The Trump administration unveiled a “postcard-sized” tax form late last month that will supposedly make it easier for Americans to do their own taxes. The move was nothing more than a publicity stunt—as a number of commentators noted, the administration achieved its postcard-sized ambitions only by requiring millions of Americans to submit supplementary worksheets that actually complicate the task of tax preparation.

The real action on tax filing right now is happening on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where Congress is working hard to ensure that doing your taxes remains a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. The House of Representatives has passed two bills in recent weeks that seek to stop the IRS from simplifying the tax-filing process. One is pending in the Senate Finance Committee. The other cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee in late June, with a floor vote likely this summer.

At issue are two innovations that, if adopted by the IRS, would radically reduce the time and expense incurred in filing federal income tax returns. The first is free online tax preparation paired with electronic filing: The IRS could offer an easy-to-use product that assists you in completing your tax return, then allows you to submit your return online—all at a price of $0. A second and even more pioneering possibility is “pre-population”: the IRS could allow you to begin the filing process with an already filled-out return rather than making you enter each item of information from scratch.

Other countries adopted similar innovations long ago. In European nations with pre-populated returns, taxpayers routinely report that it takes 15 minutes or less to comply with their annual filing obligations. In the United States, by contrast, the average taxpayer spends eight hours—and $110—filing personal income taxes each year. Free online tax preparation and pre-populated returns would go a long way toward bringing our individual income tax system up to speed (literally). The bills before the Senate would block the IRS from implementing either reform.

Why would lawmakers want to stop the IRS from simplifying tax filing? Here’s a clue: H&R Block has spent $3.4 million lobbying the current Congress, and Intuit—the maker of TurboTax—has pitched in an additional $3.1 million. They and their employees also have contributed more than $500,000 this cycle to congressional candidates, political action committees, and parties.

And tax politics make strange bedfellows. Fighting alongside H&R Block and Intuit are anti-tax activist groups like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. H&R Block and Intuit love taxes—that’s how they make their money. Grover Norquist wants to cut taxes wherever possible. But on this issue, their interests are aligned. H&R Block and Intuit want to make it difficult for you to file on your own. The anti-tax activists think that if taxpaying is too easy, voters will be less likely to resist the federal government’s growth. Both want to make it as painful as possible for you to do your taxes yourself.

Now, Congress is poised to help them out—both by barring the IRS from offering its own free online tax preparation tool and by withholding funding for IRS efforts to introduce pre-populated returns.

Start with free online tax preparation. California already offers a tool, CalFile, which allows residents to prepare and file state income taxes online at no cost. So why doesn’t the IRS do the same?

Well, it tried. In the early 2000s, the IRS entered into a partnership with a consortium of for-profit tax preparation companies called the Free File Alliance, which includes H&R Block and Intuit. Those companies promised to provide free online tax preparation tools to taxpayers of low to middle income.

And they did—sort of. Intuit now offers a TurboTax “Freedom Edition” to taxpayers with annual incomes of $33,000 or less, as well as all taxpayers who qualify for the earned income tax credit. But it doesn’t link to that product from its home page, instead directing taxpayers to a similarly named “Free Edition” that charges taxpayers for filing state tax returns. H&R Block’s “Free File” product excludes most taxpayers older than age 50. Other companies offer free tools for preparation and filing with a range of age, income and geographic limitations. The result is that the Free File Alliance can advertise that it offers free tools to nearly 100 million Americans who have incomes of up to $66,000, but only about 3 percent of that group successfully navigate the web of restrictions and ultimately file through these mechanisms.

Taxpayers who find a free filing option one year often fail to do so the next. In 2015, for example, 56 percent of taxpayers who used Free File the previous year and who were eligible for Free File again instead used a non-Free File option. In some cases, they were simply duped. A reportedly common practice among tax preparation companies is to send e-mails to individuals who previously used the company’s Free File product, saying that the company has the individual’s tax information on file and asking the individual to use the company’s software again. Then it directs the individual to a non-Free File version of the company’s software.

Not only does Free File fail to fulfill its potential, but it acts as a serious obstacle to meaningful reform. In 2005, the IRS entered into the first of a series of binding agreements, known as memorandums of understanding, in which it has pledged not to offer its own free tax preparation tool. The latest version also prohibits the IRS from helping taxpayers even linking to the websites of state-funded online tax preparation tools such as CalFile.

Currently, the IRS has the right to terminate the Free File arrangement with 12 months’ notice and then offer its own free online tax preparation tool. The first of the two bills passed by the House this year would close off that option and prevent the IRS from exercising that right. It provides that the IRS “shall continue to operate” the Free File program subject to all “subsequent agreements” between the IRS and the tax preparation companies. In other words, it enshrines the unsatisfactory status quo into federal law.

