If the IRS Fulfilled Its Mission, There'd Be No TurboTax

I can understand that it's always going to be hard to pay your taxes. But why does it have to be so tough to file your taxes?

According to the IRS website, the agency's mission is to: "Provide America's taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities..."

If that's their mission, then they are failing miserably. A MASSIVE, multi-trillion dollar industry (including accounting, bookkeeping, all those software companies) exists solely to duplicate the core mission: helping Americans "understand and meet their tax responibilities." If that's what the IRS is doing, then what the hell does H&R Block do?

Imagine if you needed to hire a professional, or buy software, just to get a fishing license or pay a parking ticket. Anyone would tell you it's simply not good enough. The government agency involved, we would all insist, must go back to the drawing board and find a better way to interact with the public.

The IRS should too.

Take that argument a step further. Imagine that half the population bought a "fishing license paperwork tool" to make buying fishing licenses easier (much like so many of us own TurboTax or similar to make paying taxes easier). If you're the government honcho in charge of making buying fishing licenses easier, wouldn't you want to copy that tool and make it your new way of doing business?

Or, to put it another way, shouldn't the government give us all some free Uncle Sam version of TurboTax? It has been field tested and proven to meet the needs of millions of Americans. Far more than anything the IRS provides, TurboTax helps people "understand and meet their tax responsibilities." What does it say if that's the IRS's main mission, but a private company does it in tandem and better? We're paying the IRS to do that job for us. We shouldn't have to pay Intuit to do it too. It's massive incompetence, compounded over decades. Who's going to fix it?