I'm totally sympathetic to this and yet our family uses TurboTax. It's just much easier to use that program instead of doing the taxes without the software, and its cheaper than hiring someone to do our taxes for us. In order for a boycott to work, a lot of people have to be willing to sign on to the project. When someone like me won't join the boycott, unless I'm an outlier, it means the boycott effort is doomed.
To really stop the evils of Big Tax Prep so that we can get to return-free tax filing, we need someone to create open-source tax prep software and to distribute it for free. The problem is that the tax code changes each year, so creating that software requires both software designers and tax lawyers, and fairly substantial updates every year, for both the federal and state level for all states. Which means that any do-gooder who wants to do something like this would need a lot of resources. Without a rich backer, or some well-funded do-gooder foundation funding the effort, it probably won't happen.
But it could! We just need Mark Zuckerberg or someone like him to read a compelling article and it might happen!!! Unfortunately, the odds are it won't.
To really stop the evils of Big Tax Prep so that we can get to return-free tax filing, we need someone to create open-source tax prep software and to distribute it for free. The problem is that the tax code changes each year, so creating that software requires both software designers and tax lawyers, and fairly substantial updates every year, for both the federal and state level for all states. Which means that any do-gooder who wants to do something like this would need a lot of resources. Without a rich backer, or some well-funded do-gooder foundation funding the effort, it probably won't happen.
But it could! We just need Mark Zuckerberg or someone like him to read a compelling article and it might happen!!! Unfortunately, the odds are it won't.
