Taxpayer Watchdog Opposes IRS Direct File Expansion

For Immediate Release

Contact: Kara Zupkus (224) 456-0257

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) their “Direct File” program would become a permanent tax filing service in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia this tax season. This would ultimately strain the IRS’s already-limited abilities and be a disastrous result for taxpayers across the nation.

In response, David Williams, President, offered the following comment:

“The IRS is already behind on its current responsibilities. The agency routinely falls months behind in processing millions of tax returns from previous years. Instead of focusing on doing its job, this latest decision would radically increase the IRS’s authority and scope. This will only exacerbate the agency’s current backlog and delay the returns for millions of Americans.

“Further, having the nation’s tax collector become the nation’s tax preparer will have devastating consequences. When an American citizen prepares their own taxes or uses a private service to assist them, they have every incentive to find the deductions that will yield them the best return. The Internal Revenue Service – as their name suggests – is tasked with generating revenue. They have no such incentive. In fact, they have quite the opposite. They want to extract as much as possible from the taxpayer.

“This is a solution in search of a problem. The market has a number of alternatives for taxpayers to use to file their taxes. The only result here will be more delays and less money in the pocketbooks of hard-working Americans. Congress should step in to protect their constituents, as the IRS has no statutory authority to initiate and expand such a program that will have destructive consequences.

Expanding the program is unwarranted because there has been no serious evaluation of the program yet.  The Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation (investigative arm of TPA) will be submitting a slew of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the IRS and members of Congress to determine the true costs of the program, among other things.  It is fiscally irresponsible to move forward with any program without a full accounting of costs and potential problems.”

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 Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis and dissemination of information on the government’s effects on the economy.