Hi everybody welcome to another edition of the Full Measure After Hours

Podcast today we're going to talk about some real news you can use.

That's the fact that millions of Americans are eligible for free help filing their taxes,

free professional help. So why don't you know about it.

And with me again, back by popular demand is producer David Berncoff, who helped me find this story.

Actually, he found this story, which was done by ProPublica, the nonprofit, and it really is a fascinating story, a fascinating backstory about,

let me just summarize and then you can take some details, millions of Americans have been eligible

for free professional tax help really since the early 2000s

under a program negotiated by the IRS and some of these professional tax preparation companies.

But the story is they've made it almost impossible

for you to find out how to use it.

So millions of Americans who could be using this don't even know about it.

And if they Google, which is what most people would probably do,

they're probably going to get misdirected somewhere else.

Yeah, it's really interesting that for a lot of people, if you make under a certain amount of income

you don't have stocks and bonds that throw off income to you you don't have

property income it's a fairly basic thing to file your taxes, but people are

still scared, they want someone else to look at it, and so...

And you go end up paying, let's say you have a simple tax return, that could still cost you...

A hundred bucks, a couple hundred bucks.

Yeah, and you go into H&R Block or TurboTax, various tax preparation companies.

So the IRS years ago decided, let's create a simple calculator online that you punch in some numbers and your taxes are done.

...