Professor Ventry, collaborators explain why 'filing taxes isn't easy' in Politico op-ed

Professor Dennis J. Ventry, Jr. co-wrote a Politico op-ed titled “Why filing taxes isn’t easy.”

“Congress is working hard to ensure that doing your taxes remains a time-consuming and expensive endeavor,” Ventry and co-authors Joseph Bankman and Daniel Hemel assert in the op-ed. The piece points to two bills now in the Senate that, the authors say, “seek to stop the IRS from simplifying the tax-filing process.”

One would prevent the IRS from offering free online tax preparation, paired with electronic filing. The other would stand in the way of the IRS “pre-populating” tax forms with taxpayers’ details - an innovation that would save time by not requiring the filling out of entire forms.

This apparent resistance to streamlining tax preparation can be traced to the tax software industry’s worries about losing business if the IRS makes filing easier and cheaper.

H&R Block has spent $3.4 million lobbying the current Congress, and Turbo Tax maker Intuit has pitched in an additional $3.1 million, Ventry, Bankman and Hemel report. “They and their employees also have contributed more than $500,000 this cycle to congressional candidates, political action committees, and parties,” Ventry and his co-authors write.

Professor Ventry is an expert in tax policy and legal ethics. His research interests include tax expenditure analysis, family taxation, professional responsibility and standards of care, tax filing and administration, tax compliance, public finance, and tax and legal history. In addition, he is chairman of the IRS Advisory Council, and co-author on the casebook, Federal Income Taxation with Martin McMahon, Jr., Daniel L. Simmons, and Bradley T. Borden.