So Monday was tax day, but in the week's frenzy of gathering your receipts and getting a return to the post office in time,

you may have missed the important tax news that happened in Congress on April 9th.

The House passing the Taxpayer First Act.

It is a bipartisan bill that would permanently ban the IRS from offering its own free electronic tax system.

The Taxpayer First Act is a big fat government handout to H&R Block, Intuit, and the rest of the for-profit tax prep industry.

Through an agreement with the IRS, they currently offer free tax filing services to those taxpayers making less than

$66,000 a year. But clicking on that option yields aggressive upselling that attempts to bait

and switch users away from the free offer. H&R Block has spent $3.4 million lobbying the Congress into it, which makes

turbotax, has given $3.1 million, and their voices were heard. For the second straight

year, the bill has sailed through the House. But before the Senate voted last year, there was an intervention by tax scholar

Dennis Ventry, whose opinion piece in The Hill called the free file program a scam. That bill

subsequently failed to reach the Senate floor, and how it will fare this time around remains to be seen.

Ventry is a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Dennis, welcome to O.T.M. Thank you. You've written about the

reasons you think it's a terrible idea. One is that it would turn what amounts to a promotional

come-on to permanent U.S. law. It could be called the

Tax Preparation Industry U.S. Act, huh? Well, I hadn't thought of that. I wish I had. Just

yesterday I was having a conversation with one of my students. She had used free file this year. She qualified by income.

She only had about $15,000 worth of adjusted gross income. And when she got to inputting something

about educational expenses, the particular provider software indicated that she needed to purchase

a fee-based upsell deluxe edition. When she got to her very nominal small business income, same thing. Sorry, you need to purchase a fee-based upsell deluxe edition when she got to her very nominal

small business income same thing sorry you need to purchase a deluxe edition if you want to continue

using us now the industry group the free file alliance is all for this legislation and in support of it

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