The Trump administration has shut down the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) two-year-old experiment in free streamlined tax filing, but the people behind Direct File don’t want to let it go quietly.
The massive tax-and-spending law that President Donald Trump signed on July 4 included funds to study a replacement for the IRS-built website that the Republican administration had already begun to dismantle. Yet the idea of keeping the public filing option alive in some form has brought together a collection of activists and computer programmers including former IRS employees, nonprofit advocates and even an 18-year-old dishwasher in Arizona who wants to create his own tax filing website despite having never filed a return for himself.
“It’s no longer a question of ‘Can this be done, and can this be done well?’” said Gabriel Zucker, one of four people who have formed a group at the nonprofit Economic Security Project to keep preparing Direct File for future administrations to use. “It’s just a question of: Do we want to do it?”
Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.