TurboTax to pay $141M in agreement reached by all 50 states | Hacker News Reader

TurboTax to pay $141M in agreement reached by all 50 states

ag.ny.gov

243 pointsxdfg13345175 comments

This is the important part of the article:

> Consumers are expected to receive a direct payment of approximately $30 for each year that they were deceived into paying for filing services. Impacted consumers will automatically receive notices and a check by mail.

It looks like TurboTax is being required to return the money they fraudulently obtained, but they're not even required to pay interest or any additional restitution or punitive damages. It's definitely disappointing and a minor miscarriage of justice.

Edit: Two things I want to clarify from my original comment. First, I wasn't able to find pricing info from the years in question so I went from what I remembered as their lowest pricing tier which I think was $30. Second, I use the term "minor miscarriage of justice" as a comparison to the Sackler BS which was a gross (as in disgusting) miscarriage of justice.

It's better than a coupon for free tax preparation next year, which is sort of what I expected.

Given the recent trend of incompetence leading into borderline scams I don’t blame you.

True, I feel like coupons are a way that a lot of these go. I remember my $14 Ticketmaster coupon (or something I don't remember the exact amount) that had an expiration date on it.

Some of the class action suits also require you to be the one to put in effort to receive your money, so the fact that TurboTax is just mailing everyone a check seems better than others. And "better" doesn't necessarily mean "good". Still not a fan of TurboTax or the US tax filing system.

Is that a full refund? The cheapest Turbotax product is $60 + 50 for state.

I assumed that TurboTax has already adjusted their pricing tiers in response to the lawsuit since my vague memory of many years ago is that the lower tier was about $30. If someone can give more accurate pricing information for the effected years that would be cool.

The economy is rigged. Intuit made $5.7 billion in revenue (2021) and the fine is only $141m.

I agree with you. Miscarriage of justice. Like a bank robber only having to return the money as the "fine" and zero punishment after.

I don't think Intuit's total revenue is relevant to this discussion. The most relevant number is how much money did they make off this little scheme which seems to be much less than their total revenue. I didn't see this value in the article, nor was I able to find TurboTax's pricing model for the years in questions so I went off (my very fuzzy) memory that their lowest tier was about $30.

When you ignore a red light, the fine is not calculated based on whether you had an accident or not. For a fine to be significant, it has to exceed the profit made from the crime, otherwise you'll keep running red lights until you actually crash or run someone over.

Given its profits, Intuit could easily survive a fine of one billion, and would think twice about implementing similar frauds in the future. Behaving ethically would be in the best interest of their stockholders.

> When you ignore a red light, the fine is not calculated based on whether you had an accident or not. For a fine to be significant, it has to exceed the profit made from the crime, otherwise you'll keep running red lights until you actually crash or run someone over.

Sure but that would still be based on the profits of the scheme, not any other unrelated revenue. In your traffic light analogy it’d be like billing the ticket based upon how many miles per year you drive rather than the speed limit or how fast you were going.

I can't remember which, but there are countries where traffic fines are scaled to your income, which would be a great way to fine companies.

Finland is most often given as an example of this.

If we're giving them the rights of people, then just fine them by time with the same effect as if they were a person.

Median wage is $12/hr and a company with $50bn/yr revenue does something that would normally be $120? $250 million.

> For a fine to be significant, it has to exceed the profit made from the crime

I think their point is that we don't know how much profit Intuit made from the crime (at least, I couldn't find it in the article). The assumption is that tricking people into paying to file when they didn't have to is not 100% of their revenue.

That was understood. The point is that the fine is punitive and should be a large portion of their revenue to make it clear that bad behavior is the opposite of profitable and continued bad behavior may lead to bankruptcy.

Yet, the fine for running a red light is not proportional to a persons earnings (in the us).

It’s like parking in places that could lead to a ticket. If you only get a ticket once every 100 times you park. It might be cheaper and more convenient to park illegally.

The system has to up enforcement or up the pain of non compliance. Else you encourage people to take the rational choice of breaking the rules.

>"I don't think Intuit's total revenue is relevant to this discussion. The most relevant number is how much money did they make off this little scheme which seems to be much less than their total revenue."

