I was surprised how much I enjoyed reading this. Although it's necessarily opinionate d(the lead author was part of the Direct file team) it comes off as very even-handed, giving equal consideration to successes and failures, and addressing the partisan political environment in factual terms.
It's unusually well-written, providing lots of key details or dropping in relevant context without ever losing sight of the big picture and the looming deadlines. I expected to just read the executive summary and then skim the rest, but it held my attention the whole way through.
A fascinating , yet sad, post-mortem.
Anyone wheeling and dealing along in the shadows between "politics" and "deliverable, functioning product" should read it. Or, I guess, paste the link into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to summarize for them, lessons learned in bullet points and how it could apply to $their_job.
But I'm generally a weirdo who finds these kinds of reports fascinating, so don't purely go on my recommendation.
There isn’t much to study - it didn’t succeed or fail on the merits - someone didn’t like it because he didn’t create it so it got axed.
Care to share substantive evidence of your outrageous claim, or is it more karma-grabbing Reddit seethe?
You forgot to mention they subsequently made it open source.
I assume you didn't read that far if you read it at all:
I disagree wholeheartedly that there isn’t much to study. Direct File was actually a resounding success, especially when you consider how much difficulty governments tend to have shipping good software products. There is a lot of good information in here that government entities can learn from.
It had talented software engineers involved including with the marketplace. It succumbed to political forces
Including how and why it died. That is an important lesson for the entire governmental enterprise, including all decision-makers, to learn: that government CAN deliver something good and one single person should not be in totalitarian control
I think it speaks to doing things "the right way". Direct file could have been mandated by Congress, but it wasn't. Instead it only directed the IRS to do a "study" as a "voluntary agency initiative". That left full control of whether it should be done in the hands of the IRS and the executive branch.
Eh, government should not be in the business of maintaining digital infrastructure, regardless of how capable it might be. As much of it as possible should be contracted out to 3rd parties.
Explain your reasoning at least.
The government has to maintain some infrastructure to get this sort of thing done. Whether digital or analog. And if it contracts it out, it needs to oversee it. So no matter how it is done, the government has to pay.
> As much of it as possible should be contracted out to 3rd parties.
This is the case pretty much.
Don't you care about the actual outcome at all? Even if the government does a better job, you still prefer a third-party organization?
You could just light the money on fire instead and get the same result. Contractors routinely screw the tax payer. I once had a job in one of these third parties where the entire operation was effectively defrauding the tax payer by claiming 1hr jobs would take 40.
Direct File was a service not infrastructure
At exorbitant costs or lackluster execution, with plenty of campaign donations along the way
Do you think the government should allow electronic filing of taxes?
Because if the government is going to accept returns electronically instead of through the physical mail, then it should accept them without requiring an intermediary.
Interestingly, it does this for corporations, but not for individuals.
Gee, I wonder why.
Personally, I think that (a) the government needs to have my PII to process my taxes, and that (b) having the government require me to also hand my PII to a third party in order to pay taxes is a big fucking security nightmare.