[hundt]

Can you point to where the IRS has said that they can prepare returns for taxpayers?

As far as I know they can correct isolated pieces of information (e.g. wrong numbers from a W-2) but do not have the ability to prepare a return from scratch.

Edit: I mean, they can obviously put all the pieces of information they know about you onto one return and do the calculations. But there will be many pieces they don't know, and I think you are unlikely to get an accurate return without them (or based on guessing). But if the IRS says otherwise I would like to know.

[lvh]

Sure: the ProPublica article linked elsewhere in the thread about how the IRS keeps saying "we should just do Free File soup to nuts", Intuit does a bunch of lobbying, and the IRS goes "oh okay I guess we won't do Free File for a while".

You're of course correct that they do not have every document to prepare a return from scratch: but they do have the vast majority of them (in the cartesian product set of (Person x Document)), and certainly a similar to what other industrial nations who have reduced taxes to a postcard notice have--so the assertion also seems credible to me.

[hundt]

Sorry, I'm still not clear what you're referring to. There are multiple ProPublica articles linked in this thread and I'm not sure what statement you're paraphrasing with your "soup to nuts" quote. Are you referring to this article[0], which says the OMB suggested in 2002 that the IRS develop a free option, and the IRS opposed it then and consistently since?

Regarding your second point: the IRS has a lot of documents but it is dwarfed by the total amount of information needed to prepare a return. Even just to determine who your dependents are is a complex flowchart[1] for which there are no official documents in existence that can provide the answers. These kinds of things come up all the time when doing ordinary people's taxes, not just in esoteric situations. (I know because I used to volunteer to do it.)

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

[1] https://apps.irs.gov/app/vita/content/globalmedia/dependency...