Last week, the IRS published the majority of Direct File’s source code to GitHub, with one of the people who worked on Direct File noting that “establishing trust with taxpayers was core to our approach for designing and building Direct File.” IRS Direct File, commonly referred to as Direct File, is a tax-filing program offered by the IRS that allows US taxpayers to prepare and electronically file federal income tax returns at no cost. The majority of Direct File’s source code getting uploaded to GitHub is a step forward for free software, both because of Direct File’s scale and what it represents: that there is still a lot of power in collective action. It will protect the work of its developers regardless of whether Direct File will be offered for the 2025 tax season.
That’s so cool, maybe the first time in the history of humanity that we see open source tax software, that’s guaranteed to be accurate to the law. For one year at least
It runs Scala / Java, and has docker configs, decent documentation. And an ominous message explaining that some parts were too secret to open source so they had to rewrite chunks of it. Overall, it seems like it was a big project just to get this published, and I am impressed they managed it, given the software team was comprised of 3 different agencies and several contractor firms
Maybe they should do taxes like every other civilized society instead of the bait and switch they do now.
Better yet, tax businesses and the top 10%, eliminate income tax for everyone else. It’s a net gain and not a small one.
