Tax filing season is entering the home stretch. If you haven’t filed your taxes yet, now is the time to gather your statements and think about how you will file your return. While this task is rarely fun, the good news is that this year there is a new tool for filing taxes that Oregonians can use to file their taxes for free. That tool is Direct File, an easy, free way to file taxes for those eligible to use it. This new online tool from the IRS removes the cost and other barriers that many people often encounter when trying to file a tax return.

Our estimates show that about 640,000 Oregonians are eligible to use Direct File. This includes about 2,100 tax filers in Baker County, 2,300 in Morrow County, 13,700 in Umatilla County, 3,900 in Union County, 900 in Grant County and 900 in Wallowa County. Those are significant numbers, ranging from a low of 24% of all tax filers in Wallowa County to a high of 44% of filers in Morrow County.

The arrival of Direct File has been a long time coming. Since the start of electronic tax filing, most tax filers have needed to pay a middleman — usually a big corporation — just to carry out our civic duty of paying taxes. The reason for this is because the corporations that dominate the tax filing industry have spent millions lobbying Congress to prevent the IRS from creating its own free tax filing tool, according to a lengthy investigation by ProPublica.

But the dam finally broke last filing season when the IRS launched Direct File as a pilot program in a few states. The tool proved to be a success, based on its excellent reviews from users. This year, this free tax filing tool became available for Oregonians.

IRS Direct File is available for people who have less complicated tax returns, such as those who receive all of their income from wages or Social Security and take the standard deduction. But the tool allows people to claim tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit that can be worth thousands of dollars to families in the form of a tax refund. To determine if you qualify for IRS Direct File and to use the tool, go to directfile.irs.gov.

Once users file their federal taxes directly with the IRS using Direct File, the system directs them to Oregon Direct File, a free online filing tool created by the Oregon Department of Revenue. This integration of the federal and state filing tools removes the hassle of having to input information twice, making state tax filing easy. For eligible users, this is a great way to file Taxes.

We hope that in the years to come, the IRS will continue to add features to the tax filing tool and make it available to more people. For many tax filers, the IRS already has in its possession all or nearly all of the information that goes into a tax return, meaning that the agency could simply prepare the return for you and send it to you as a draft for your review, which you could accept or revise.

But for now, IRS Direct File has already changed the landscape of tax filing, offering a way for many people to avoid having to pay a middle-man to file taxes. So check out if you’re eligible to use Direct File and use it if you can.

Tyler Mac Innis is a policy analyst with the Oregon Center for Public Policy.