[pc86]

This. It's farcical to believe that the hard part of getting around tens (hundreds?) of millions spent on lobbying for regulations, plus managing the constantly evolving tax code and all the legal and financial liability surrounding that, is writing the actual code. That's the easiest part by a factor of 20.

FOSS tax prep software exists, most of it is ok, some of it is pretty good, but it's really a legal and regulatory problem that is not going to be solved by developers.

[IgorPartola]

As someone working in this field at the moment, what you and the commenter you are replying to are saying is exactly part of the lobbying push by the likes of TurboTax and H&R Block. It’s complex, yes. But the data is publicly available and does not change all that frequently. And of course an effort like this should 100% be subsidized by the government anyways.