[2] Until 2011, the IRS did not have a requirement for national registration of paid tax return preparers in the United States.
Effective January 1, 2011, new rules required the registration of almost all paid federal tax return preparers.
[4] A new continuing education requirement of 15 hours per year would have been imposed on tax return preparers (except for CPAs, attorneys, enrolled agents, and a few others).
[6] For most US taxpayers, the IRS already collects all the information needed to send them a draft tax filing like a credit card statement.
Or they could simply accept the draft tax filing, sign and return it with a check in the appropriate amount if they owed anything; if not, they'd receive the indicted refund, as they would otherwise.
ProPublica reported that Intuit, H&R Block and other tax preparation services made it exceedingly difficult and almost impossible for a taxpayer who qualified to file for free to actually find how to do that.
[15] The cost of preparing and filing all business and personal tax returns is estimated to be $100 to $150 billion each year.
In addition to the amount collected in taxes, Americans spent roughly 6% of that amount in their efforts to comply with the law and between 12% and 30% more in doing things that would not have to be done if the tax system were more rational (though estimating the costs of compliance and efficiency losses is difficult because neither the government nor taxpayers maintain regular accounts of these costs).
[18] The Taxpayers Protection Alliance opposed this bill, saying "giving the IRS more power to prepare tax returns is both an overreach and a conflict of interest.
... From leaked private tax information to strong-arming poor people with audits, power should be taken away from the agency.
"[19] (The Markup later reported that online tax preparation software companies like Intuit / Turbotax, H & R Block and others were not adequately protecting their clients confidential data, which was being harvested and shared with Meta / Facebook, so ads could be more accurately targeted,[20] raising questions about whether government or private companies better protects people's data.
As to who is "strong-arming poor people", ProPublica[8][10][14] and Lessig[7] insist that tax preparation companies and big business more generally make money from blocking legislation like this.)
[23] On November 22, 2022, The Markup reported that "Tax Filing Websites [including TurboTax, H&R Block and others] Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook" to facilitate targeting ads.
In 2018, TurboTax was the most popular tax preparation software in the United States, holding a 66.6% market share of self-prepared returns.