-source code they released and modify it for 2026? Everybody seems to care about this issue so much, so this feels like an extremely high-impact thing to do.
- sgerenser 11mo agoThere are already ways to file your taxes for free or very cheap, e.g. https://www.freetaxusa.com https://www.freetaxusa.com. It would be hard for anyone to compete with a free or very cheap competitor, even as a nonprofit.
- zbentley 11mo agoYes, but Direct File moved us closer to a future where the government could pre-fill data for (and/or potentially just send a bill to) tax filers. Even if other free tax filing software exists, the loss of Direct File is painful because it was advancing the precedent of first party tax software.
- sgerenser 11mo agoThat’s valid, but my comment was about why a (non-governmental) third party or charity wouldn’t want to take the open source Direct File software and run with it. If they aren’t actually the government running it, it completely loses its primary advantage.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- sharts 11mo agoJust because an org is non-profit doesn't mean that it isn't out for itself.
- agentbellnorm 11mo agoPaying a private company so you can pay the government. You guys need to raise your expectations.
- kotaKat 11mo agoAs one of those ~300,000 that filed with Direct File these last two years I’m sad and disgusted. Guess I get screwed so some asshole at Intuit can make an extra twenty bucks.
- impish9208 11mo agoI’m currently making my way through a video series on Ancient Rome. Apparently, there were times when Rome contracted out the right to collect taxes from certain regions. So businessmen would bid on this, and the winner then had a limited time when they could go out and collect the taxes. If they managed to collect more than what they paid for the bid, that was their profit. It’s easy to see how this was heavily abused, and these “publicans” were hated by the people. They’re even referenced in the Bible; “sinners and publicans”. How long before the IRS considers this arrangement?
- arealaccount 11mo agoThe article touts the ~300k users of direct file as a big number, and the “just 3% of eligible tax payers” used free file as a small number. Wouldn’t the 3% number come out yo millions of people?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- sgerenser 11mo agoDirect File did have a lot of limitations, so I assume when they say “eligible taxpayers” that’s the total number of people that could have used Direct File, which is much less than 100% of taxpayers. Even then, I’d assume more than 10 million people in the U.S. have very simple tax returns.
- kylecazar 11mo agoYes, and also, there's a difference between Free File and Direct File, and the article kind of switches between referring to the two. Free file: government partners with private companies to offer free tax returns through their software for low income people. It's suspected a lot of people don't know about it, and just use the paid versions of filing software because you have to start the process on IRS.gov and dark patterns were employed by the snakes at Intuit et al. Hence "just 3%". Been around for decades. Direct file: New program (since 2024) for eligible people to file directly for free with the IRS, no third party tax software middleman. Only half the states are eligible, income criteria, simple taxes only. 300,000 touted as a bigger number because it's a very new program.
- nikodunk 11mo agohttps://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/ https://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/
- ryandvm 11mo agoCitizens United. The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
- superxpro12 11mo agoYeah this needs to be the left wing "abortion" fight. Something we need to fight for 50 years before its finally overturned. Dont stop talking about it.
- mindslight 11mo agoThe problem is that Citizens United directly derives from a few straightforward concepts that are much more entrenched. The summary that "corporations are people" is kind of a misframing that makes you think the decision could have easily gone the other way, but that refrain is actually disempowering because there isn't much that could be changed at this level of abstraction. This is a better exploration of what needs to happen: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-corporate-power-reset-that-makes-citizens-united-irrelevant/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-corporate-power... ( I found this article via HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45317731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45317731 )
- nerdponx 10mo agoI'm nothing close to a scholar on the topic, but that CAP article does not at all make it sound like Citizens United was inevitable. It does make it clear that the ruling builds on other old and bad rulings, but it's still quite a leap.
- mindslight 10mo agoIt made it to the Supreme Council, so obviously there were good arguments on both sides and it could have been decided the other way. But fundamentally the rationalization of how it was decided is rooted in this deep seated assertion that people working for companies are doing so personally-voluntarily, ultimately stemming from the US's broken legal conception of rights in terms of a "negative" framing. While it would be great to reframe individual liberties in a positive sense so conflicts could be weighed equitably, I don't see that happening any time soon. Hence, focusing on regulating the government-created liability-limiting legal structures that encourage such scale in the first place.