IRS Free File
About IRS Free File
The IRS Free File program was created in 2002 through an agreement between the IRS and the tax preparation industry. Under the agreement, tax software companies provide free filing for taxpayers with income below a threshold. In exchange, the IRS agreed not to develop its own free filing system. The threshold was originally 52,000 and has been raised to 79,000. The program has been criticized as confusing and underutilized. Only about 3 percent of eligible taxpayers use Free File. Intuit and other companies were found to have deliberately made Free File difficult to find. The IRS Direct File program, launched as a pilot in 2024, represents a break from the Free File approach, with the IRS providing its own filing interface.
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