Cindy Black of Linwood, Washington, has almost always done her own taxes. The 62-year-old nonprofit executive’s situation is straightforward: She only has one or two W2 forms for her employment, sometimes with a 1099 for some consulting work on the side, and her bank interest to report. She’s always figured that it wasn’t worth paying a company like TurboTax or H&R Block to do work she was capable of doing herself.

Naturally, that meant the onus was on her to print out paper forms and set aside hours to complete her taxes each year, following the instructions and hoping she got everything right. It was a process she consistently dreaded, so much so that she typically put it off until right before April 15. In more recent years she’s used the Internal Revenue Service’s free filing options, which offer people who earn under certain thresholds access to commercial tax prep software. These, she says, are “better than the paper ones but still time consuming.” Making her way through the numerous questions—and determining whether she qualified for various credits and deductions—took a lot of work. “It didn’t take a lot less time.” If she owed the government, it meant going through a separate process to either mail in a check or muddle through another online form.

But then she read about the IRS’s new Direct File pilot in a newspaper article, an option the IRS launched this year to let Americans file their taxes for free directly with the agency. And when she found out that her state is one of the ones where the pilot is operational this tax season, she was delighted. “I went, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea,’” she said.

Congressional Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which not only sent more funding to the IRS but required it to study direct filing. The IRS took that prompt and decided to build and roll out such an option this year. This season, Direct File is available in 12 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. It’s open to people with the simplest tax situations: those who take the standard deduction—which nearly 90 percent of Americans do—with W2 earnings from salaried employment, benefits from Social Security or unemployment insurance, and interest income of $1,500 or less. The IRS expects several hundred thousand people to use it this season; more than 50,000 people used it in the first two weeks.

Those lucky thousands who get to use Direct File this year will almost certainly save a whole lot of money and time. The IRS estimated that the average taxpayer spent $210 and 11 hours to file their taxes in 2019.

A few days after Black read about Direct File she decided to use it during an hour-long break in her work schedule, hoping that would be enough time to get her return done. She gathered the few documents she would need and logged in. “It was really user friendly compared to the other ones that I’ve used,” she said. “The questions were simple and very clear.” At the end she was told she owed $17 and was able to make the payment right then and there.

It took her between 15 and 20 minutes from start to finish, giving her back about 45 minutes to do other things. That kind of time “is really valuable,” she said. “That’s huge.” She also said it was far less stressful.

“It was the most convenient way I’ve ever filed my taxes,” she said. “I........

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