the situation might be changing, thanks to the recent demise of a long-standing agreement between the IRS and a consortium of companies called the Free File Alliance. Under that agreement, the companies had promised to provide free tax filing for people with low incomes, and in return the IRS promised not to build anything that would compete with consumer software products like TurboTax. In 2019, when investigative journalists revealed that the companies were intentionally hiding their free option—and in fact tricking people who would have qualified for it into using a paid product instead—the
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