It was a pilot and was open to a small subset of taxpayers. It was intentionally not benefiting from economy of scale to incrementally deliver value rather than probably badly trying to hit every use case the first go around.
The cost per filing criticism is generally posited in bad faith, by people who don’t understand incremental software delivery, or both
Ok but why even make it? 40$ per taxpayer filing vs the government doing it with our taxes.
I doubt it's going to beat private industry's price.
It's not a bad faith argument though. If it cost the gov 40$ or it cost a tax payer 40$ what's the difference?
Your "226" includes the one-time initial development costs. You're comparing $40/yr in perpetuity versus something like $220 once, $6/yr after that - and I suspect the actual costs of running the system are far lower.
If you read further you'll see that in 2025 they spent $40 million additional and served 300000 people - so $130/user?
The metrics for this project don't sell it - the politics do. You'll either love it or hate it.
Again, assuming the government can outcompete on price vs private industry.
It's a real point but I don't know an example of that happening elsewhere. The US government outcompeting private industry is exactly why communism doesn't work
You’ve already received the answer to this. The platform was already built. There’s every reason to think it would require only very small operating costs from now on, whereas a company has every reason to maintain profit margins with a fixed price.
The government outcompetes the private sector in almost everything it gets into. Healthcare, mail delivery, fire relief, and far more. The private sector is all about slashing quality and raising prices.
It’s not communism. It’s literally how most of the rest of the developed world file their taxes.
Given taxes are a government system, and one that’s complicated enough that you shouldn’t expect the average tax payer to need to understand it nor have the money to afford an accountant, it’s actually insane to argue that this should be operated in the private space.
This is exactly the kind of thing the government should operate in capitalist societies.
Most of the developed world aint doin so hot
Those who fund their government branches are generally doing better than those who are not. America being the prime recent example of this.
And those who’s government places policies which benefit their voters generally have a better quality of life than those who accept lobbying, and corruption dictate government policies.
Why should a malicious third party have our financial records? Why would a third party know filing reqs better than the IRS? They already know the data anyway. Other countries have done this for decades already, cheaply.
Is this fixed cost per filling, or does it include cost of developing the system? I somehow doubt that for all Americans to fill taxes it would cost 6.5b$ (163x40)
I think its like building a bridge analogy, when it costs you to use ferry only 0.01% of price of the bridge. But when its built its essentially free and ferry goes out of business.
Yes that I'd like to hear. It's possible it would be cheaper over time if we assume tax filling is artificially held at a higher price by companies but competition says that shouldn't be true.
But also, the "bridge" is built? There are tons of companies already doing this.
They made it to start somewhere. How to start without starting? Just like when a startup has crappy unit-economics, then refines and scales to better.
Also, where can I get tax software for $40? Even freetaxusa isn't free.