I think this is already going a bit in the wrong direction. How about:
1) You download the info from the IRS in a publicly documented unencumbered format. JSON with a well-specified schema, for example.
2) You import it into your favorite tax program.
3) When you're all done, you upload the forms in a publicly documented unencumbered format back to the IRS, thus saving them lots of money compared to scanning a mailed copy.
Another major improvement would be for the IRS to publish all of the formulas backing all of the tax forms in machine-readable format. I suspect that a large fraction of the work involved in maintaining programs like TurboTax is manually importing all the forms.
Maybe our taxes are simpler, but in Canada we have many free tools even endorsed by the government for tax preparation and they're quite popular.
Some of them are even offered by Intuit and H&R Block in order to keep people using their software.
I mean that coming up with a "disruptive" competitor to the big guys that essentially does what they do, but doesn't charge you, isn't as easy as it seems.
https://www.creditkarma.com/tax
They want access to all that sweet financial data that appears on tax forms though (they make money marketing credit products), so I'd probably read the privacy policy pretty closely before using it.
It's incredibly straight forward, no special user interface or IO, just basic UI and basic math, just a bit on the tedious side to get all the forms together and up to date.
I don't buy this at all
And of course the government wants to maximize revenue - if they were given control over this they could easily do small UI tweaks that may result in significant increases in revenue.
Given a choice between a simple tax system that gave you a $100 rebate for doing nothing; and a complex tax system that gave you a $90 rebate if you brought their software or a $30 rebate if you did nothing; the tax preparer would prefer the latter system even though doing so would increase the tax their customers pay.
Oh there you go! An opportunity for someone to take advantage of people and sell products of actual dubious value. This is not a comment on your particular idea (audit protection services) as much as it is the general concept. But even with audit protections services this is a situation where the company will slant things to their benefit and take advantage of people who honestly don't know what they are buying.
Let's consider the positions of all sides:
* The professional tax preparers are worried that they're going to lose business if the government assumes the bulk of the tax preparation work.
* We as taxpayers would prefer that the government pre-fills a return for us, since they already have the information, and lets us file the pre-filled form if we detect no errors. That saves us time and also lets us see what info the government has about our income.
* But we also recognize that it's in the government's interest to maximize the tax we pay, and (ideally) it's in the tax preparers' interest to minimize the tax we pay.
Given all that, if pre-filled returns are unlikely, for political reasons, then perhaps a step up from the current Free File program might work like this:
1) You go to a Free File partner.
2) You authorize the IRS to release all of your tax information to that partner, who pre-fills the forms.
3) The partner walks you through the pre-filled forms, so you can check for accuracy.
4) The partner then does its own checks to discover errors that you might not have picked up on.
5) The partner makes money by selling optional add-ons, such as audit protection services.
This would, at the very least, speed up the Free File process and let you see what info the IRS has. It also ensures (like it or not) that the partners keep getting business (or at least eyeballs to pitch extra services to), and it ensures that your interest in paying the least amount of tax possible is reasonably protected.