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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that the Bill Campbell described in this article could be the same one who oversaw Intuit, a company which has engaged in some very shady business practices with regard to tax reform (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...). This is not to speak ill of the dead, only to note that people are complex and full of contradictions.

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Bill Campbell was also the one that helped negotiate the wage theft that Apple and Google were sued over. https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...

There's an interesting portrayal of Bill and his actions in Biz Stone's "Things a Little Bird Told Me", his memoir about Twitter and other things.

Can you add more to this?

At board meetings, Campbell would appear to listen to Ev’s presentations on the state of the company. After Ev’s sermons were done, the coach would clap loudly and hug his protegee, proclaiming again to everyone in the room that Ev was “doing a fucking great job” and asking them to clap… Then, after Ev left the room, proud that his mentor thought he was doing such a great job, Campbell would shout at the group: “You gotta get rid of this fucking guy. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”

http://fortune.com/2013/11/04/6-things-we-learned-from-hatch...

That's from the other Twitter history by Nick Bilton but both agree as to the nature of "coach" as betrayer.

Your timeframes are very off. He was CEO of Intuit from 1994 to 1998. The lobbying to disallow free e-filing happened in 2005 and onwards. You can't hold him accountable for things that happened 7+ years after he left. This is independent of taking either side of the morality of their lobbying, or lobbying in general.

And for the record, I am all for tax simplification. :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Campbell_(business_exe...

The guy was chairman until 2016

Good point. He would have known.

I always wanted to ask the executives how they reconciled the "Integrity Without Compromise" corporate value with the lobbying against return-free filing. But I'm almost sure the answer I'd have gotten is the same one that most of the people working on TurboTax gave me...that taxpayers need an advocate to ensure that they're not overpaying the government. If the government prepared people's returns, even if people had the option to amend them, most wouldn't go through the hassle, so the government would have an incentive to not optimize returns so that people were paying the least they were legally allowed to.

It's possible that this was just the party line that they were all told to parrot, but if felt like they had more integrity than that, so I'm choosing to believe that they've all internalized that logic and truly believe it. For my part, when I worked at Intuit, I chose to rationalize it by telling myself that I worked on an unrelated product and that I was not involved in that "shadiness." Still, whenever we'd release rosy TurboTax numbers to investors and the stock would pop, I felt a little guilty profiting from that.

The notion that people need an incentive to save money is more or less a contradiction under capitalist dogma.

One is about people and organizations, and the other is about hedging for long term interests of the company's prospects.

The details of the second could be sinister or evil from a macro, national context, but if you narrow down your scope to just Intuit the organization and its people, its lobbying efforts can be seen as doing the right thing for its workforce and their well being.

If you narrow your scope enough then almost anything can be seen as doing the right thing.

How is it "very shady"? I totally buy that tax prep firms have an interest in keeping taxation complicated, but there's a not-crazy argument that the government shouldn't obscure how and how much its citizens are taxed.

For one thing, forcing individuals to determine their own tax puts some practical limit on how complex the tax code can be.

Given that individuals can and often do outsource the execution of the tax code to software such as TurboTax, what practical limit did you have in mind?

Also, it is one thing to say that the tax code should not be secret or obfuscated. It's another thing to say that tax preparation should require use of private companies. It doesn't, quite, but you can't e-file directly with the IRS...

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