So following this logic, unethical behavior, deceptive practices and bogus advertising is less important than the percentage of total revenue gotten from those practices? That sounds like a talking point straight out of the Intuit PR book. Without considering total revenue, a fine like this is just the cost of doing business for Intuit, a footnote on an otherwise wonderful corporate earnings statement.

Do you also suppose that $30 was always the true cost to the victims? There's no shortage of people that live hand to mouth who would have been negatively impacted by being duped out of that $30.

And just for historical perspective this is a company that signed an agreement with the IRS back in 2002 to provide "Free File" to American tax payers in exchange for the IRS not creating a competing free file platform.[1]. Not only did they fail to honor their agreement but they actively engaged in subverting it. What's the fair price for abusing the public trust? It's not unreasonable to think that some of that $30 was actually used by Intuit to pay lobbyists to ensure those same duped people continued to have no viable free filing option available to them.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2002-free-online-electronic-...

> As part of the agreement, Intuit admitted no wrongdoing

It was literally just a cost of doing business. They did nothing wrong*

*According to our justice system.

The right comparison is yearly income - $2.062B. From the 10K, TurboTax and Mint are 37% of revenue. Mint is probably negligible, so the income from TurboTax is $0.67B a year or 5x the fine.

That’s if you’re equating one year of income vs 3 years of behavior. The fine is for 2016-2018 in which we can safely assume Intuit made at least 1.5B on TurboTax. So the income made commensurate to the fine is closer to 8x.

This is one of the reasons why trust in public institutions have plummeted. This is also the reason for the rise of both the far right and far left.

Also important, from Intuit's statement:

> As part of the agreement, Intuit admitted no wrongdoing

I hate this and I don't understand why the government always agrees to it. Isn't an admission of wrongdoing more valuable than a tiny fine? Why do they always accept this kind of settlement? Isn't it both the right thing to do and better politics to keep the case going until the corporation at least has to admit it broke the law?

There are two reasons to take a settlement:

1. You’re not sure if you will win.

2. You don’t want to pay the cost of fighting.

If the two sides roughly agree on the likelihood of victory, it makes sense to settle so both can save legal costs. You can multiply the probability of victory by the spoils and make that the settlement amount. The costs and risks of fighting give some more incentive to come to a compromise even when the odds are unclear.

Sometimes settlements do include an admission of wrongdoing. The fact that this one didn’t is a suggestion that TurboTax had some strength in the negotiation. Either the case was not a slam dunk, or the states had some kind of other constraints. Maybe they judged that negotiating for more money was more valuable than an admission of guilt (which is easy to argue, since the consumers harmed will get utility from the money in their bank account).

> I hate this and I don't understand why the government always agrees to it

Taking things to trial is very expensive, and you the taxpayer is paying that cost. The company is probably never going to admit wrongdoing even if found guilty.

not admitting wrongdoing scopes the settlement to only that transaction (exchange of money in this case.)

Admitting wrongdoing can lead to other cases (because your admission can become evidence), so it’s a much more expensive settlement for the person or company, possibly expensive that it’s not worth settling.

But no punitive damages. If I personally deceived people to this extent then reimbursement would be the least hurtful penalty. I'd be looking at jail time. The least the FTC could do is levy treble damages.

How about instead of fining them, we just create a free tax filing website at the IRS to spite them? $141MM is just the cost of doing business, and that's ridiculous.

Because the IRS tied their own hands when they agreed not to compete. You'd need to find political will to change that and "how you file your taxes" isn't a sexy issue that gets voters to give a fuck.

> they agreed not to compete

Apparently, as of 2019, this is no longer the case.[0]

0. https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-reforms-free-file-pro...

Re-reading the original comment, I misunderstood their verb tense. I took it as "why hadn't we just done this ourselves" and was pointing out the historic glad-handing.

You are correct that in response to the issue, the IRS cut out the sweetheart deal they'd given the industry originally.

The IRS went 3 months past promised deadline on their withholdings estimator site. I can't imagine the folly that'd be produced by them attempting tax software, as wrong as that sounds.

Because they're ridiculously underfunded. Half of the conservative movement is based around trying to starve the IRS to death so that de facto taxes for wealthy people don't exist anymore.

It’s bipartisan

There is a continuous issue in our government where you can support a department and its efforts however its continuous underfunding or gutting has made the department essentially defunct.