Worse yet, the House bill accomplishes this result in a remarkably deceptive manner. The bill is titled the “Taxpayer First Act,” though the provision codifying Free File puts tax-preparation companies first and taxpayers last. And beyond the title, the text of the statute is amazingly sly. To understand the bill’s impact on the IRS’ ability to offer its own free tax preparation tool and to support state-funded options, the user would need to refer to pages 5 and 15 of the latest 24-page memorandum of understanding between the IRS and the tax preparation companies. When legislation hides the ball like that, you know that something is awry.

So far, industry lobbyists have succeeded in advancing their anti-taxpayer agenda without attracting much notice. The Taxpayer First Act passed the House in April without a single dissenting vote. The provision that locked the flawed Free File arrangement in place was bundled with a number of other measures to modernize the IRS and reform the enforcement process, and some House members who voted for the bill may have done so because they supported the other elements of the legislation and did not fully appreciate its effect on free tax preparation tools. But even after an exposé by the nonprofit investigative organization ProPublica and the digital news site Quartz last month shed light on the bill’s buried provisions, only one lawmaker—Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—publicly denounced the bid to block the IRS from offering its own free product.

Meanwhile, the Senate is on the verge of approving a separate measure that would also stand in the way of a second innovation: “pre-populated” returns. With a pre-populated return, the tax agency fills in tax forms for individuals—since it already knows your salary income, withholding, dividends and so forth—and calculates any taxes owed or refund due. If a taxpayer agrees with the tax agency’s calculation, she can submit the pre-populated form electronically as a final return. If the tax agency has missed an item, the taxpayer can update her return accordingly before filing. And since such a program would be optional, a taxpayer could simply throw the pre-populated return in the trash and do her own taxes, or opt to pay her accountant or lawyer to prepare the return instead.

Pre-populated returns build on the fact that tax filing today is much like grade-school math: the teacher already knows the answer; he just wants to see you show your work. The IRS already knows from the W-2 filed by your employer how much you make in wages, and it already knows from forms filed by your financial service providers how much you earn in interest, dividends and capital gains—as well as how much you contribute to your individual retirement account. For tens of millions of taxpayers who claim the standard deduction and have no other income sources or writeoffs, that information is all they need to calculate their taxes accurately.

More than 20 other countries have successfully implemented pre-populated return systems for at least a portion of their taxpayers. California did, too—its “ReadyReturn” pilot program, launched in 2005, allowed taxpayers to file pre-populated state tax returns. The program was enormously popular: Of the 88,000 Californians who used it in 2012, 98 percent said they would do so again.

ReadyReturn’s statewide success should have spurred the IRS to pursue a pre-populated return program at the national level. But as the IRS began to explore technological innovations that would ease the tax filing process, the tax preparation industry’s lobbying efforts kicked into high gear.

Free File Alliance members argued that pre-populated returns would create a “conflict of interest” because the tax agency would have an incentive to tell people to pay more than they actually owe. California’s experience with ReadyReturn casts doubt on this claim: Participants in the pilot study reported essentially the same adjusted gross income when they completed their state taxes through ReadyReturn as when they filled out their federal tax returns the old-fashioned way. (Adjusted gross income calculated via ReadyReturn was, on average, actually $3 less, so the state certainly wasn’t squeezing people for more money.) And the optional nature of pre-populated returns means that taxpayers never need to pay more than they actually owe. There is, moreover, a deep irony in Free File Alliance members making this unsubstantiated “conflict of interest” claim: Free File itself is a massive conflict of interest, with tax software companies operating a program whose failure they have every incentive to ensure.

Sadly, the tax preparation companies have so far prevailed. Since 2015, the tax preparation industry has persuaded lawmakers to include a line in the annual appropriations bill that bars the IRS from offering pre-populated returns to taxpayers. The Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Bill approved by the Senate last month extends that ban another year.

The codification of Free File in the Taxpayer First Act and the extended ban on pre-populated returns in the appropriations bill are steps in precisely the wrong direction. Instead of barring the IRS from offering its own Free File alternative, Congress should direct the agency to provide taxpayers with free online tax preparation and filing software. Warren and Representative Brad Sherman of California have introduced bills that would do just that, but so far, the congressional leadership has been more interested in doing the tax preparation industry’s bidding than in easing the tax filing burden. Meanwhile, senators should insist that the Taxpayer First Act be amended so that the bill doesn’t freeze Free File in place, and they should ensure that the ban on pre-populated returns is stricken from the 2019 appropriations bill.

The tax preparation industry will no doubt pour millions of dollars into efforts to kill these measures. And there is no pro-simplification lobby to oppose them: No one profits from making it truly free for you to file your taxes each year. But ultimately, H&R Block and Intuit do not get to vote—taxpayers do. Once voters start calling their senators and representatives to demand meaningful tax filing reform, lawmakers will realize that supporters of easier tax filing far outnumber opponents. And if members of Congress can be convinced that siding with the tax preparation industry will lead to negative electoral consequences, millions of Americans may finally find that filing taxes is as simple as sending a postcard.

Joseph Bankman is the Ralph M. Parsons professor of law and business at Stanford Law School. Daniel Hemel is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Dennis Ventry is a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law.

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