On November 20th, according to Cailianshe News (Editor: Liu Rui), as the saying goes, 'a new officer burns three fires.' Elon Musk's 'Government Efficiency Department' has not officially taken office yet, but has already started considering work plans in advance.

On Tuesday, Eastern Time, according to US media reports, Elon Musk's Government Efficiency Department (DOGE) committee is discussing the development of a free mobile tax filing application.

After this news came out, the stock prices of US tax service providers H&R Block and Intuit plummeted significantly.

DOGE is discussing the development of a tax filing app.

According to reports, the Government Efficiency Department led by Elon Musk has already discussed plans to develop a mobile application that would allow Americans to file taxes for free.

Over the weekend, the US Government Efficiency Department has tweeted, highlighting how complex the US tax laws have become.

The tweet emphasizes that since 1955, the US tax code has grown nearly 1000% to 16 million words, with lengthy and complex tax rules requiring Americans to spend 6.5 billion hours annually in preparing and filing tax returns. The post concludes: 'This needs to be simplified.'

Insiders revealed that the leaders of the DOGE committee have discussed reforming the tax system, allowing Americans to file taxes through an app, seeing it as an opportunity to improve the way millions of taxpayers interact with the federal government.

Although this idea is not seen as the core of the committee's work - DOGE's two core missions are to reduce government spending and decrease federal regulations - it may still become one of its official goals once in office.

Stock prices of American tax service providers have taken a hit.

After the news came out, the stock prices of American tax service companies plummeted. On Tuesday, Brok Services' stock price closed down over 8% Eastern Time, while Cash Thrive's stock price fell by as much as 7%.

Brok Services is a long-standing financial services company with a history of over seventy years, offering global tax services through the mobile application Spruce; whereas Cash Thrive provides an online tax filing platform TurboTax and offers professional tax products for accounting professionals.

Brok Services annually generates nearly $4 billion in revenue from its tax filing services, while Cash Thrive derives close to one-third of its revenue (about $5 billion) from its TurboTax service.

In fact, this is not the first time the U.S. government has attempted to proactively enhance tax filing services. Previously, the Biden administration introduced a pilot project through the 2022 Deflation Act, where the IRS launched an initiative allowing taxpayers to file taxes online for free, but the actual results were unsatisfactory.

Wall Street has mixed views on the potential impact of government intervention in the tax filing business.

Analyst Andrew Silverman wrote that the tax declaration application for DOGE "could theoretically threaten the revenue of Block Services and Jefferies Financial."

At the same time, a Jefferies Financial analyst released a report stating that investors selling Jefferies Financial stocks because of this news is "unfounded," as the US DOGE tax declaration application is "unlikely to take precedence in a long list of measures." He also added that the US Internal Revenue Service had previously launched a tax declaration pilot project, but it "had very little success."