It’s also FUD about how complex, or really how simple, doing your own taxes can be. Filling out a 1040 for the overwhelmingly common situation of a single job is a cake walk. The vast majority of people would be taking the standard deduction now as well.

A paper 1040A would be faster than going through an online system for many. Just mail it in.

What about a mortgage in another state? This always trips me up.

They answer that in the NPR podcast the parent linked to. But it essentially boils down to the fact that taxes are constitutionally voluntary yet tax evasion is illegal.

I'm no constitutional scholar but I don't think the IRS is constitutionally prohibited from sending me a filled out tax form and asking me if it's correct.

Say what now?

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

They do anyway. One year, I must have screwed up my return, because I got a letter from the IRS saying: We think you screwed up, here's why, send us X amount, and we're good. Or you can file an amended return.

I sent in X amount. We were good.

FYI those letters are, afaik at least, typically grossly overestimated. The number is meant to scare you into calling a CPA to straighten it out, essentially. So for anyone else with the same kind of letter, don't just pay unless you know that it's correct ahead of time.

Note that this is a letter for an incorrect return, not an unfiled one.

I had one of those, and it specifically identified the error. When I went and checked the paperwork, the figure in the letter was precisely correct.

So, a tax filing life hack: fill $1 to all fields of the form and wait IRS to tell how much you actually need to pay?

Thanks for that tip. In our case, the error was due to a missing form, and when I corrected it in Turbo Tax, my number was close enough to the IRS number, so I called it a day.