Tax Sense

The IRS already has all the information that the vast majority of US taxpayers must use to file their taxes. Why can’t we have the IRS figure out our taxes and stop this charade that benefits no one except tax preparation firms? Unfortunately, the anti-tax contingent’s desire to force Americans to spend time and money on tax preparation dovetails with the tax preparation industry’s desire to collect billions of dollars in fees. Tax preparation companies lobby Congress to keep tax preparation costly and complicated. Indeed, Intuit, maker of TurboTax, the tax preparation software, has listed government tax preparation as a threat to its business model. In other words, it seems the tax preparation industry has kept the system complicated because the potential cost to it in terms of lost revenue is vast. I beg you to apply common sense to this issue. Why should the profits of private tax preparation firms be so sacrosanct and of higher priority than the US Treasury and millions of taxpayers? Surely the lobbyists should not have such overriding importance and influence! You can demonstrate that our Congress is not impotent in the face of special interests.