IRS Direct File on GitHub

I moved this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44187512

The code that defines how the fact graph works is here: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/tree/main/direct-f...

but the actual tax definitions that deal with facts and derived calculation are here: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/tree/main/direct-f...

See for example the standard deduction and tax rate calculations https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f... https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

I imagine these are based on the MeF (Modernized e-File) schemas because the system needs to transform the input data into XML MeF schemas to submit electronically to the MeF system (See https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/modernized-e-file-mef-s...)

Interesting, I want to read more about this.

I'm sure everyone working on this knew it was doomed before the first line of code was written, and that it would be killed as soon as the next (R) was in charge. It was a great accomplishment to get working software released before that happened, but I'm sure nobody was kidding themselves into thinking it would last. The pay-to-file tax lobby is too strong and corrupt.

The bill was introduced by the Republican party (Nick Langworthy, co-sponsored by William Timmons). Don't spread misleading/fake information.

That's reactive programming in Java, where you return a callback to be run when an operation completes.

The giveaway is the Mono<T> return type.

My eyeballs bleed, and I'm pretty comfortable with Java for many years.

I see the most of it stems from reactive-style programming (reactor.core.publisher.Mono).

Maybe they just tried to fit into one screen? Anyway I'd ask to simplify it, if I was a their team lead.

It is if you’re doing government style work and you want have a job for life creating code that nobody else can read.

Or if you’re in the business of selling extremely wide aspect ratio monitors.

I saw an internal “sso” auth app that iterated a byte array and concatenated the values into a string instead of base64 encoding it when I worked at HP/HPE/DXC

The atomics are goofy, but reactor can often lead to messy code structure when you actually need sequential blocking behavior.

I've seen similar things, in Java as well as some other languages. It's obviously not the preferred way of doing it.

Is this what people have to do when they don't have the C# async/await autogenerated state machine?

I can tell you as a person working in a spring boot webflux shop that is pretty bad code. You really don’t want to nest that much. Using atomic references outside the reactive flow is a huge red flag that they don’t know how to program in webflux properly. Not that webflux is easy to use at all and the dx is garbage.

> .onErrorResume

I dislike Java but if it can get me back to the On Error Resume Next days I might reconsider.

Wow, that's frustrating code. I feel vindicated in using an ultrawide to code with. When I mentioned on here I use it because sometimes you have to work on code with super-deep indents I got downvoted to negative infinity for shitty code management.

Looks like callback hell, but in Java. Async/await would solve it, but it's Java.

Yes and no. This is a common pattern, but implemented very lazily. Most of this can (and probably should) be refactored out to separate classes/functions.

But no, I don't think this would faze most Java devs. It's ugly and bad practice, but more or less acceptable depending on personal taste. It works, at least.

Point of interest: LLMs tend to go too far in the opposite direction with code like this. They will break everything apart into functions or classes, even trivial one-line lambdas. I find that even more obnoxious than the monstrosity you linked.

If you are a non-Java developer, it does look daunting. But in my opinion it’s much much better use of the Java streams api and reactor library that I have seen compared to most shitty corp firms.

Yeah, absolutely. FWIW, the repo notes:

"Direct File interprets the United States' Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) as plain language questions, the answers to which should be known to taxpayers without need of external instructions or publications. Taxpayers' answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS's Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use."

So in theory it's useful now, but as you say it could easily change.

Piggybacking, I think the "hard part" also includes the decades of success that the tax prep lobby's had in protecting its business interests at the cost of US citizen's welfare. Although the number of states that provide free direct filing has grown from last year -- which I only remember to be substantially less than the 25 who do so today -- it's unclear what the problem is with the remaining 25 including DC where I live

Right, politicians and officials working on behalf of the tax-filing lobby could introduce lots of changes to the tax code with a view to making this software useless.

I do not know of this capability currently, but if it has enough for eFile, it can also be used to generate a paper return.

Sounds like a business opportunity.

I wouldn't say interop is a huge deal, the main time and cost sink is translating the recursive Gordian knots of tax law into a logically cohesive structure that can be evaluated programmatically. And then you (ideally) must prove its correctness.

Imagine pair programming with a tax lawyer. I'd rather eat my own hands.

Better fork it quick before some ideologue deletes it and threatens to imprison anyone who looks at it.

Another way of saying this: Creative Commons, based in California, USA, did not publish a license that can be used by one of the largest domestic authors of software.

Less snarkily, I do wonder about the discrepancy there.

i've done that when i forgot to add some necessary files in the initial initial commit. since the adding the forgotten files did not include any changes warranting a different message, it lets me know i was a knucklehead and the commits are meant be considered the same commit. it's much faster than looking up to see if there's a way to amend an existing commit with additional files, and then going through the process of actually doing it. my use of git is add/commit/push/clone/switch/fetch. after that, it's 100% look it up and hope i'm not going to bork my repo by following some SO thread

  git add .
  git commit --amend -m "initial commit"
  git push -f origin HEAD

    git commit --amend --no-edit

The government required them to scrub the commit history. Hilarious that they used that message for the second commit.

Is there a reason you'd need to do so? What is freetaxusa.com missing that direct file gives you (other than the fact that direct file is free and supported by the government itself)?

Where does it say that this project is impacted by the 11% layoffs?

This isn't true - you can still submit through Direct File: https://directfile.irs.gov/

  "The IRS will no longer accept returns directly."

Seems around 1M is the price for pardons or changing of tariffs in favor of the donor.

Disbanding 18F was a crime. This made it abundantly clear that the E doesn't stand for efficiency.

