- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25117460
Summary
Elon Musk claimed on X that he eliminated the IRS team responsible for the “Direct File” program, which allows Americans to file taxes online for free.
His statement came in response to a right-wing influencer criticizing the program as government overreach.
However, the Treasury Department confirms that the Direct File system remains active, offering free tax filing with customer support.
The program, available in English and Spanish, is optional, allowing taxpayers to choose between using it or filing their taxes manually.
If you don’t have capital gains taxes or deferred tax deductions, doing your taxes is really easy.
That said, this is a way to stop providing free services that private companies want to get paid to do. HR Block makes billions from people who are either too lazy or too bad at math to do simple stuff. Real accountants earn their living on complicated taxes, but millions of Americans can do a 1040 EZ, which takes about 5 minutes to fill out.
The statistics show that even though 70% of Americans are eligible to file for free with the IRS tools, only 3% actually use that tool to file for free. So I’m not sure how much business is even being lost here.
I have capital gains, capital losses carryover, foreign investment taxes withheld, bank interest, and the $50 I made on twitch I probably need to file as well.
So that means I need to do the capital gains worksheet to figure out the exact tax
Yet I still file free every year
I have all of that, too, but I just do paper taxes because I’m old and too lazy to figure out how to do anything else.