Then when the rest of our electorate looks at it they say "what is this shit dept? it doesn't do anything anyway, let's find a privatized solution".

That was in fact the entire goal of gutting it. That and passing the cost onto you, the citizen in addition to the taxes paid for said defuct department that has a few well paid bureacrats sitting in there finding more ways for it to be shitty at its job.

This is an openly stated conservative talking point and goal. I first noticed it happening in earnest under GW Bush with the EPA, dept of interior, post office, and more.

Even better is to have the IRS to automatically calculate your tax each year. Send a postcard with the results, if you disagree, you do the entire filing yourself. Planet Money[0] did a story about California's attempt years ago. Conservatives vetoed the legislation because they think taxes should be painful.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/epis...

> Conservatives vetoed the legislation because they think taxes should be painful

It's a shame that Republicans have totally dominated California politics since ReadyReturn got vetoed. It's like Texas on the west coast.

ReadyReturn did eventually make it through the legislature, so you sarcasm doesn't fit the situation.

Even better would be to abolish the income tax and the IRS. Democrats and Rhinos opposed this during the TEA party revival, which became MAGA at the frustration and realization of the uniparty of DC.

But keep playing dems vs repubs game. Many have already seen the realization that its now elitist vs MAGA. Aka elitist trying to control everyone else vs individuals trying to live their lives

It already exists: https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...

If you're below the threshold I think it should be similar to TurboTax & etc, while the Fillable Forms one is the same as the paper forms.

I used the IRS’s online forms this year and was happy with the process. But I just took last year’s forms and updated the numbers, it’d be much more difficult from scratch. Also, I have the lingering fear that the IRS is more likely to audit forms filled out by hand instead of by some company…

Doing exactly that was actually the origin of Free File system that Intuit was supposed to be providing. Back in 2002 the IRS was set to create an electronic free filing system. In response the tax prep lobby comically named "The Free File Alliance"[1] went into overdrive to prevent this. The IRS agreed to forgo creating their own Free Tax file system if Intuit, H&R Block et al. would agree to provide that service to tax payers. This is the agreement that was executed by both parties two decades ago:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2002-free-online-electronic-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_File_Alliance

My only confusion in this ongoing saga is, how is there no open source free hosted solution for people to do this? Or are there any but they're not reliable/famous?

I have worked at Intuit, Bangalore for a short time as a contractor and once during a weekly feature demo, a guy joked that "user shouldn't see the obvious way to cancel the payment". There was laughter around. It was a dark pattern but no one cared. They were boasting about being one of the best places to work all the time.

But it was hell. They simply don't give contractors a place to sit and work. You're called 'Mobile'. So you get to sit only where the full time employees don't sit or when they are on leave. It was humiliating and i simply don't understand why they have that as a policy. The manager was talking as if he moved mountains for us a couple of contractors to sit. But it was actually a couple of desks where there was direct sun light and no full time employees would sit because it's so hot and you get sweaty in minutes. I left in a couple of months and didn't even say good bye.

There is: GNUcash, ledger, and beancount.

this was shared recently

https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes

I tried using it; it's very limited. It might work for you if you have W2 income and nothing else.

Well, State and fed tax can be filed free and all the forms are available online or even free printed copies in public libraries.

Can we please just solve the much bigger problem which is that ordinary people should not need to use any third party services to create, validate, and submit individual income tax returns. The IRS can and should be the provider of this software.

Or just abandon Income Taxes (57% of US households don't pay any anyway) and embrace Land Value Taxes to fund State and Federal operations. Apply a credit for each child of the owner living in the dwelling to encourage house ownership.

I mean, Texas essentially runs that way (minus the credit) and I wouldn't exactly call it a utopia here.

I'm not sure I like the idea of land value taxes though I concede there is a better argument that government expenses correlate better to land owned than to income.

I think the issue is less about expenses and more about what the populace will tolerate handing over.

The one thing that's good about land value taxes is (perhaps) that they correlate more with wealth, so politicians who get rich from the state at least have to pay tax for their fancy houses.

Well Intuit has tried very hard to prevent that and so far has been successful.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

There is a whole industry around improving digital services the US Government provides (and State governments as well).

Check out 18F / USDS sometime.

Can we do the same to Dunn & Bradstreet DUNS number? This is free as well, required for business credit score creation and reporting, federal contracting, and oddly for posting an app on the Apple App Store.

