Stick it to TurboTax with Claude

A software engineer, disgusted by tax software companies that aggressively lobby against free IRS filing online, did his taxes with Claude this year.

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.