About.com Rating

Tax Simple offers Web-based software to prepare and file a federal tax return for free as part of the IRS's Free File Alliance.

Eligibility for free federal return: Individuals who have adjusted gross income of $58,000 or less, are age 62 or younger, and reside in any state except for AK, FL, NH, NV, SD, TN, TX, WA, and WY.

Cost to prepare state tax return: $24.95.

Time: just under two hours to prepare a sample federal and state tax return.


Notable Features: error checking; optional forms-based interface; requires that Microsoft's Silverlight be installed and configured to use with your Web browser.

Rating: 3

Navigation and User Interface:

Visually nice screen display, but getting to and from sections was difficult at times.  One reviewer got stuck a couple of times and couldn't maneuver to get back to a particular screen easily.  Tax Simple looks nice with different color and boldness of fonts.

Tax Simple provides end-users a choice between Guide and Topics. "Guide" presents a series of interview-style questions. "Topics" presents categories of income, deductions or tax credits so that the user can work on the topics relevant to them.

Interestingly, clicking the government forms link in the top-level navigation takes the user to an interface that looks similar to the tax forms. Users can access input worksheets by clicking on a line on the tax form and then clicking a green arrow. Users can return to the interview-style program by clicking "step-by-step guide" from the top-level navigation.

Additional navigation links enables a person to jump to the personal information, U.S. tax information, state tax information, city tax information, tax review, efile and print sections of the Tax Simple program. Most of the time, though, users navigate through the program using the green Back and Continue buttons found on the page.

On the left-hand side of the screen Tax Simple displays the tax return status showing the balance due or refund and e-file status. Further down on the left is a navigation box showing subsections. When in the personal information section, the left-hand navigation panel shows subsections for personal details, address details, filing status, personal summary details and dependent details. The third and last section on the left-hand side displays "useful links" for Gather These Documents and Government Help. The links in this third section did not change as we moved through different parts of the software.

Help Features:

Tax Simple provides brief explanations of each category of income or deduction, but further information was lacking. For example, on the page where a person enters medical expenses, Tax Simple did not provide in-depth information about what types of expenses could be deducted, nor did it provide links for more information.

There's a help drop-down menu located at the upper right-hand corner of the browser screen. A search through the help content for "medical" returned one result discussing the Affordable Care Act, but no information about the types of expenses that can be deducted. Tax Simple lacks help functions found in other free tax software programs.  We went to the "Chat" section and was told it is only for software questions and not tax-related questions.

Error Checking Features:

Tax Simple conducts an error check after the federal and state tax information is finished. After the error check, Tax Simple displays a summary of the federal tax return. Users will need to set up an account and pay for the software before Tax Simple provides a PDF copy of the return to look over.

Overall Experience of the Software:

While we were a little disappointed with the lack of content in the help section, Tax Simple deserves praise for building tax software with the ability to switch back and forth between an interview-style and a forms-style interface. Tax Simple is probably best suited for people who are willing to look up tax information on their own.

To check out the software for yourself, visit Tax Simple Free File Edition.