FTC bans TurboTax from advertising 'free' services, calls deceptive advertising
cnn.com
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I thought it was a funny commercial because 37% doesn't seem like a lot and Turbotax is portraying it as the average person will identify themselves as part of that 37% even though that is not too far off form just 1/3 people so a minority of people.
It was one of the few times I saw a company blatantly lean into the negatives in their fine print and just outright tell you its good.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fr...
Crazy.
4 > 3.
Fifta-Pounder?
Fifth-Pounder?
Five-Pounder?
For all we know, marketing vetoed it cause they were lazy.
Or would that suffer by seeming microscopic when listed close to "32 ounce" drinks ?
… yes, that early.
And, to be fair, they're the first math concepts that aren't intuitive.
Which IMHO leads to some people not studying, then feeling lost, then rationalizing their lack of effort as "I'm bad at math" or "Math is hard."
I blame this on my Chemistry teacher - a class which I was also taking at the time - who spoke little English and had never taught in the United States until the year I landed in her class. I actually did reasonably well in Algebra for the first quarter or so until it all fell apart.
Fits in about the same space as the original problem unless it’s printed so small that you have to rewrite it, and way less room for transcription errors. I also find it clearer but that may just be me (fwiw I’m “bad at math”—I find it incredibly boring and basically can’t follow proof- and equation/identity-based stuff, I have to turn it all into algorithmic thinking to have a prayer of understanding it; i.e. my opinion on the superiority of short division is that of a mathematical imbecile, so, grain of salt)
> I blame this on my Chemistry teacher - a class which I was also taking at the time - who spoke little English and had never taught in the United States until the year I landed in her class.
It doesn’t help that in chemistry, 1 + 1 may be 1. Or 3. :-)
[edit] short division:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_division
Under the “example” section, the little superscripts are what you write in by hand on the problem as you work it, at least as I did it. 9/4 in the hundreds place is 2 with 1 remainder, so write 2 up above as part of the solution and a 1 superscript next to the 5 in the problem itself (tens place), now that’s 15, divide that, 3 goes in the tens place of the solution, write the remainder (3) next to the digit in the ones place as a superscript and do it again, if you need to keep going just add a decimal point and zeroes as required.
Way faster than working long division, takes up less space, and less error prone (imo). What’s actually going on is clearer (again, imo)
Fractions are a bit different though - you're splitting a single thing into equal chunks. Hence, slices of pie.
Multiplying by 1/5 is really dividing by 5. Introduce that first. We already know how to do this. You split your 1/3 slice into 5 equal slices.
Do the same to the other 2/3 slices, count all the slices, and you have 15. Hence, 1/15.
As an aside, common core math is amazing. They gave my daughter a model for the distributive property that can be used to show how to do long multiplication.
I’m not saying I don’t get it, I’m saying others have told me that they found the explanations and instructions they were given nonsensical.
Suddenly, you need to begin to understand the rules around operators, sequencing, and what operations are legal and illegal.
Absent that understanding, even...
1/4 x 2/5
So it's the point at which math becomes "pure" rather than strictly physically-mapped.
Actually I think we do very little addition of fractions later in math. But it is a concept that confuses the multiplication or division.
To not make this mistake, you have to be able to call to mind that the map x -> 1/x reverses the inequality sign. That's a fairly abstract thing to remember especially if you haven't taken math for years. Yes you could draw it or write down the equation, or convert to decimal... But it's enough of a cognitive barrier that it doesn't surprise me that it would impact the behavior even of people who would answer correctly on a test.
Where it does get easy is if you work with the same set of fractions every day. For example, if you work in construction in the US you can probably quickly order the fractions commonly used for measurement, e.g. 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 3/4 etc. But 1/3 isn't one of these. Now that I think about it, they probably should have just chosen a fraction that you can find on a tape measure, like 3/8.
You absolutely don't have to remember that x |-> 1/x is order reversing, and, for most people, shouldn't—you immediately give two or three other methods (I don't understand what "write down the equation" means) that are a much better way for the average person to check this.
For example, consider: 1/1123 < 1/1092. Is that inequality true? The fastest way to check is to compare the denominators and adjust for the way division interacts with the inequality.
You can't really draw that pie chart quickly. You could write the equation down and multiply both sides though.
For 1/3 vs 1/4 yes you could draw it quickly. Or you could fill a glass 1/3 full of water and one 1/4 and compare them. But that's a pretty special case for small enough denominators.
English says "1/4", or "1 over 4", or "1 quarter".
Japanese says "4 bun no 1", or the practical equivalent of saying "4 under 1" in English.
I consequently routinely say the numbers in reverse, confounding both myself and anyone around me before I realize my brain engaged in furious tentacle sex with the numbers.
1/5th pound burger is going to sell better than the quarter pounder while using less beef.