But they have an insane number of anti-patterns to get you to pay for it and other products in the way.

A lot of people here asking "Why is the fine so low, how does this happen!" I recommend reading "The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives"[0] which is obviously a bit broader than just fines, but does touch on the history and current state of things with respect to corporate malfeasance.

One thing that I did not know (too young to be paying close enough attention at the time), but was interesting to me was the backlash from Arthur Andersen collapsing and the resulting loss of jobs as part of the whole Enron scandal. This was at least somewhat blamed on government overreach in going after Enron, even if that wasn't exactly the case, and helped to set the table for quite a slide in standards over time.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2017/07/30/535799735/corporate-bungling-...

So the fed doesn't want to be to harsh and risk destabilizing the economy? Then by doing this, encourages companies to engage in shitty behavior. Which could then destabilize the economy when they implode.

Capitalism™: Shut up, it tastes good!?

[Yeah I'm being reductive, just annoyed to watch all this and feel helpless that nothing changes]

Right, but when large "needed" industries fail and destabilize things, they just get bailed out. In the end, it all works out for the investor class.

The investor class is anyone with a 401k

Most people with a 401k derive a small portion of their income from it.

If >60% of your income comes from your day job, you're not part of the investor class, you're part of the working class.

I swear the broad adoption of 401k programs is one of the biggest crimes against the working class.

So much risk for the owner of the money and tons of upside for all the supply chain servicing them.

The idea of people investing their retirement seems like a good one, but yes I'm afraid it winds up just being a scam. The worst part appears to be that the monetary authorities now can't allow recessions, because that would destroy people's ability to retire. So, you get a bloated economy where creative destruction isn't allowed to occur.

What risk? The 401k is for retirement planning, you're looking at 20+ years horizon, the risk on a global index fund is inexistant at that time scale

Why do you think this?

You're not technically wrong, but I think a reasonable reading of my comment could see the implication that I was speaking of the individuals who are actively investing and derive their primary income from it.

If some schmuck pulling 50K a year with a passive 1% contribution to his 401K thinks he's the same as Warren Buffet or the guys at Bain, I can't stop him.

Nothing capitalistic about this. Super complex taxes are a problem created by the Government.

Get rid of the income tax and switch to a simple sales tax and most returns would be eliminated

Most people don't have super complex taxes, there's no reason the IRS can't just send them an itemized bill every April, that you can either attest to the correctness of, and pay, or contest by doing a full filing.

Progressive income taxes aren't what make tax filing a pain.

It should be quarterly and a bill, not a refund.

On the contrary, regulatory capture and similar issues are a necessary consequence of capitalist accumulation.

The opposite of a free market is having a government decide winners and losers. A reason why many like low regulations. Reduces governments ability to screw things up.

I think some countries use a different tradeoff than the US for their income tax. Instead of spending a ton of government and taxpayer time and effort to accurately assess what each taxpayer owes, the government simply generates an estimate based on what it knows about each taxpayer and uses that. They accept the reduced accuracy but it is offset by the reduced effort in determining everyone's bills. That is to say, you don't need to move away from an income tax to address the problem.

I believe in China in these cases the government would take over the company and charge the executives. Maybe we should take the same approach.

Maybe, maybe not. All depends on how many friends you have in the party, and whether the current leading faction sees you as a threat or not

More often than not, the investors take some losses (foreign investors are usually wiped out), and the company is reconstituted with the same executives holding similar positions (and equity in the new company). This is done because large companies are usually politically well-connected, and the various levels of government in China prefer stability over rule-of-law.

"Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed;

To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!"

- Isaiah 10:1-2

Seems to me we got an awful lot of that going on these days.

The problem is that politicians who want to legislate based on their religious values are extremely picky about which tennets of their faith they want to codify into law.

Luke 3:10-11

“‘What should we do then?’ the crowd asked. John answered, ‘Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.’”

There's a distinct absence of many people willing to either legislate that into law or practice it themselves. Not that I'm advocating for codifying such things into law: this is merely an observation, and an expression of my frustration with those who want to impose their values on others, but only when it's convenient for them.

I wouldn't argue the original point was about religious legislating. It's more about a fundamental principle of a just society is that it doesn't allow the rich and powerful to oppress others because they have money.

