The electronic filing sites are available to "the public" both as a webform and as an api. They're just buried and never mentioned.
The electronic filing sites are available to "the public" both as a webform and as an api. They're just buried and never mentioned.
No. They are fucking not.
The site that was killed was the IRS direct file site.
The webform is through the free file alliance, aka Turbotax and friends.
The API requires you to jump through a million hoops. Heaven help you if the reason you want to use the API is because you are behind on your taxes, because that will signal that you are not of good character.
Speaking of being behind on your taxes, you have to use paper for any but the last three years of returns anyway.
I was talking about free fillable forms, but when I did some research I learned its not actually owned by the irs. Now I'm confused.
The confusion is deliberate.
The Republicans are trying to strangle the IRS and outsource everything.
The IRS, despite its many shortcomings, consistently tries to help people get their taxes filed.
So when the Republicans were in charge, and the IRS wanted to ensure that people could just fill out their forms, but the Republicans in congress wouldn't directly support filing through the IRS, the IRS came up with a workaround. It was a workaround both for them and for Turbotax et al, because it sort of acted like a pressure relief valve.
The workaround allowed people to file their taxes for free, so the IRS was, well maybe not happy, but certainly mollified. The workaround kinda sucked for the taxpayer experience, so Turbotax was happy. And the workaround was implemented by private companies rather than the US government, so the Republicans were happy.
But you definitely have to hand your data over to a third party to use this workaround -- effectively the same evil (cough, Turbotax, cough) party you were trying to avoid in the first place.
When the democrats were in charge, they effectively torpedoed the workaround with DirectFile, so of course when the Republicans got back in charge, they had to axe that.
By the way, you mentioned an API. Free file fillable forms does not have one. The only one I know of is the one that the tax program vendors use. Yes, it is publicly documented, but to use it you have to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops.