Can AI Do What Tax Code Reform Never Did?

It’s not the biggest problem we have, but filing taxes in America is expensive in terms of time, money, and stress.

I’ve never filed taxes without the use of software or a paid preparer. The prospect is genuinely almost unthinkable; it would require reading hundreds or maybe thousands of pages of dense tax code. As far as I know, literally no one does this.

I think I filed my first return with TurboTax. But then I learned, via this Planet Money episode, that TurboTax is basically the reason our taxes are miserable and pricey. Since then, I’ve found many alternative solutions from FreeTaxUSA to private tax accountants, with varying levels of cost and satisfaction.

Ten years later and a little more willing to do my own research (and equipped with tireless AI research assistants), I think the basic facts of that Planet Money episode hold up. Most similarly-developed countries seem to have a system that requires little work from the filer. Apparently tax filing is either just a few minutes of work or not even needed for citizens of the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Norway, and Finland. In the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia, it’s supposedly more common to do some manual filing though not actually required – it’s just useful to claim deducations. The only rich country I found with taxes that entail a similar level of effort to the US is Germany.

The apparent issue is that the IRS doesn’t pre-fill our tax forms, even though it has pretty much all the needed information for payroll taxes. Several rounds of reforms have been pushed. Most in the 2000s were subject to lobbying by Intuit (the owner of TurboTax) and H&R Block, who claimed that letting the IRS pre-fill taxes would enable them to overcharge by skipping potential deducations.

Are these objections credible? It doesn’t seem like it. All these other countries have pre-filled tax forms. And setting up a pre-filled system wouldn’t necessarily preclude citizens from doing their own preparation and filing if they felt they could find more deductions than the IRS had.

I’ve never seen a remotely convincing defense of Intuit and H&R Block’s behavior. Intuit in particular seems quite malevolent. In the early 2000s, Intuit made a deal with the IRS that they’d offer free tax filing services in exchange for the IRS not doing it themselves. But “Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find.”¹ For years, they advertised their services as “free” when only part of the process was free, and internally seemed well-aware that they were tricking users who would be loathe to restart the process with a more honest preparer after they’d done half the work.²

The two companies spent a combined $20.8m on lobbying in the last three years³. The timing suggests it was mainly to coordinate opposition to Direct File, another reform effort, this one under the Biden administration. It got killed under the current Republican regime. Was it any good? I didn’t use it so I can’t say.

But shame on all involved. In recent years, opposition is consistently from Republicans and consistently tied to lobbying money from these companies. If you want to claim that a particular proposal is bad, then introduce a better idea. Instead, Intuit, H&R Block, and countless accountants across the country charge us for a service that we should get for free (and in fact, the IRS mostly already does – but after we send in our own forms!).

I started this article talking about the complexity of filing taxes and the madness of doing it without the assistance of a paid tool or expert. But a new tool is on the scene, and I’m hopeful that it might spell the beginning of the end for these tax agencies.

AI’s capabilities are moving so fast that it’s difficult to keep up with. In November 2025, when I was first thinking about filing end-of-year taxes, I wouldn’t have trusted Claude⁴ to do them for me. But now? I think I would. The tax code is vast and painful, but I see no reason to believe a tax professional is any better at navigating it than Claude would be; in fact, my actual experience with tax professionals has been that they’re pretty careless.

Mistakes in your taxes can come back to bite you, so I have my reservations. And yet, tax agencies don’t even accept liability for their own mistakes; they make you sign off on the filing that you sure as heck don’t understand. So ultimately, I see relatively little downside in leaving them.

I suspect it’ll be at least a couple years before normal people try this, and it won’t be until the “AI” is packaged up in a nice consumer app. But perhaps in five years, paid tax preparation will be for only those with exceptional circumstances.

If so, I sympathize with the many rank-and-file accountants who will be out of a job. But to Intuit and H&R Block, good riddance.

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