Turning this into some sort of weird partisan issue seems that you are more interested in scoring points for your side than any real effort to discover truth.

A weirder and harder to find recommendation: "Essays in the economics of crime and punishment". While quite old, gives a good overview of the thinking behind how governments establish systems of fines, jail time and how their thresholds are figured out to calculate restitution to society.

Find in a nearby library here: https://www.worldcat.org/title/essays-in-the-economics-of-cr...

Lack of punishments in form of incarceration being the norm is what makes this happen repeatedly.

> New York Will Receive Over $5.4 Million for More Than 176,000 New Yorkers

That's $30 each for users who are already onboarded and very likely to use this high-margin product again next year. As customer acquisition strategies go, "outright fraud" is looking pretty good!

“This agreement should serve as a reminder to companies large and small that engaging in these deceptive marketing ploys is illegal.” I think he meant profitable. From Intuit’s perspective this is like a court order to dump out the cup of coffee you bought.

Forget the people who signed up from their ad, let’s add up the money the country has collectively spent (wasted) on CPAs, TurboTax, H&R Block, etc due to the complex income tax code Intuit and friends perpetually lobby to maintain.

Intuit is a parasite on our society. Their newest strategy is to force businesses using QuickBooks into software subscriptions because we all know the logical rules for double entry bookkeeping are constantly in flux /s

Fortunately there's an easy way to work out if the punishment is sufficent - Fiduciary duty will cause the replacement of the CEO and board if they made the wrong decision in fucking the population over and assuming their vast profits wouldn't easily cover any fine.

For context, Intuit's market cap at end of day today: $126.68B.

Some cash flow measure is probably a better comparison (it will still only be days or a few weeks of those).

The right comparison is yearly income - $2.062B. From the 10K, TurboTax and Mint are 37% of revenue. Mint is probably negligible, so the income from TurboTax is $0.67B a year or 5x the fine.

141M would be like me having to pay 1000$ fine for robbing a federal bank where I stole $10 billion.

Wishing Intuit were fined out of existence, but a man can dream I guess.

$2.5M of the $141M is for “admin fees” ಠ_ಠ

$2.5M is a remarkably low percentage. If this means that 98% of the fine actually goes back to consumers, that's better than I've ever heard of from a class action lawsuit.

lol at 140 million going to consumers.

That’s going to be like $1 per person per year they used the service

Per the article, it's $30 per person per year.

It's not everyone who used TurboTax, just people use use the Free Edition which is what this lawsuit is about.

Not sure I understand.. if they used the Free Edition, shouldn't they not have paid anything? I'm guessing that is the crux of the issue, but I guess I always assumed Turbo Tax got you started on the Free Edition then tried to upsell you. Sounds like they charge you money while keeping you on the Free Edition?

The Free Edition doesn't support most use cases so it's not really free. According to the article, iirc, it supports less than a quarter of tax returns.

smh, couldn't even read a press release:

>nder the agreement, Intuit will provide restitution to nearly 4.4 million consumers who started using TurboTax’s Free Edition for tax years 2016 through 2018 and were told that they had to pay to file even though they were eligible to file for free using the IRS Free File program offered through TurboTax. Consumers are expected to receive a direct payment of approximately $30 for each year that they were deceived into paying for filing services. Impacted consumers will automatically receive notices and a check by mail.

$30/year per person who shouldn't have paid TurboTax is not nothing.... especially for people who would have qualified for the free filing program. Getting $60 back is a pretty good day for them. That's a days work at minimum wage.

"Class action lawsuits" are a weirdly American thing as well.

Bit like short-sellers.

Ideally government/state would enforce fair play - but instead it's left to private enterprise (financiers and lawyers) to patrol, for the potentially ridiculous returns that can make for wrong-doing. Makes me think of old "Wanted Posters", just for "Wrongdoers" and the reward being "Ridiculous"

Does also make me wonder how much blackmail goes on, unnoticed. There must be more than a few "reports" that got bought be a company for a large consultancy fee..

That's because this wasn't a class action suit, but litigated by the state AG.

1.7% doesn't feel like a lot to administer giving away $141M....

Is the IRS under any obligation to provide e-filing systems access to companies like Intuit that knowingly flout the law?

If not, they should revoke it.

