The IRS has moved to cancel its “experimental” Direct File program. This is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s…exceedingly pleasurable fantasy…of the IRS online platform that lets filers prepare their taxes for free and submit them through the state.
Aside from the program’s cost ($138 per tax return, which is more than many tax software sellers charge) the editors of The Wall Street Journal noted,
The bigger problem with the program is its threat to the norm of taxpayer autonomy. The push to cut out the tax “middle man,” meaning private services, would have resulted in millions of filers letting the IRS make both the first and final determination of their tax liability and connect to their checking accounts.
Notice that: the IRS gets to connect to our private checking accounts. With Direct File, that’s a deeper connection than simply allowing the IRS to direct deposit a refund. With Direct File, the IRS has been able to extract the tax due from a tax payer’s bank account.
With the cancelation of Direct File, us tax payers, us average Americans, avoided a two-step sequence of events. The first step would have been making Direct File no longer a trial being tested in 24 of our nation’s States, but instead rolling it out nation-wide.
The second step would have been mandating Direct File for all of us.
It wouldn’t have stopped there, though. It wouldn’t be even a short step, more like a small shuffle, after that to alter Direct File to have employers “Direct File” all employees’ pay checks to the IRS instead of sending them to the employees. With that, the IRS would extract the taxes it deemed appropriate and remit to the putative employee the remainder—the amount the IRS would deem appropriate for each tax payer to have.
We dodged a terrible pas-de-deux—that dance for the two performers of tax payer and Government—for the time being, but the Progressive-Democratic Party will return to power eventually, and dangerously sooner than us average Americans want.