Show HN: A continuation of IRS Direct File that can be self-hosted
github.comthe IRS recently open sourced most of Direct File, a tax tool it has been working on for a few years now. unfortunately, due to recent events, the IRS isn't working on it anymore. I decided to pick up where they left off and I'm trying to get it ready for next tax season
the work behind Direct File is really interesting and I made a lot of it available online to read as well - https://docs.openfile.tax/en/latest/
Thanks so much for keeping this going, and for the late 18F for open-sourcing these implementations... I hope there's a way we can institutionalize your efforts.
As a side note, when the documentation page is viewed in a dark mode browser, I see black text on black background (https://docs.openfile.tax/en/latest/).
I'll fix the docs today, thanks
Thank you for your work
i'm not from the US, but i did work on forms related to government workflows.
it bugged me for a long time why a person can't store facts about themselves and let some software figure out which of those facts are needed for filling out any form, which needs the usual personal facts.
then one can review the required facts and decide which ones are they willing to share.
in fact governments could even standardize the kind of info they are dealing with usually and when a citizen wants the government to do something, instead of filling out forms, they could provide their own, self-hosted fact db, run the govt's query and provide the results (after review)
I think the post office could have been this, but the political will wasn't there. Separation of banking from taxation and the postal system from both of those for separation of concerns for compartmentalization was probably at the forefront of the minds of the founders, since Washington himself had run a spy network and been personally hunted by soldiers and mercenaries on their own turf during the revolution, so I can't say these aren't legitimate concerns, but they haven't exactly aged well. At the time of the revolution and directly after the union, there was no federal income tax anyway.
the https://docs.openfile.tax/en/latest/direct-file.html link in the readme results in 404
never understood exactly what is the code they released. is it just the from filler that only works for people with a single w2 and no stocks etc?
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