I am not without complaints over my government (United Kingdom) - but they did manage to built an online tax system, without suddenly deciding that private companies would enhance the experience.

By all means fine the bejeesus out of Intuit - but do not think for one moment the actual problem wasn't that they managed to lobby their way into that position.

If anybody is interested, I quite like the UK government website - https://www.gov.uk/

It has the appearance that it was knocked up in notepad, but after using it, I have a modicum of respect for how it makes government usable.

gov.uk is a breath of fresh air compared to the commercial swamp of the surface web. It’s a great example of design-is-how-it-works elevated above design-is-how-it-looks.

> It has the appearance that it was knocked up in notepad, but after using it, I have a modicum of respect for how it makes government usable.

I'd wager that the looks have a lot to do with accessibility. Government sites are interesting in that to fill their purpose they're on the far end of the spectrum of website and system accessibility—in that they must be usable for:

1. People who don't have typical eyesight—colorblind, blind, vision with poor focus, issues distinguishing text without a sufficient level of contrast

2. People who don't use keyboards or mice to navigate—this could include folks using screen readers, voice assistants, or more exotic interface devices (think paraplegics using eye-tracking software or tongue switches).

3. People who are not neurotlypical and may struggle to use the website—think dyslexia, anxiety (info-dense walls of text can trigger panic attacks), or individuals who have trouble using computers or the internet.

There's likely a lot more there than I'm personally aware of, but making even a basic service available and usable to a constituency can take a huge amount of effort. The UK gov website guidelines[1] touch on this and I applaud any government or organization that takes these things seriously.

1. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-p...

Oh I agree - it looks like it does for all of those reasons. Even for normal me, when using it, I find I like the design language. e.g. When sorting out my tax, it has sections that clearly explain "Does this apply to you" and if it does and you fill it in, then you get a summary on the "master-list" you eventually submit.

Also the only site where clicking on the "more info" section actually clears up any query I had.

I've no doubt there're endless interactions, a/b testing and all the rest that have enabled them to create something that looks so basic. It's just that's such an unfamiliar pattern to engage with. We all "tut-tut" over "dark design" - but there are very few commercial sites that want you to get in, do your task quickly/accurately - and then leave for a year. e.g. Google prides themselves on you finding what you're looking for quickly - but they want you to come back again.

I feel this way about most utilities I deal with. TMobile and Comcast both have terrible UX for their websites. PG&E is a bit better, but only in that it's better organized.

I'd love for more services to have simpler interfaces. I honestly feel the web in general is over-complicated for most day-to-day tasks. This may just me being grumpy about the volume of poorly implemented single page apps I run into.

Oh, you've just picked another of my personal scabs there.

"We'd like you to use our website, but we don't take it seriously"

You know the companies, they stick up your renewal quote 20% and hope you'll not notice. You go to their web-site, and there's just an "accept" button. You enter 'web-chat and after 30 mins, they'll knock it down to an 18% increase" Then you phone them and after some endless messages around "have you tried using our website" you can eventually escalate it through a few phone operators around the world to 'on-shore-customer-retention", who'll knock it down to an inflationary 3% increase.

Feel all this could easily be replaced by some 30 min online IQ test - I'd still waste the same time, but at least it would cost them less to retain me.

You could also volunteer to train their negotiation AI, to be used in future years.

Or perhaps you did!

Can’t recall where I saw it in the past (maybe even on HN - I know a bunch of the digital team hang around here) but I read something about how it was also important to make it function well on low powered mobile devices with poor internet because a lot of people that need the service aren’t as fortunate as many of us.

Honestly, I love the work the Uk team has done on the digital services. I find them a real pleasure to use. Very clear, consistent and functional. There are a lot of corners they’re yet to get to, but the areas that have been sorted out are great.

I hate to break it to you, but they did decide that private companies would enhance the experience, they call it "Making Tax Digital".

Soon for VAT and Income Tax you will need to use "compatible software" from an approved vendor, you won't be allowed to just submit your details through the governments own website anymore. Great stuff.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/find-software-thats-compatible-w...

The API for MTD stuff is very open:

https://developer.service.hmrc.gov.uk/api-documentation/docs...

