[jokethrowaway]

Because the agency which decides whether I did my taxes correctly is likely going to have terrible UX and has an incentive to hide options for me to save on taxes?

I pay private agents all the time to avoid having to deal with terrible governments interfaces and find shortcuts, wins for me.

[bastawhiz]

As opposed to the terrible UX of the for profit companies that have been providing the same services for years? For most people, the cost of TurboTax is higher than whatever mystical savings they might "find".

[jokethrowaway]

I'm not in the US but in the UK and Estonia private accounting solutions are really good. Eg. I'm a huge fan of https://freeagent.com/

The problem is with your own government accepting bribes to keep things complicated and preventing new competing companies to enter the market, lowering costs and improving the experience.

> Filing taxes is surprisingly complex, thanks in part to the lobbying efforts of Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, which in 2016 alone reportedly spent $2 million on lobbying to keep the tax code complicated. It’s not just Intuit, either. ProPublica reports that H&R Block spent $3 million lobbying in 2016, some of it on the same effort.