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by everybodyknows 1515 days ago
Is there some regulatory hurdle that deters these companies from offering an end-consumer solution to individuals?
1 comments

No, and some of them do. The "hurdle" is the target audience. These professional products usually begin at over $1K license cost per year and go well into five figures for larger tax practices. The pro products are designed to track the status of hundreds of returns, communicate and exchange documents efficiently with all those clients, allow multiple staff members to work on the returns, prepare various entity returns beyond 1040 such as S-corp, partnership, trust/estate, and all U.S. states that have tax, automatically share data between returns of related persons (shareholder/S-corp, partner/partnership, kids with high investement income/parents of those kids). The pro software usually supports a much larger number of less common forms than the consumer products and has better diagnostic support for unusual situations.

It's kind of like the difference between having an Oracle database server vs. having MS-Access on the desktop.