Americans spend an estimated 1.7 billion hours and $31 billion every year doing their taxes. The average person spends about $270 and 13 hours filing a return. None of that is necessary. Most other rich countries don't make their citizens do this. The IRS already has most of the data on most W-2 households. They could send you a pre-filled return, you could check it, you could be done in five minutes. That system exists in 36 countries. It does not exist here, and the reason it does not exist here is not technical or philosophical. It is lobbying.
Who Pays to Keep Taxes Hard
The popular villain is Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. They earned the spotlight. But the lobby is broader than one company, and getting fixated on TurboTax misses the structure. Three groups benefit from a complicated tax code, and they all spend money to keep it that way.
The tax prep industry. Intuit, H&R Block, and the smaller players. Intuit and H&R Block alone have spent more than $103 million on federal lobbying since 2003, with a record $7.1 million combined in 2025 alone, the year IRS Direct File was killed. Their business model only works if filing is hard enough that you'll pay to outsource it.
Anti-tax political activists. Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform have fought return-free filing for two decades. The argument is ideological. If filing is painless, they fear taxpayers will care less about how much they pay. The strategy is to keep the friction as a constant reminder.
Industry-specific carveout lobbies. Realtors who lobby to protect the mortgage interest deduction. Charities that lobby to keep itemized charitable deductions. Insurance companies that lobby for the health savings account complexity. Every one of those carveouts adds a form, a worksheet, and a reason to hire a preparer. The tax code is roughly 7,000 pages long. Almost every page is there because someone fought to put it there.
Some accountants and the AICPA. Not every CPA, but the largest professional bodies have historically opposed simplification that would shrink their billable work. They tend to phrase it as concerns about taxpayer accuracy and IRS overreach. The financial interest is the same.
How They Win
The playbook is well-documented. ProPublica obtained internal Intuit strategy decks and laid it out in a series running back to 2013. The tactics generalize across the lobby:
- Fund think tanks and minority-affiliated groups to publish op-eds opposing simplification, framed as protecting "the most vulnerable." In 2023, op-eds parroting Intuit talking points appeared in at least 20 newspapers.
- Push appropriations riders that bar the IRS from spending money on free filing tools. This has nearly become law multiple times.
- Negotiate "Free File" partnership programs that look like solutions but are designed to fail. The Free File Alliance reached 5.1 million users at peak in 2005, then fell as companies steered eligible filers into paid products.
- Hire former IRS officials and tax-writing committee staffers. The revolving door is the connective tissue.
It works. Direct File, the IRS's own free filing tool, served 140,000 taxpayers in 2024 with a 90%+ satisfaction rate. It expanded to 24 states in 2025. It was killed in 2026.
What Individuals Can Actually Do
"Write your representative" is on every list and changes nothing on its own. The lobby outspends the average constituent letter by a factor of a million. Real progress requires routing around the system as well as advocating to fix it. Here are practical things you can do this week.
1. Use VITA if you qualify, even if you don't think you need to.
The IRS-funded Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program prepares federal and state returns for free if you make under $67,000. Trained volunteers do the work. The returns are accurate and electronically filed. Every return prepared through VITA is a return that wasn't paid for. Volume here directly undercuts the industry's argument that low-income Americans need their software. If you qualify, use it. If you have time, become a volunteer. It takes a 4-hour course.
2. Use the IRS Free File Fillable Forms directly.
This is the IRS's own no-frills filing system. Anyone can use it regardless of income. It's not user-friendly, but it's free, and it bypasses the tax prep industry entirely. Most people don't even know it exists, which is exactly the outcome the lobby wanted.
3. Use AI as a research tool, not a filer.
This is the nuance most people miss. Standalone large language models compute full tax returns correctly only 23% to 42% of the time. The reasons are real: hallucinated line numbers, wrong tax tables, cascading errors on interconnected forms. If you have ChatGPT prepare your return end-to-end, you will have a bad time.
But AI is great at something else: explaining what a form does, what a deduction means, whether you're eligible for a credit, and what numbers from your W-2 go where. Used as a tutor instead of a filer, it eliminates the moat that tax prep companies depend on. The whole reason TurboTax can charge $89 is that the average person doesn't understand what Schedule 1 is. Spend 15 minutes asking an AI model to walk you through your specific forms. Then file the return yourself in Free Fillable Forms. The first year is hard. Every year after takes 30 minutes.
4. File on paper if you have a simple return.
Counterintuitive, but real. A simple W-2 return on paper takes about an hour the first time and costs the price of a stamp. The forms are downloadable as PDFs. The tax prep industry's leverage is the assumption that paper is impossibly hard. For most filers, it isn't.
5. Move money to your state's filing tool.
Several states, including California's CalFile and New York's free file program, offer their own state filing tools. They're typically faster, simpler, and not full of upsells. Use them instead of the state add-on inside TurboTax, which is where the company makes a lot of its money.
6. Fund the alternative.
Code for America built FileYourStateTaxes, the companion to IRS Direct File. They take donations. The Economic Security Project advocates for free filing. The lobby is well-funded because it has a financial reason to be. The countervailing force is funded by individuals, which means individuals giving even small amounts move the needle. $50 to a 501(c)(3) that's actually building free filing tools is more leverage per dollar than almost any other policy donation you can make.
7. When you do hire a preparer, hire small.
If you have a complicated return that genuinely needs help, hire a local CPA or enrolled agent rather than a national chain. The fees are often comparable, the work is usually better, and the dollar doesn't go into the lobbying budget that's preventing simpler filing for everyone else.
8. Talk about it like it's a scandal.
One of the things the lobby has won is making this feel boring. Filing season comes around, everyone complains for 90 days, and then we forget. The fact that 30 million Americans had a free, government-built, 90%-rated filing tool taken away from them by lobbyists in 2026 should be a rolling story, not a Tax Day footnote. Treat it that way in conversations. Send the Fortune piece to people. The political ceiling on tax reform is low because the political floor is "nobody is paying attention."
9. Yes, also write your representative.
Last because it's the weakest of these on its own. But layered onto the other steps, it matters. The specific ask should be: "Restore IRS Direct File and expand it to all 50 states. Vote against any appropriations rider that prevents the IRS from offering free filing." That's a concrete request. "Make taxes simpler" is not.
Why This One Is Worth the Effort
Most policy fights are zero-sum or contested on the merits. Tax simplification is neither. The benefits are real and large. The opposition is narrowly held by a few companies and ideological groups. The fix already exists in working form in 36 other countries. The technology is solved. We are choosing to keep it hard because a small lobby keeps winning a fight that almost nobody else cares about loudly enough.
The good news is that the asymmetry runs both ways. A lobby that depends on inattention and inertia is fragile against organized attention and small changes in individual behavior. Every household that learns to file their own return, uses VITA, gives $20 to Code for America, and tells five friends about Direct File chips at the moat. The fight isn't hopeless. It's just been quiet.