Direct File has been open sourced, and its creators have left government to continue working on the “future of tax filing.”
The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector.
Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE.
Direct File has been called a “free, easy, and trustworthy” piece of software that made tax filing “more efficient.” About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network.
I was one of the 300,000. It worked great!
Glad to see it won’t entirely disappear.Very good!
It’s high time the tax filing helper scam got busted.
Does it matter? The difficult part is updating yearly for tax changes. What team of tax accountants will be supporting this?
Would"pro bono" work translate to accounting? Wouldn’t be the first time when non-IT people contribute to open source.
There could be some tax pros who are donating time to it? But I haven’t seen any team built around it which is my point. Or is there?