The US tax code isn't created to work like this. Direct file asked many questions about things like dependent children, whether you're blind and whether you have an HSA - all things that are relevant to your taxes that aren't actually available to the government right now.

Secondly, there is the issue of State / Local taxes - the IRS only receives federal tax data making it hard to automatically fill out the whole tax return since efiling products tend to file federal / state taxes together.

This year, direct file allowed people to import their W2s and 1099-INTs automatically based on the information the IRS had: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f...

lobbying on behalf of the tax filing industry

additionally, the US has (one of?) the most complex tax systems in the world. In part b/c most of it is carve outs...on behalf of various lobbyist groups / catering to specific voting blocks.

Entering your income is easy enough if you're a salaried employee with a W2 form. The time consuming part is searching for and entering deductions. The tax code is ridiculously complex and there are forms for all sorts of deductions.

this was supposed to be exactly that

The same reason the US moves more of the worlds money through commercial and investment services hosted here.

Ask anyone in the EU who has lived in one country and earned a paycheck from a different one.

Anyways, give it time, the EU is currently working to make it's tax system more complicated to solve some of the long standing continental issues, and to make the EU system more like the US one.

Kinda. Since it's Public Domain, there's little to no use in signing the code, because they explicitly forfeited any rights to it.

Public Domain means you can legally take their code, riddle it with malware, and distribute, claiming that's the real and true Direct File source code, and you are its author. What you do with malware is a different legal issue of course.

So I'm not sure proving you are commit owner by signing it is really helpful if anyone can do it as well, and there's no copyright holder to decide who's right.

You don't know what they used internally. There are two commits on github which just dump the code from whatever they used for version control for the past two years, and no further development will take place.

what could it really do though? any discrepancies will just be settled in an audit. of course, you are providing name, address, SSN, bank account info, but what malevolent entity doesn't already have that data about you anyways? besides, trust us, we're the government is good enough already! /s

That's an idea... Make a fork, add a file at taxpayers/${SSN}.yaml describing your return in terms of income/deductions/circumstances, make sure it lints successfully, and then submit a PR for the IRS to review. If it's merged, CI/CD initiates a bank payment/withdrawal. If you get audited, resolve the conflicts and update the PR.

Other than the flourish of adding some Scala to enterprisey Java there is absolutely nothing atypical about this bog enterprisey application. It’s a JS/TS/Java app, nothing else stands out.

Listing every config language and a few lines of CI or whatever scripts shit is misleading.

I see nothing other than typical boring enterprise/big gov crap here (which is fine, and expected).

The Canadian government doesn't provide a DirectFile equivalent. The closest thing we have is Wealthsimple's tax software which just _happens_ to be free (and for what it's worth, in my experience, is also pretty good).

I would love for the Canadian government to release free tax software analogous to DirectFile!

personally i'd prefer a tax system that was easy enough to understand in an hour. like, really simple, instead of a complex bag of sticks and carrots. less waste, less time, more clarity on how much productivity is partitioned off for government services.

would really render moot the "TurboTax lobbying", "government already has info", etc conversations.

Even easier if your employer automatically syncs with CRA. No filling in forms at all.

In other countries, the government does the taxes for you, and sends you a pre-filled form that you can amend or change.

It takes me half an hour with FreeTaxUSA . It can be easy, but TurboTax doesn't like their software to be easy for some reason.

just want to chime in to say that it's around that fast in the US as well

Most people will just have to enter their W2, choose the standard deduction, and then click submit. There are free tools that do this already like FreeTaxUSA.

That said, I have 2 gripes with the current system:

1. companies like TurboTax lobbying to prevent the government from building their own tool... if TurboTax is genuinely better then people will still use it even if the govt builds a tool.

2. the tax code being so complex that it's profitable for wealthy people to avoid taxes with special deductions and hire lawyers to defend them from the overstretched IRS.

What makes it easier than US taxes?

Intuit and their millions in lobbying efforts might change the administration's thoughts on that.

• IRS Direct File launched in 2024 after being created via the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act in 2024.

• The Trump administration is preparing to sign into law a new budget that orders the immediate termination of the Direct File program (see SEC. 112207 "TASK FORCE ON THE TERMINATION OF DIRECT FILE").

• 18F, the agency within the federal government probably most responsible for championing and promoting open source development (and just all-around providing good digital services at a significantly lower cost), was eliminated by the Trump administration in March.

I know that you are probably a busy person, like many of us here; Still, I would encourage you to take some time each week to become informed about what is (or isn't) happening in politics rather than just offering knee-jerk reactions based on partisan feelings. It really is important.

I see you've discovered the reddit-to-HN flywheel.

Except that Trump has already prevented us from using it. He axed it, beginning next tax season.

It's not a boogie-man, Trump really does just suck. He's anti like, anything even good-adjacent.

IIRC public domain is actually the "default" for code released by the government

FTA:

> Releasing Direct File’s source code demonstrates that the IRS is fulfilling its obligations under the SHARE IT Act[1] (three weeks ahead of schedule!).

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9566

Although it is written in the "LICENSE" file for purposes of uniformity and GitHub compatibility, a dedication to the Public Domain is not a "license". As you can see, they waive all their rights to claim copyright protection, and therefore, no license is possible; no license is necessary to use it for any purpose.

And yes, "As a work of the US Government" it is dedicated to the Public Domain by law.

TurboTax already has competitors.

The problem I had with the papers is they don't tell you when you need to have another form. Guided question software will ask questions to determine if you need forms.

That's what a smart contract is meant to represent, and they get taken advantage of every single day.

The law has better properties when it comes to undefined behavior than code does.

Thanks - I've changed the URL to that from https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filin... above, since the latter continues to be signup-walled.