(a) Termination of Direct File.—As soon as practicable, and not later than 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Treasury shall ensure that the Internal Revenue Service Direct File program has been terminated.

E-file: which is essentially just an api end point for accepting digitized tax returns and is what all the major (paid) tax software uses.

Direct file: a web based version of the 1040 irs forms which will, when filled out, submit the forms electronically.

=== Edit: there are actually three, the third is Free Fillable Forms, which is what I'm actually talking about here ===

Note that when I say "version of the forms" I mean that quite literally. The interface is as close as html can come to looking like a printed 1040 form and about 1 tiny step up from filling out a pdf version.

The forms will occasionally do math for you: some of the fields are marked as the sum of a set of fields and those will automatically do the addition for you, but that's the limit of the automation.

For example, to compute your actual owed taxes you need a percentage to multiply by your taxable income, and that number is found by looking through a roughly 10 page table that maps income ranges in brackets of $50 to a specific number (so 0-50 is one number, 50-100 is another, and so on up to several hundred thousand).

To get this number for the form you, of course, must open the help documentation in a separate tab and scan through it looking for your bracket.

My understanding as to why it works this way is that the irs is basically doing as much as they're legally allowed to. The irs is, as far as i know, forbidden by law, from developing any kind of software that helps you file taxes (or more accurately, competes with turbotax) and this web-form doesn't quite count as breaking that law.

I'll note in passing, that as a general rule "both sides" tend to take turbotax money to hobble the irs, this specific direct file was championed and funded by democrats, opposed by republicans and the republican president trump is trying to delete it.

> The program had been in limbo since the start of the Trump administration as Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have slashed their way through the federal government. Musk posted in February on his social media site, X, that he had “deleted” 18F, a government agency that worked on technology projects such as Direct File.

> There was some hope that Musk, with his DOGE team of computer programmers, could take over Direct File and improve it. But the two people familiar with the decision to end Direct File said its future became clear when the IRS staff assigned to the program were told in mid-March to stop working on its development for the 2026 tax filing season.

https://apnews.com/article/irs-direct-file-tax-returns-free-...

- Employers don't tell the federal government about state tax information and when they do, the government doesn't store that information

- W2s aren't due to the SSA at the opening of tax filing season and penalties aren't commonly enforced for submitting w2s on time.

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

Granted, the ranks of the self-employed are a small fraction of all taxpayers, and there's no reason the latter should be forced to do things as if they were part of the former.

You can deduct the cost of thefts. You can deduct alimony. You can deduct student loan interest. You can deduct business use of your car. Donations to charity. Bad loans you gave out. Gambling loses.

Life is not simple. You should not perceive this as an "interview." The tax industry is huge because our businesses are monopoly sized. The majority of money that is liable for tax purposes is held and moved by businesses. Your income taxes are not what this industry runs on.

$168.6k is suspiciously the same as the (2024) social security cap, so they probably didn't handle that edge case.

$250k is the start of NIIT, so they probably didn't handle that case either.

My guess: since the tax code is so complicated, they probably wanted to support the simplest and most common filing cases in the first release. Handling all the edge cases would delay the launch, and prevent them from collecting feedback. If the feedback and demand was positive for v1, they could expand the surface area in the future.

Unfortunately, it didn't last long enough

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2024/demo/income-poverty/...