I've been using TaxAct for years, but I'm not sure they are better. They have every incentive to lobby with TurboTax to make sure it is hard to file taxes without help.

I'm tempted to go back to paper forms. It wasn't hard, just annoying the one time I forgot to copy line 13 of form 1234 to line 43d of form 5678 and then had to amend my state filings.

Yeah, truthfully I would rather not have to use TaxAct either. Since the IRS already knows what I owe, what's the point of filling out forms by hand?

Every year when I manually copy information from my W2 onto an online form, I think that tax season must be the biggest data entry clusterfuck in the world.

> Since the IRS already knows what I owe, what's the point of filling out forms by hand?

Complete agreement, though there will in some cases be a need to file forms to supply information that they don't already have. Additional deductions, for instance: charitable contributions, deductible expenses, etc. But those forms should be "here's the information", not "here's the information and a pile of careful calculations implementing an algorithm".

It holds your hand a lot less than taxcut or turbotax though. Its basically a very thin shim on top of the IRS forms and instructions. Other than the electronic filing and a couple pretty basic hints, once you have some history and are vaguely aware of tax credits for various things, its barely easier than the IRS instructions in the old paper tax forms.

I tend to use taxcut, which is a bit closer to turbotax, but frankly its messed up things that I only found by reading a paper copy of the return before filing and noticing numbers that didn't make sense (doubling values by adding imported values with hand entered ones, that kind of thing). I had problems like that with turbotax in the 1990's but haven't used it since the bootloader fiasco.