alt Hacker NewsUS IRS free online tax filing open source repo (2025)
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I wanted to electronically file my own taxes last year instead of paying turbotax or an actual accountant.
While my situation isn't particularly complex (but complex enough that I did need help from an accountant the first times), none of the free filing services online (IRS FreeFile included) offered the more complex forms I need.
"Not a problem!" I thought. Except, even if I could download the forms from the IRS and do all the work myself, I could not for the life of me find a way to electronically submit (and had to hire my accountant again).
Is it possible in the US to electronically file your own taxes?
When I read these and the related stories I am thankful I live in a country where you don't even need to file taxes. Virtually all income is reported to the tax authorities, so they will calculate a tax rate for you and you rarely need to make adjustments if your income is stable and regular.
Only when I need to make some surprise deductions (e.g. purchasing work-related literature, deductible by law here up to some sum) or for some reason the payer of income is not reported to the tax authorities. Or when the income falls short of what was projected for that year (e.g. unpaid leave, getting fired, changing to jobs to a lower salary (it happens) etc.), or there is a surprise bonus and so on. Normally I do not need to anything.
I cannot see how Turbotax survives the oncoming AI Coding freight train. All the information is out there.
This is great that this is out there. I've been working on making an agent based experience that helps you put together your whole return or make an estimated return based on future assumptions and solving for the federal tax code has been a very token expensive operation!
https://github.com/captaincole/OpenReturn - Still in Beta
I'm going through their engine as well and validating mine. My engine is built to include the CA tax code also.
The biggest reason that turbo tax and the other companies survive though is that in order to allow efile you have to be a registered agent and that process is crazy expensive and difficult.
In Brazil, we can send our "IRS" (IRPF) via internet since 1995 It used to have a .jar app that runs on windows/Linux/mac, but now we have android/iOS app, and also online via browser too.
The .gov url in that repo doesn't work. That's kind of suspicious
As an EU person who lived in US for quite some years, I always found it funny when my fellow Americans were laughing at European technological backwardness, only to be reminded about their admin services being basically still from the 90s/00s.
Who is making an agent-forward turbotax competitor? Take my money already. Good god, the previous generation of tools suck.
Of course even with software the government can't help itself but produce a degenerate amount of documentation that you have to parse through before doing anything. I really hope AI helps out in this regard, i.e. they should train their own models or fine tune one to produce correct answers almost always. Then it's a matter of following the AI instructions. Of course that's probably too good and efficient for the US government.
The PRs are mildly entertaining, as are all the ones they've closed. Doesn't seem to be run by someone who knows what they're doing?
I expect IRS DirectFile to return and made permanent with recent Congressional regime change.
Ok but is the IRS API endpoint that gets the filings in json/xml/etc still open and "free to use"?
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I was thinking of making an open source engine for tax rules that could take all your financial documents locally and produce a tax filing with your own agent. Something like direct file but done for you and open source so you don't need to give all your data to someone else.
I'm curious why this hasn't been done before.