The vast majority of processing is happening outside language-related areas of the brain. There's certainly leaky interfaces between areas of the brain, but if you literally thought in a language, and that distinction persisted throughout the brain, that would seem to imply that speaking 3 languages would require 3x the number of connections in the brain.
The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would presumably be true if we literally thought in a language, but the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited.
In other words, "thinking in a language" is an illusion.
Tangentially, I realised in high school that I was doing almost all math operations as word transformations. I reasoned this was why even familiar procedures for which I confidently & consistently got correct results were taking substantially longer than everybody else. I was translating everything twice.
3/8ths is a pretty good marketing point since all the numbers are bigger and it should be intuitive, plus you can more easily see that it's also 50% bigger than 1/4th => 2/8ths. The harder sell is the 'double whatever' being equal to 3 patties of the competitor.
I literally had an argument with a room full of US university professors about whether or not 30% and 1/3 were the same thing.
The correct one, that 30% is less than 1/3.
https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractio...
Perhaps the average Joe would be better off with mm rather than 1/16" increments.
Here, straight from the horse's mouth:
https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractio...
VINCENT: And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald's. And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
JULES: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
VINCENT: No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't know what the f*** a Quarter Pounder is.
JULES: Then what do they call it?
VINCENT: They call it Royale with Cheese.
JULES: Royale with Cheese. What do they call a Big Mac?
VINCENT: Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.
And no, she wasn’t testing my knowledge, she was seriously confused, as she would ask me that even later in life. Mind you, she has a masters degree. She is in her early 50s right now, and she is fully of sound mind to this day, not senile or anything like that.
Imo, this type of silliness is rather common across many different places, but Americans just tend to own it and not be afraid of coming off silly (if that’s how they genuinely end up behaving in a given situation).
Seems like the strategy of the ad is to repeat the word "Free" so much people don't remember the rest and to make it seem like the disclaimer is meaningless. Even with it, it's still free.
Sounds hokey but that sort of shit has been the bread and butter of advertising since forever. A vanishingly small percentage of people are anywhere close to as rational as they think they are when buying things. Many of the most self-assuredly "skeptical, rational, well-researched consumer" types get totally snowed by the simplest marketing ideas because they're looking for sales bullshit they can empirically disprove, and most marketing is influencing people in a way that makes them think they came to the conclusion independently.
I was pretty sure when first seeing it that they'd already gotten in trouble for their last ads that used the word "free" a lot, and this was a very direct response to that... I guess that's just the final decision that's being reported on here.
A 1040 + W2 might the only equation these people need to solve for.
> they get a big paycheck once a year to pay off whatever
If you have something big to pay off, you usually need to do it right away. You probably can't afford to wait however many months until you get your refund.
However, giving the government an automatic loan means that a land lord cannot charge that much more in rent, and the owner does get to spend it eventually, rather than throwing it into a rent pit
This is false. You simply aren't going to be able to budget your way into riches if you don't have enough money to go around. If you don't believe me, limit yourself to a minimum wage budget with no startup savings (and no borrowing off of others) and tell me how you are doing in a year... and then tell me how you'd survive the next few years on this. If minimum wage is too little, try setting the income at just over the mark you'd have for assistance.
Alternatively, if you have enough money to cover reasonable expenses, some fun, and have a little leftover, you don't really have to budget if you don't tend to spend lots. If I have enough money, I don't really have to budget.
You are insultingly out of touch.
I'd like to paint you my picture of my life in 2009 and then compare it to today's numbers.
I was making $10.75/hr at a Subway, working ~38 hours/week. That's ~$1600 pretax, about $1,200 post-tax. Expenses:
Rent (Single-bedroom apartment): 650 car insurance: 75 water/sewage/garbage: 40 internet: 30 phone: 30 electricity: 50
That left me with $325/month to pay for gas (luckily I loved only ~3 miles from work, so that didn't cost me much), food, and entertainment. $10/day for food wasn't terrible, but it's not exactly steak and seafood, either. And remember, that $10/day is supposed to include entertainment as well. Honestly, it wasn't really THAT bad. Buuuuut....
Minimum wage increases have happened, but rent has gone up too. That job would now pay $15/hr, ($2280 for 38 hours pretax, ~$1710 post-tax), but the rent on that exact same unit is now $1,200/month.
Assuming all other bills remained the same (they wouldn't), I'd now be left with only $285/month for food. And with over 15 years of inflation, that $285 is worth significantly less.
At that point, even with budgeting, I'd still be living paycheck-to-paycheck. When wages don't keep up with the cost of living, you can't budget your way out of it.
To make it worse, that kind of living starts to take its toll on mental health. You feel like you're constantly drowning. That $4 coffee or the meal at Taco Bell will be your only source of real joy between each paycheck.
Whether you have the willpower to not touch it instead of increasing your food budget from $10 to $11 or whatever is a different story, and speaks to the mentality: if you never got the money in the first place, you can't be tempted to spend it.
