In 1981, when she was 10, Jill Young moved with her family from California to Washington state for her father’s job. The job paid a six-figure salary, which Young says led the family to believe their financial situation was pretty great. But a year later, their family moved back to California. Not long after, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) flagged them for an audit. Amid managing three young children and two moves within such a short time span, Young’s parents were suddenly under the gun to dig up old paperwork.

“They fought constantly,” Young remembers, and it “vastly affected” her father’s credit. “He had to find all his related paperwork and receipts to prove that he filled out his taxes correctly. But he could not find the paperwork from that year, and so he was forced to pay penalties since he couldn’t offer proof otherwise.”

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Toward that end, according to Joe Bankman, a Stanford tax law professor who has championed a simplified tax filing system, “Companies such as H&R Block spend millions on convincing Congress to keep the status quo. The result is that we now have the most complicated system on Earth here in the United States.”

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Bankman believes the method, which no other state has attempted, could be applied to federal tax filings, too: The IRS would calculate the tentative return and the taxpayer would have the right to either approve or refuse it.

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Bankman singles out two major roadblocks to the simplification of filing taxes: the influence of anti-tax activists such as Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh, and the so-called tax lobby that represents the interests of tax software companies.

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The IRS’s binding Free File agreement has been extended five times since its inception, and it will be up for renewal again in 2021. Congressional representatives from both parties have endorsed Free File. In April 2018, the House voted unanimously to make Free File permanent, but the measure has yet to be voted on in the Senate. “It has never been seriously challenged,” Bankman says, and the deal is such that the IRS can’t offer an alternative.

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The bill has been estimated to save a collective 225 million hours and $2 billion in costs spent on preparing taxes. “If you start off with a return with everything on it, it is reasonable to assume you wouldn’t have to spend much time filling it out,” says Bankman. “The challenge, in the long term, is to make sure our filing system doesn’t primarily serve industry.”

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