the IRS has hitherto set up neither a direct-filing system nor an automatic one, because of lobbying and conservative ideology. Intuit and its ilk have pressured both Congress and the IRS to head off such systems, and then taken the resulting profits to lobby for the tax code to be made more complicated, so ordinary Americans are even more tempted to pay to avoid the headache. One particularly evil objective in this area has been to make claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit as complex as possible, to prey on poor people who tend not to have the skill or time to fill out difficult forms. Roughly between 13 and 22 percent of EITC benefits are gulped down by tax prep companies.