U.S. News & World Report, Senators Urge IRS to Provide Taxpayers With Free Software:

Egged on by [Mark] Kirk at a hearing this month, [Dick] Durbin, chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the IRS, wants a disinterested IRS to look into drawing up software like TurboTax and offering it free to Americans on the agency’s website. “We can eliminate the middle man,” Durbin said. “It may save taxpayers money.” …

[Kirk] argued that Americans spend too much time and money filing taxes and that the agency should make helping taxpayers its priority. His idea: “That an American doesn’t pay TurboTax, doesn’t pay H&R Block, simply logs onto the IRS website, fills out their taxes in an accurate, complete way in which the software is handling all of the complexity, and the amount of time spent complying with federal law drops like a rock.”

Shulman suggested, however, “I don’t think it’s quite that simple.” … Intuit, the TurboTax maker, notes that the IRS offers a service called Free File; however, it’s limited to those with adjusted gross income of $58,000 or less. Shulman was saying that his agency had gotten lots of letters on both sides of the free software issue when Kirk declared: “Your mission should be to make it as easy as possible to comply with federal law, so this argument inside your shop should end in like an hour.”

(Hat Tip: Bon Kamman.) This gives me an excuse to run the latest TurboTax ad: