“Breaking Up With TurboTax: How I Used Claude to File My Taxes for Free”
10th March 2026
The IRS already has your W-2s, your 1099s, your brokerage statements. It knows the tax rules. For most Americans, the government could calculate their tax bill, send them a pre-filled return, and let them approve or dispute the result. This is how it works in the UK, Japan, Germany, and dozens of other countries. The reason it doesn’t work that way here is that Intuit and H&R Block have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars ensuring it doesn’t. Their business model depends on tax filing being a problem Americans need help solving. So they lobby against pre-filled returns, against Direct File, against anything that would make their products unnecessary. They have succeeded. Americans collectively spend around 6 billion hours per year on tax compliance. TurboTax is a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist.
The IRS already offers a partial service: If you fill out all of the forms except for the computation of tax and just leave that section of the return blank, they will figure out how much tax they think you owe and send you a bill. At the very least, this is a way to postpone when you have to pay and ensures they won’t be second-guessing your own computation.