TurboTax pushed low-income taxpayers to paid tier to make up for Trump tax law

What Intuit/TurboTax is doing here is a classic bait and switch. TurboTax is legally required to make filing free for many individuals, but funnels them into unnecessary paid products. They make it almost impossible to find the free product, going as far as making sure those pages are unindexed from search engines.

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I saw this first hand with their tax filing. They would ask vague questions on if something applied to you or not. If you answered yes it applying to you, they immediately forced you to use their paid tier. If you went back and clicked "no", you were unable to go back to the free tier. I was also unable to delete any of my data off of their system, so I was left with TurboTax having a lot of my personal data and a half filled out tax return.

I ended up going through a different tax software to file my taxes.

This is such a mess... In India, the income tax department releases both Excel and Java versions of their forms that you can fill, verify, sign, and upload (as xml) - see https://www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/downloads/incomeTax...

And what is this about a 2002 deal between Intuit and the IRS agreeing for the IRS not to release a tool that competes against TurboTax? That's so completely bizzare. Why in the world would the IRS strike a deal like that, that is detrimental to their own interests?

Isn't this essentially upselling? I struggle to see how this is newsworthy considering this is a common sales tactic across virtually all domains.

This story originally broken by a Planet Money podcast.