Australia, Estonia, France, Hong Kong, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, and Poland have similar programs available and are used by some taxpayers.
[17] In March 2017, the effort to establish ReadyReturn in California was the subject of an episode of NPR's Planet Money podcast.
[23] When the FTB launched the ReadyReturn website, Intuit sued and lobbied California legislators to kill the program.
[33][34][35][27][6] A bill to provide explicit statutory authorization for ReadyReturn and to make the program permanent died without a vote in the 2006 session of the California State Legislature.
[36][37][38][39] California State Controller Steve Westly said he was stunned by the response from taxpayers who used the program as part of the pilot project, about 96 percent of whom said it is a service government should provide, and one they would use again, "I absolutely have come to believe that ReadyReturn is the right thing to do".—California Controller, Steve Westly[40]No ReadyReturn forms were used for the 2006 tax year,[41] but the FTB revived it on their own for the 2007 tax year, expanding it to cover one million Californians.
[27] These lobbying campaigns have dissuaded the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner from implementing a free online federal tax preparation program.
[69] ProPublica notes that Intuit's product TurboTax "rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the US government did what most wealthy countries[70] did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens".