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
It’s definitely not guaranteed to be accurate to the law. In fact, I’m surprised there isn’t a disclaimer to that effect on the GitHub project page. Maybe it’s because they’re the government and if you true to sue over an error, they can tell you to go pound sand.
Well the IRS says it is accurate.
It doesn’t say accurate to what standard but I think its pretty clear that “tax law” is the default here.
Did the government claim it was accurate to the law? I’m guessing just providing code doesn’t open the government to liability. That would fall on anyone who implemented it. I always assumed that’s why for-cost software has Ts&Cs that indemnify them unless you pay extra for the protection.
From the license:
Unless expressly stated otherwise, the person who associated a work with this deed makes no warranties about the work, and disclaims liability for all uses of the work, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.
Yeah, I’d say that would cover them pretty well. Also, happy cake day!
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.
More free software is always a good thing.
is there ever a case where free software would be bad?
Only if you’re a scumbag/useful idiot.
I think that California and the Blue States will make good use of this, considering the shit that the Trump Regime has been pulling.
If they even continue paying federal taxes…
Being an open source program, the Blue States can modify it for their own taxation apparatus. The money intended for the Federal can be held in escrow, then released into service of the states if the Federal doesn’t negotiate with the Blue States in good faith.
