Given that it took twenty years for them to open up the *data* in the first place... I know that I was banging that drum before the turn of the millenium. "Here we do the return, we have where they work, how much they make, where they bank, where their investments are... and Lacerte is willing to tell us, "total wages"." Not a whole hell of a lot of help.
To be fair, I was using one of the (Yahoo!group's) Lacerte Tax User Group's member's Visual Basic utility since about 2009 or so. He was able to open, read, and export/save the binary data file as plain text, which I then went and parsed out into a data table.
And before that, my "normal daily routine" was to Alt+P(rint) | C(lient detail) out to a text file, for everyone that I was doing an electronic transmission for, and parse *those* into a data table. Then after the end of tax season, I would go find "everyone else" (that was not filed electronically), and generate all of those at once. Since efiling was easily 95+% of our client list, this was not terribly onerous.
ODBC connection was released in 2018, so yeah, twenty years.
And once you *HAVE* all of the data... you can do anything you want with it. "Find me all spouses under the age of 35 working at Lockheed-Martin with a W-2 over 80,000 and a Schedule C with home office, where the client has no W-2 at all BUT has a Partnership in CA."
