The IRS Knows the Answer and Would Like to See Your Work

Every spring, America celebrates its strangest civic holiday: millions of adults gather around laptops, locate documents the government mostly already receives, answer questions written in the emotional register of a hostage negotiation, and hope they have correctly guessed how much money Washington wants.

This is called “filing your taxes,” because “annual federally supervised scavenger hunt with financial penalties” apparently tested poorly.

For most wage earners, your employer sends you a W-2. Your employer also sends that information to the Social Security Administration, which shares it with the IRS. So the government has much of the basic wage and withholding data already. Then it turns to you and says, essentially, “Interesting. What do YOU think you made?”

That is an extraordinary relationship.

Imagine a restaurant where the waiter keeps the menu, eats half your meal, calculates the bill privately, then hands you a pencil and says, “Take a swing. There are penalties.”

We have built an entire economy around this ritual. GAO reported in 2026 that paid tax preparers file returns for more than half of taxpayers. The IRS counted 879,698 people with current preparer tax identification numbers as of August 1, 2026. Nearly 880,000 people can legally prepare federal tax returns for compensation, helping Americans explain Americans to America.

That’s not a tax system. That’s an ecosystem.

And before somebody begins vibrating about personal responsibility, yes, citizens should know what they owe. They should also know how brakes work, but Ford doesn’t mail you a transmission every April and threaten interest charges unless you rebuild it by the 15th.

The truly elegant part is how complexity became a commercial opportunity. Congress writes a tax code that can make a reasonably literate adult feel concussed. Software companies arrive to guide the frightened civilian through it. Government then partners with private companies to provide free filing to qualifying taxpayers. In 2026, IRS Free File offers guided software through eight private-sector partners for people with adjusted gross income of $89,000 or less. Earn more and you can still use fillable forms, assuming your recreational interests include translating federal instructions into numbers while wondering whether Schedule 1-A was named by a Bond villain.

We briefly tried something radical. The IRS operated Direct File, a free government filing option. Nearly 300,000 taxpayers used it in 2025. Then Treasury suspended it in the fall of 2025. Commercial tax-preparation companies had opposed the program, arguing in part that private alternatives already existed.

Of course they existed. So do tow trucks. That doesn’t mean the Department of Transportation should scatter nails across I-95.

This entire debate gets dressed up as ideology because ideology is cheaper than admitting the obvious. A government that requires a routine legal filing should provide every citizen a simple way to make that filing. Private tax companies can still exist. Accountants can still exist. Complex returns will still require expertise. Nobody is proposing that a veterinarian perform a corporate merger because both involve paperwork and mammals.

The absurdity lives at the ordinary end of the system. A teacher with one W-2, a mortgage, two kids and no shell company in Luxembourg shouldn’t need commercial software to discover whether the federal government wants another $417.

There’s also a darker joke under all this. Complexity doesn’t punish everyone equally. Wealthy taxpayers can hire specialists to navigate deductions, entities, timing strategies and whatever other legal sorcery has replaced the phrase “pay your taxes.” Poorer taxpayers may qualify for free help, if they know where to find it and meet the rules. The broad middle gets a yearly reminder that being too prosperous for one free option and too ordinary for sophisticated planning is apparently a tax classification.

Even “free” has required federal supervision. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission found that Intuit, maker of TurboTax, had engaged in deceptive advertising involving free tax filing claims and ordered the company to stop making misleading representations. Nothing captures the national filing experience quite like needing one federal agency to protect you while dealing with obligations imposed by another.

There are practical fixes, and none require summoning an economist through a pentagram.

For simple wage returns, send taxpayers a prefilled federal return using information government already has. Let people confirm it, correct it, add credits or deductions, or reject it and file normally. Build a permanent public electronic filing option available to everyone, while letting private companies compete by offering genuinely useful extras. Simplify the tax code where complexity produces little besides compliance cost. And if paid preparers handle more than half the country’s returns, Congress should finally establish sensible competency standards for the people Americans trust to keep them out of tax trouble. GAO has been warning about gaps in preparer oversight for years.

None of that eliminates accountants. It eliminates the national fiction that administrative friction is a character-building exercise.

Taxes will never be fun. They don’t need to be. Colonoscopies aren’t fun either, but nobody makes you calculate the diameter of the scope, select a private-sector colon partner and then threatens a penalty because you misunderstood Worksheet 6.

The government can decide what citizens owe. It can collect the money. It can receive the wage data. It can enforce the rules.

Maybe, just once, it could also tell us the damn answer.

References

Because apparently jokes involving federal tax policy now need adult supervision, here’s the paperwork behind the punchlines.

Internal Revenue Service, What’s the difference between a Form W-2 and a Form 1099-MISC or Form 1099-NEC?
IRS W-2 and 1099 guidance

Internal Revenue Service, Use IRS Free File to conveniently file your return at no cost
IRS Free File 2026 information

U.S. Government Accountability Office, Paid Tax Return Preparers: Opportunities Remain to Improve IRS Oversight
GAO paid tax preparer report

Associated Press, IRS Direct File is officially dead. Here are other free tax filing options
https://apnews.com/article/irs-direct-file-not-available-2026-04f2d0c31bec80b55d122a0e76e08c36

Internal Revenue Service, Tax Professional Management Office federal tax return preparer statistics
IRS preparer statistics

U.S. Government Accountability Office, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service: Applicability of the Congressional Review Act to the Suspension of Direct File
GAO Direct File suspension decision

Federal Trade Commission, FTC Issues Opinion Finding that TurboTax Maker Intuit Inc. Engaged in Deceptive Practices
FTC TurboTax decision

_____________________________

Tammy Pondsmith writes satire, distrusts forms containing worksheets, and considers April 15 proof that Stockholm syndrome scales nationally.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.