Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic senators on Tuesday used tax day to attack tax preparation services like TurboTax and H&R Block.
The Massachusetts liberal joined with Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Al Franken of Minnesota to request a Government Accountability Office probe of tax services that offer to front customers their refunds, to see if those services include any hidden fees.
Tax preparers like H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, and Liberty Tax Service increasingly are offering to advance customers money they are due to get back from the government at no cost. But Warren and the other Democrats want the watchdog agency to look into whether those services have fees tacked on, and say if those fees exist, they could affect millions of people.
“An overwhelming majority of Americans rely on paid tax preparers, or use third-party tax preparation software, to file their taxes each year,” they wrote.
Democrats have also taken aim at tax software products like Intuit’s TurboTax. Last week, Warren and 10 others announced that they would introduce the Tax Filing Simplification Act of 2017, which would allow the IRS to provide free online filing software that could provide pre-filled tax returns to taxpayers who chose it.
That legislation would effectively cut out the middleman, crimping TurboTax. The Democrats noted that the average taxpayer spends 13 hours preparing and filing a return, and pays $200 for tax preparation services.
In years past, Republicans have opposed legislation along those lines, on the grounds that it would grant more power to the IRS.
This year, House Republicans suggested that their proposed tax reform would simplify taxes enough to ease the tax filing experience. House Speaker Paul Ryan has suggested that, by eliminating most credits and deductions, his reform plan would allow most taxpayers to file on a return the size of a post card.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Ryan said in a video published Tuesday. “This is one of the things we are working on right now.”
