In general, ANYTHING mandated by the government should be available primarily in minimally sufficient form from the government. That goes for insurance, fees, services, etc.
And honestly it should just be TurboTax but paid for by the government like every other public-private partnership in other industries. Boom now the incentives are aligned.
Coming from a country where the government offers a decent and free tax software, I really hate being hostage to TurboTax and their dark patterns.
But honestly, the situation could be a lot worse if it were provided by the government, given the current tax code. To start with, we'd likely have the federal government + every state having different opinions on how to implement their version of the tax code, and spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars with consultants and developers (vide health.gov [1]) to implement their own flavors.
On the taxpayer side, you'd have to deal with at least two systems when doing your taxes, but potentially more if you lived in multiple states. In the best case scenario, some data would be portable between them (but likely not all, given the complexity and number of edge cases). In the worst, you'd have to enter the data manually in multiple systems, making it a nightmare to keep systems in sync. In this alternate universe, TurboTax doesn't look that bad anymore.
The only way to solve this cleanly would be through a full reform of the tax code, including a drastic standardization and simplification across federal + states. But it's unlikely to happen anytime soon, and, not surprisingly, Intuit will be always lobbying heavily against it.
Now, if government were to embrace a public-private partnership like you suggested, we can make meaningful progress faster. Create a white-label version that is offered for free to 140M taxpayers, align incentives on simplifying the tax code, and get the 3P ecosystem to develop advanced versions for more sophisticated users, businesses, etc to create extra incentives to continue improving the sw.
Mortgages, student loans, ACH and wire transfers… all substantially government provided and funded services for which the taxpayer frontend is private companies.
They shouldn't have to fill out the forms at all. For the average person it should be a literal "yes, that looks correct" online check box. That's exactly what TurboTax doesn't want.
Yes, and it's awful. I have ADHD and even with turbotax handholding me and importing last years' data and grabbing some fields automatically, it's still quite stressful.
I know several folks that have their partner do it cause they just hate it.
