It was a pilot and was open to a small subset of taxpayers. It was intentionally not benefiting from economy of scale to incrementally deliver value rather than probably badly trying to hit every use case the first go around.

The cost per filing criticism is generally posited in bad faith, by people who don’t understand incremental software delivery, or both

Even if that's true, there's no reason it can't be streamlined over time. The true scaling problem is profit. The government has an interest in accurate tax collection -- not collecting a service fee.

da troof soshul bot?

the billion dollar tax prep industrial complex as a group spends the most lobbying dollars on tax policy -- in particular, suppressing any effort eliminate or even reduce filing complexity -- and lobbying ops like theirs don't happen because their service's value to tax payers speaks for itself

The government inefficiency is in doing the small pilot program and using those costs as per filing costs. Of course it's going to cost more if you only do a handful of them. The first iPhone cost a hojillion dollars to make, but Apple sells them for $1,000 and make a ton of money at that price point because they've made millions of them. This is so true for government spending that the shipyard building aircraft carriers did a press release begging congress to buy two at once because it would be cheaper than buying one and then waiting a long time and then buying a second one anyway.

https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Media/News/Article-View/Article/...

This ignores the time cost of having to find the right private company to file your taxes (everyone loves price shopping!) and manually funnel all your data into it, data the government probably already has. Tax prep costs me at least an entire day of my time every year.

P.S. When citing that you had AI do a basic analysis of something, specifying what you analyzed and which AI you used would be nice so other people can reproduce it or dig deeper.