> Majority of work will be done automatically by some free jQuery and PHP scripts (hello Obamacare website)
Obamacare website was notorious for being completely terrible. And so were many other government-run healthcare sites - I personally tried to find some info on CA site when it was launched and failed for several days until they worked out the kinks.
And tax code is vastly more complex than what healthcare needs. There are literally hundreds of various exceptions, deductions, conditions, etc. Many of them inter-related or conditioned on other things. Did you every try to figure out how to use some of the IRS worksheets? It's no picnic. I recently tried to figure out whether I can deduct the cost of some home improvement I've made - took me several hours and I'm still not 100% sure I got it right. US tax code is insanely complex.
Of course, it may be that IRS has most of it already implemented and it may be that this implementation actually allows to produce pre-filled return (from what I've seen from IRS, it's not that easy, but maybe I'm wrong). Still, the project would probably have very significant cost, and unlike the commercial offerings, it won't be privately financed, and it would inevitably suffer from what many government projects suffer from - cost overruns, bureaucracy, wastefulness, choosing suppliers based on political clout, etc. It's not going to be free, it's going to cost a lot of money.
> Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in the IRS possession?
Quite a lot of it. E.g. my charity donations aren't. Many of my other deductible expenses aren't. Education expenses probably aren't. A lot of small business income may not be. A lot of deals like selling non-public stock aren't.
I think you might have very narrow view of how complex a tax return can be if you don't have just "one/two salaries, standard deductions" situation - which btw many preparers offer to handle for free or near free already. That's not where the problem is. It's when it goes out of that simple case where the complications lie.
And yes, currently the simple taxpayers in some measure are subsidizing the more complex ones, by financing the platform that allows handling more complex cases with their money. However, I'd hate if I had to pay $600-$1K for my more complex case (that what it would cost to hire a tax accountant) instead of $60 or so I'm paying now for the software (plus hours of time reading IRS instructions of course).
Maybe Intuit argument is still bad, I don't know, but it's not as laughably bad as you describe it, not even close.