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The idea was lots of people could file for free using a private online service. Not many people at all ended up using it, since it wasn't in the company's interest to have people not pay them.

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More accurate: Intuit told the federal government they would absolutely offer a free e-file tax service next to their pay service, and then they used several lies and manipulative techniques so that folks could not find it or even discover its existence.

Or if you do find it, you get intermodals with dark patterns upselling the paid service, and once you upgrade you can't downgrade back to the free-file version.

Well, you can “downgrade”... You just have to start all over. Which IMO is absolutely atrocious.

Of course they did not use it. Tax software companies went out of their way to make sure this would be the case. After all their shenanigans, they might as well have put Free File option in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.

Related: TurboTax Deliberately Hid Its Free File Page From Search Engines

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126

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