Dear tax preparation companies: ????

I never thought getting to file my taxes for free would make me angry, but here we are...

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This was the first year in America I only had a W2, and not Schedule K-1s and weird stuff like that, and I had learned that you can file for free through the IRS website.

Awesome, I thought, because where I come from they send you your tax return, and if it's correct and you don't have special deductions to add, you literally just sign it and send it back to them. 

So yeah, having to pay for it felt really dumb. But, Murica. 

I had assumed though that the free version would be more difficult than TurboTax or TaxAct. I had assumed it would be classic IRS-style -- difficult to decipher and a lot more you have to figure out yourself. So imagine my surprise when I went to the IRS Free File page and found out that they link directly to those very same sites. ​

I honestly didn't quite believe it, but I went through it all -- logged into my old account, got auto-fill from last year's return, ploughed through all the questions . . . and in the end it did, in fact, turn out to be 100% free!

What????

I knew that the only reason it isn't free is because those companies keep lobbying for it so they will keep making money, but the fact that it's literally free if you just go through the IRS directly is just astounding to me. Although, after the past year I shouldn't be surprised anymore at the corruption in this country. 

Still, it would be nice to not lose faith in humanity on an almost daily basis.

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