Yes, it’s that time of year again. We know it, we hate it and it’s the worst thing the government makes us do. 

Taxes are a bill the government charges you, to put it lightly. So why do you have to do all the math? If you did that with any other bill, you would be going to jail for not paying enough for a pizza. You’d have to divide the number of pepperoni by cheese consumption or something of the sort. 

Employers and banks send records of our income and W-2s to the IRS when we’re hired on. The government could be doing your taxes for you, according to Los Angeles Times article. “The Tax-prep Industry Lobbies Hard to Keep Tax Day a Torture for You.” 

The idea is called return-free filing and it would entail you checking the government’s math. Filing your taxes would take five minutes with the return-free filing. If that wasn’t reason enough, both Barack Obama and Ronald Regan advocated for a similar bill to be passed by Congress, according to  ProPublica’s Director of Research Liz Day. 

Tax softwares spend tons of money to kill return-free filing bills while in committee. Turbo Tax and H&R Block pay a lobbyist to kill those bills. 

As if this news couldn’t get any worse the tax prep industry created something called the free file alliance, which would allow two-thirds of the taxpaying citizens to file their taxes for free. 

It’s not well-known with the system being complicated and not advertised at all.

So long as the free file alliance exists, the government can’t offer return-free filing. It especially sucks for college students. Those that do taxes themselves are stuck with software they have to pay for, and those that still have their parents or guardians do it will eventually have to figure out if they want to pay for awful services’ help or struggle to do it themselves. 

So what can we do about it? Nothing. The government is being paid a ton of money to do nothing about it. 

The only thing that can be done is if as a generation we make a move to change things for the future. America can do what it does best: complain until a change is made.