In the United States, tax filing is due on April 15th. As the day approaches, Americans pull together forms, calculate deductions, and, in many cases, pay professionals or companies to help them navigate that process.
In many other countries, by contrast, filing taxes is simple and free. We spoke with Mina Hsiang, the third administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS) and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Hsiang talked with us about why tax filing looks different for Americans and about the push to create a government free-file system in the United States.
It takes just a few minutes to file taxes in many countries. How does that work?
Many other places—like the United Kingdom, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, and Kenya—do what’s called prefilled filing, where the government tells you what it knows about your income, and then you just make changes. In those countries, doing your taxes can take just fifteen minutes.
Part of what makes it more complicated here is that we enact a lot of our policy objectives through the tax code. We try to incentivize people to buy houses, have children, and to go to college, and we put all of those complicated add-ons in the tax code. Wealthier people can often hire someone to help them navigate this and make the most of these incentives. But not everybody can afford to spend the time or money to hire someone who understands all those details.
In the 1980s, President Regan tried to make tax filing easier—what happened?
For a long time, presidents have been saying the IRS should make it should make it free and easy for everyone to file their taxes. In 1985, President Regan proposed a “return-free system” for taxes that over half of Americans would be able to use. For ten years, the IRS worked to get it ready—so that more Americans could simply review their own tax return, not have to prepare and file it directly with the government.
But right as they got close to launching it, the tax prep companies were like, “That’s a problem.” They put together the Free File Alliance and said, “don’t bother doing that. You don’t need to do that. We will all offer a free tax filing solution for people whose income is under some threshold, and in exchange, you don’t have to make a government free-filing solution.”
All of these companies spend a lot of money lobbying and supporting candidates, so that everyone in Congress is also highly incentivized to say, “The private sector does it better.”
They wrote a Memorandum of Understanding—the free file alliance promised that they were going to offer free tax filing, and so the government wasn’t allowed to.
Does the free-file system from tax prep companies work?
Something like 70% of taxpayers should be covered by the free file option from companies—for this year it’s everyone who has an adjusted gross income (AGI) below $89,000—but for the past decade companies have worked to make truly free filing options difficult to find, while funneling people to their paid offerings. ProPublica has a good deep dive on this, which basically shows that although all these companies in theory offer a free solution, it is often very hard to access. They hide it or add charges. In 2022, Intuit had to pay a $141 million settlement to 4.4 million taxpayers for their misleading advertising.
When did the government start working on its own direct filing again?
In 2020, H&R Block pulled out of the Free File Alliance. In 2021, Intuit followed. That created a window of opportunity. In 2022, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress told the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to explore the feasibility of free filing and consider a pilot program—to test it with real people and make sure everything is working correctly before they expanded it. Their initial review found that the public was interested, and it would be possible to build a system—but it would be challenging and involve building new technical and customer service capacity.
The National Economic Council (the policy council in the White House that deals with economic factors) pushed the policy process forward. They wanted tax filing to be not just less burdensome, but more equitable. The IRS asked the United States Digital Service to help; the USDS is a government team that brings in private-sector expertise to improve public-sector technology, and I was the administrator at the time. We worked with the IRS to iterate, test, and prepare a direct filing system. Our goal was to make it user-friendly and easy to understand. Then the IRS ran pilots with USDS support.
How did the pilots for IRS Direct File go?
The IRS rolled out a pilot for Direct File in 2024, and about 140,000 people submitted returns through it. The customer satisfaction surveys were striking—90% of users rated the experience and customer service “excellent” or “above average.” The program earned a Net Promoter Score or NPS of 74—this is a metric often used to evaluate consumer brands (Apple’s is 61). The team then refined the product, made it simpler, and expanded access—in 2025, more than 300,000 people filed their taxes using Direct File. Customer satisfaction improved to 94%. It cost the government less per person than most people pay companies to file their taxes, and that’s before including economies of scale.
Usage of the program was curtailed by public confusion about whether it still existed, and the administration did nothing to clarify or promote it.
What’s the status of direct filing today in the United States?
At the end of the filing season in 2025, the Trump administration announced they’d be cancelling the Direct File program. They cited a lack of public interest in it.
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Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Economic Security Project