[sieongioetnio]

The executives and lobbyists involved can go straight to hell (better yet, prison), but I am somewhat concerned by how this might affect employees. There are some 80,000 tax preparers in the U.S.. These people did not invent this scam and are not getting rich from it. [1] There are more people involved if you include software developers, cleaners, receptionists, and so forth.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes132082.htm

The industry should be destroyed and the earth salted, but doing so will hurt some decent people.

>The IRS estimates that setting up and operating a direct file system would cost the government between $64 million and $249 million annually, depending on the number of users and the complexity of returns it could handle.

For all practical purposes, it's free. Intuit alone has some $12.7 billion in revenue, so we could spend fifty times the estimated cost and still be in the black.