Tax preparation in the United States

noted that a large group of companies and individuals make money from helping their clients negotiate the complexity of the US income tax system. These people would lose money if it were simpler. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gets most of the information needed to complete an income tax return for most citizens and could send taxpayers a draft return. Taxpayers could either accept the IRS bill as is, submit it with modifications (similar to how consumers challenge charges on a credit card they didn't make), or create a new one completely from scratch. Intuit, the developer of tax preparation software TurboTax, spent over $1.7 million to kill a program like this in California (ReadyReturn). They similarly lobbied against plans by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to create a Web portal for electronic tax filing.

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