And because of that there's tonnes of approved software, including loads of actually-free services:

https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/making-tax-digital-software

Including GNUCash, where you can register for your own developer key and file away for free - https://github.com/cybermaggedon/gnucash-uk-vat

This seems like exactly the right way for a government to opt out of writing its own web front-ends.

Agreed. The best UX is one everyone's taxes don't have to pay for.

That seems pretty good, no? There won’t be any faffing with vat and it’ll be integrated right into Xero?

That has depressed me.. The optimist hopes that this is just compliance with a well designed API.. the realist saw Intuit on that list..

See sibling post from matbee.

I did I'm trying not to imagine he's on a great contractor rate with HMRC and choosing which French villa to snap up with his next contract from Intuit..

More seriously - and after my knee-jerk has died down, my government actually publishing APIs does seem "pretty-schweet"

So, basically no fine at all. This is nothing to a company that size. Nothing.

>Intuit will pay $141 million in restitution, of which roughly $2.5 million will be used for administrative fund costs.

A total joke. It would be better to hold a $141,000,000 lottery instead of giving out $30/house.

I used Intuit online for about 10 years... at the beginning it was fantastic however year over year it just became worse until I had to abandon them and use a different online tax service... My returns are very straightforward and I did my own on paper prior to Intuit... I can only say Intuit seems to have intentionally made the flow of questions unwieldy over the years... almost as if they intentionally sabotaged their own business... so sad

IT'S STILL ALIVE! FINE IT AGAIN! FINE IT AGAIN!

I found this comment to be quite humorous. I really appreciate comments like this from time to time.

There's this new place called reddit

Reddit is older than Hacker News?

> In contrast, the IRS Free File products were free for 70 percent of taxpayers.

I wonder why the IRS "Free" version isn't actually free!

Im Canadian.

I filed my taxes using WealthSimple Tax.

It cost $0.

It took <5 minutes.

I really don't understand why people pay for TurboTax.

Because most people are not in Canada? At least who use this website I'm guessing? Or does WealthSimple Tax also do American taxes? Also, the signal to noise ratio. This is the first I've ever heard of this company, and I usually am light years ahead of the "normal" person because I peruse sites like this constantly.

They made $2 billion in profit in 2021, so this is about 7% of that.

I guess TurboTax made much more money than 141M? A fine is fine only if it is higher than the profits.

Indeed, when the fine is less then the profit, then its a kickback.

Not even that. Just consider how long it took for the government to make any kind of movement on the issue, regardless of whether it was some likely watered down toothless action or not. So, retroactively the cost was some fraction of $141M over the years they've gotten away with their practices and it is also safe to assume that they would likely just offset that cost over some period into the future, i.e., 10 years of past profit + 10 years until the mid point to the next government action, over $141M ... which they will make up by upping the price as they have clearly been doing on a regular basis.

On that note. We should be telling everyone about freetaxusa.com (no affiliation other than having tried it). I can't recall the exact cost structure, but it's on the order of $25 to do federal and state returns with investment income, and file both electronically. That's in comparison to what I think is around $100 for the equivalent using TurboTax.

its also free under ~50k AGI, though it did keep trying to upsell me to the paid version, the free file program is pretty readily available from many providers. but they all do the type of thing that they just slapped intuit's wrists for and try to trick you into needing to pay when using free file, or trick you into your "free" taxes only being federal

I second FreeTaxUSA. I used to use TurboTax and will get some of this settlement, and FreeTaxUSA is both better and more ethical.

From Google: Intuit has over $3B cash on hand. Market cap is 1000x the fine.

The Federal Government should simply buy TurboTax from Intuit and make it a free service

141 million, is a minor footnote in their profits.

Good. They totally rigamarolled me at checkout.

Nice. About half of the process of filing taxes with TurboTax is dodging all the dark patterns to try get you to pay...

All the best facets of capitalism at play: regulatory capture, decentralized costs & concentrated profits, and fees small enough to be a cost of business rather than long-term deterrent.

Well, the best facet is you can choose to use their competitor. Most of your list are more about government than the company.

How is this company getting away with 50cents per person for defrauding a whole nation?

Because this isn't about that, this is about their marketing of their TurboTax Free edition

They are fraudulently advertising their product to the whole nation - it still comes out to 50c/head.

Huh, whole media is chock full of fraudulent advertising including things that are not even marked as advertising.

