I was shocked how easy it was to do my taxes when I was poor (back before the online services even). Just went to the library and spent half an hour filling out a 1040EZ form and dropping it in a mailbox.

It's harder now that I actually have contributions to retirement, back when I owned a house, make considerably more, have two kids and a wife that's going to school, etc. But still took me less than an hour.

And I would argue that if it takes you more than an hour to do taxes, you both should and can afford someone to do taxes for you.

Oh interesting yeah, so doesn't actually sound too complex for most people then.

I'm a little confused about the last part, what are the main differences between paid and free services if it's as simple as you describe with the W-2 form?

Even then buying and selling stocks, having a 401k, IRA, etc. doesn't even make it complicated. You just have to fill out a 1099-B/DIV/INT and then list your contributions to your retirement accounts.

I don't know why people pretend it's so hard. You spend 30 minutes every year answering a few questions and punching numbers into boxes from a few documents that are sent to you by your broker/bank/employer. It's also only $15 at FreeTaxUSA.

Opening the accounts you report to the IRS is arguably more difficult than filing them on your taxes.

To be fair the vast majority have it fully automated PAYE and don't even have to file. Though it's a good point, I'm pretty sure the tax forms you get the numbers from are a standard format, I wonder why they haven't got something like that in place here.

At the very least you should be able to upload the PDFs from your work payroll as the end of year forms and it could pull the details from those

Apparently so! I'm just finding this out

I had got the impression that it was some laborious task where you basically had to hire an accountant or pay for some software