[msound]

On a related note, a Stanford tax law professor Joseph Bankman had run trials of pre-filled forms for a few California state taxpayers. Listen to his journey on Episode 760 of PlanetMoney podcast:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episo...

TL;DR:

* 99% of people liked the pre-filled forms

* He took this idea to California state congress, but Congresspeople were "warned" about him by Intuit lobbyists

* He hired his own lobbyist but lost by 1 vote in the Congress

Edit: Grammar

[nightski]

ReadyReturn sounds like it only works if you have an extremely simple tax return. While that is great, I don't understand how the people with a simple W-2 are having such a painful time with taxes. It takes about 5-10 minutes to finish a simple return. What am I missing?

[kelnos]

Assuming you're using tax prep software, you still have to click through all the stuff that doesn't apply to you, and it behooves you to at least skim the text to be sure that law changes haven't changed anything for you this year. Just the act of clicking "no" on everything will probably run you a good 20 minutes, with another 5-10 of actually entering your W-2 data and supplying payment information.

[monster_group]

You do not have to go through all the questions if you know your tax situation. It is only for people who are clueless about their tax situation that they have to go through all the questions. If you know you are going to take standard deduction there's no point in going through the entire list of itemized deductions only to find out what you already knew.

[copperx]

Me too. I don't get most of the posts in this thread.