I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes.

It’s relatively easy to make a free 1040 file. The real problem comes from all. The. Edge. Cases.

1) do you support xyz state? 2) what if I lived in multiple states? 3) what if i…

And on and on.

And it’s not just one and done. Every year IRS and states are changing their shit so you have to go thru and make all kind of updates and verifications every year.

It takes an army to build and maintain. Generally not the kind of thing for open source (unless they’re paid). But then what’s the point? One may say it’s more transparent, but TurboTax etc are transparent with their formulas - you can check every box they fill in for you.

I think the only thing that can really disrupt this dynamic are “free” commercial software (like credit karma now cash app), or government provided.

The way we got this is interestingly twisted.

French citizens requested the software used by the administration, and they managed to get it!

But, it was written in Mlang, a proprietary language created by the french administration in the 90: https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang.

Someone then decided to create an OCaml compiler that takes mlang and emits python: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966

As a result, we got Open Fisca. I now think there are other techs in the mix...

A slide of the story: https://www.slideshare.net/Etalab/opening-up-the-french-tax-...

But I believe it should be mandatory for the state to provide the source of every softwares they use internally to manage our lives. Also a test suite to allow any citizen to validate their own effort to comply with the law.

Just like laws should be published as diff of the previous laws, in a VCS repo.