Corporations like Intuit TurboTax spend millions of dollars of the money you give them to loby the government and keep the system so convoluted that you need them to do your taxes.
This is more a meme than a reality. I'm sure that they do spend money to protect their business but it's a bit silly to think that they have a measurable effect on the tax code complexity compared to the money that comes from other special interests. People with simple tax situations could very easily full out the forms from the IRS. The 1040ez lives up to it's name -- doing it with software is in most cases just more convenient. And people with complicated tax situations have a tax accountant.
There's a middle ground with upper middle incomes and small businesses which have somewhat reasonably nontrivial tax code that applies. In the absence of software they would probably be pushed the accountant route. Generally people want this complexity because they pay less compared to proposed simpler systems.
It's not about the tax code complexity. It's about the government having a system in place to use the information it already has to automatically complete your taxes if you have a simpler tax return. This happens in a lot of other countries and, having lived in one where this happens, is much better.
Intuit lobbys to stop this happening because they know a lot of people don't have complex returns and if the government automatically calculates basic returns it would wipe out a large portion of their customer base.
