Jack, it’s the worst time of year: Tax season.

And if you’ve already used a paid filing service like Turbotax or H&R Block, you can blame corporate lobbying for the added expense.

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For decades tax filing companies have spent millions lobbying to prevent the IRS from creating a free filing tool. The IRS has the authority to create a free, easy-to-use online tax filing tool and likely already has all of the information it needs to calculate your tax liabilities and refunds. The agency could just send you a pre-filled out tax form based on information they already have and allow taxpayers to confirm or amend it.

But Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block brokered a sweetheart deal, promising to offer low-income taxpayers free software in exchange for the IRS not making a free filing program of its own. Of course, these companies then made the "free" options difficult to use by deploying deceptive design and misleading tactics to steer low-income filers to paid versions of their service when they are eligible to file for free.

This is corporate profiteering at its finest. As ProPublica details, “But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.”

Sign if you agree: Tax prep should be easy and free.

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Keep fighting,
Jayleen Alvarado, Daily Kos