[PaulHoule]

They are still a tiny minority. I mean HNers from everwhere from Wyoming to Germany and Brazil.

One of the best ideas the Reagan administration had was paperwork simplification, they introduced a 1040EZ for (roughly) the same kind of filer that Direct File works for.

My son put off paying his 2023 taxes to the last minute, I told him he should try Direct File (I'd believed the story that it would be easy) but when he tried it he had extreme difficulty authenticating himself, I think because they check you against consumer databases and they could not compare to past tax returns, credit history, etc. because this was his first tax return and he had no credit history.

We were forced to wait for a long time to talk to a human operator for him to verify his id. In that time I found out that there was no longer a 1040EZ, see

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/1040ez.asp

but I was able to fill out a complete 1040 and the New York equivalent of it before we got through to the operator. We just got the check from New York the other day after about 6 weeks, haven't heard from the IRS yet.