Now you can call it whataboutery but thankfully courts have to reasonably go with what they can prove and not like "whoa, you showed fraudulent ads, here is 128 billion dollar fine equal to your market cap today. Shutdown the company and pay by end of week."

I mean, no one suggested bankrupt the company -- but as other's have pointed out it remains _profitable_ to be fraudulent. Like at least fine them >= 100% of the value they gained.

Hello. I would like to suggest bankrupting the company. It's not "fair" or "just" but it would be in the common good. Plenty of precedent for that from governments that give a fuck about the citizens and not the corporations.

I realize this isn't actually going to happen, but I'd vote for the measure that involved the state seizing Intuit and raiding their software for the benefit of the IRS.

(FWIW, I'm not going to respond to comments on this debating the merits of this non-plan. I get it's an unpopular opinion, especially on a tech-funding backed news board, so I don't need people to tell me why this is a "bad" choice and how it will slippery slope into whatever socialist hellscape personally keeps people up at night. Just wanted it out there that there are absolutely people willing to tear the whole fucking thing down because it's so broken).

Could you link some of those precedents?

Google is free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprise

Root around in there, plenty of examples of nations taking control of individual companies or entire industries. Feel free to make your own judgements of which were doing it "for the good of the people" vs "to take control of a major income sector in order to enrich a minority of individuals within the government".

> I would like to suggest bankrupting the company. It's not "fair" or "just" but it would be in the common good.

Interestingly, someone pointed out the same reason is why these companies get bailed out when they fail.

That person is a Capitalist, and I am not.

Ok, I surely not going to argue about minor technical details of plan or possible flaws in execution.

One question to ponder is how companies like Intuit came into being in first place. Why is doing accounts, filing taxes have to be so detailed and complex that this service is needed by many? If IRS rules and government legislations are published in detail, months/years ahead of enforcement, should a reasonably intelligent person just follow along and file directly without any intermediaries.

After all using third party service is not something mandated by law and not using it would result in fine.

I'm not sure it was profitable. The article suggests they duped 4.4 million Americans. They would likely still have made at least a little money off those people if their marketing was honest.

There's reputational damage too. Hopefully more people will avoid TurboTax after this news story.

I'm not sure the false advertising turned out to be a good business decision in the end.

But...the whole nation doesn't use their product

The whole nation is exposed to their advertising. And, tbh, they are extremely dominant in the market.

Many more companies got away with many other atrocities. Because in this country Corporate interests come before people interests. That’s what capitalism does when unchecked.

And which are those great countries where this is not true.

> Because in this country Corporate interests come before people interests.

Moving this to a spectrum rather than binary discussion. I'd argue that Canada, and many members of the EU do put pressure on companies to be "polite" so to speak.

Sure, it is spectrum, still I note that things cost quite a bit more and people earn quite a bit less than US. So I am not sure even if free tax filing were there, Canadians have it better than US.

For EU, when government put pressure on companies to be polite I need to learn that end result being beneficial to citizens or just politicians and bureaucracy.

$1.41 parking ticket

I'd prefer the IRS provide a truly free website. Screw Intuit, they broke the agreement.

How about the IRS send us a filled out tax return instead... and we can amend it.

For real. This is how the system ought to work. If they have the resources to come after you if you accidentally filled something out wrong, they have the resources to fill it out right for you in the first place. The tax system in the USA is nothing short of a farce.

To be fair, the IRS does not "come after you" if you make a mistake. They send you a letter, with request for the additional amount due, and if you agree, you pay it. Done.

I think that the IRS is hoping that people make mistakes in their favor... I.E.: Anyone ever got a letter from the IRS saying that they paid too much?

Happens all the time. I got one from a State once, and I'm still convinced I was right and they were wrong, I'm not exactly going to argue with them, when they're sending me money.

However if you report more interest, or wages than they know about they will take your numbers as is - they assume you are reporting under the table income. They will however fix arithmetic errors, and give you credit for things you should have asked for (dependent deductions for example).

Here's how I do my tax return: I go to the IRS website, I download my data (all the forms submitted about me). I enter them by hand into a tax program, it then generates a tax returns and sends it back.

There's almost nothing in there that needs me as part of the process, except demographic info.

Pay 141M and change nothing hmm

Phase 2: Get get rid of the Income Tax itself ...

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