That said, TurboTax did hit a specific level of 'eww' when I started seeing the refund option of a debit card (of course for some stupid fee that, if nothing else, provides some transparency to their kickback from the issuer).
I'm going to be doing what might be my last filing with them this year; it's easier for the purposes of history/other events but after that, it's gonna be my Fiancee's CPA.
Originally, I got 'started' when it was a desktop app only, and the user limit was very graceful, my parents and all of my siblings could benefit from that one yearly purchase...
Come to think of it, we should probably capture that date in the historical timeline of Enshittification.
And, yaknow, I'll ask my dad this weekend how he's doing his taxes this year. I'm honestly curious if he's finally fed up with their antics too... (It's a high bar; in the past he learned the basics of virtual machines to use some of his old-school software/tools, it's a beautiful level of curmudgeonry. OTOH my siblings have good CPAs.)
[0] - Not to be confused with some of the weird 'chop shop' Tax places I have seen around me in the past, sort of 'pop-ups' with a statue of liberty wearing person or 'wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube-man' to help drive business in.
Not shady, neither is it free, but about as close as you can get AFAIK for online filing. For what it is (a web forms app, with careful explainers), it's pretty good!
I've used tax pros and honestly, my finances are not complex enough to get a good benefit off the extra cost. I used H&R block one year, and really didn't think they knew any more about tax filing than I did. They got confused at all the same line items I did.
I mean... H&R Block is in some ways the Firestone of accounting. Sometimes there's a diamond in the rough of their 'regular' workers [0] but you never know what you're gonna get unless you happen to wind up in the right circumstances where you can build trust with one of their people that happens to stick [1]
[0] - Had a friend who could get one of H&R Block's folks to do the whole deed for 'non complicated'[2] starting with a pile of receipts/medical bills/etc and 90$ for people they liked, and yes they'd do their proper professional duty in the process. Frankly given the time investment that's a steal.
[1] - In my case, it was a guy at a local shop who had his WRX parked outside every time that was some level of manager. Always happy to give proper treatment, never afraid to say 'take it to the dealer' (i.e. more qualified people) if it was out of their comfort zone. Compare and contrast to a different shop, where after some 'changes' managed to mess up an oil change, and the 'fix' for the bad oil change... [3]
[2] - I want to be clear that non-complicated is not the trivial 'oh sure okay' here, they may or may not have had a hand in pointing out said friend's parent was doing some... 'minor some student loan fraud'. But if you had additional properties or other weird situations... If I remember they had their own sort of menu and everything. Very smartly done.
[3] - I had to re-replace a <6 month old timing belt in the process, but frankly the engine needs a rebuild now, it lost 2-5MPG from that one incident.
Interesting argument, but also a distraction from "we lied in advertising."
> It could also clearly disclose the percentage of customers that actually do qualify for the free service, somewhere close to the “free” claim advertised, the commission said.
They ran an ad during the 49ers game this weekend, centered around it being free for the character in the ad. I'm guessing that's how they'll work around this.
It was much more clear it wasn’t free for everyone than the old “free free free free” ads, but still heavily emphasized the free part.
They'll likely delay until that decision has come down and they hope they can just claim the laws were unconstitutional in the first place.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-to-hear-maj...
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/11/justices-to-consider-mult...
Far to easy for a corp to delay while it pays otherwise.
[1] https://skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/inengli...
Not saying the US shouldn’t do this automatically, I’m merely pointing out it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison.
In the EU you top out at €100-150k.
I say this from experience as a European who's lived on both continents.
It's completely evident that the salary differences in the EU/US are not from the convenience of the govt calculating taxes for you, and that's the point you tried to make in your origin post.
On the other hand, you'd make great advertisements for TurboTax.
Healthcare for a family of 4 in some parts of the US is absolutely fucking bananas compared to most of Europe. I've seen monthly premiums of $2k+ after the employers part, not to mention the deductible!
The US healthcare system is incredibly expensive and ineffective. Americans often like to come up explanations for this status quo but the fact is the system is trash when compared internationally.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Not to be confused with IRS Free File
In all seriousness though, Free File pretty much does what it says on the tin (allows low-income taxpayers to file for free); it has existed since 2003; and it has been pretty successful all things considered (Intuit and H&R Block's best efforts notwithstanding). I think it's a reasonable name.
I found the Free File thing but it didn't quite sound like what you were talking about :)
There’s certainly a line because some advertising is illegal and some isn’t.
There are also a lot of Senators and Representatives that have a larger re-election campaign fund now as well. But that's not illegal either. There are probably elected officials on the IRS committee. They also might own shares of INTU... Even that is not criminal.
Verbs or adjective, your grammar doesn't matter. All you have to do is follow the money.
Ok so why did you say Intuit broke lobbying laws?
> (yet)
When does Intuit plan on breaking lobbying laws? Which laws? And how do you know this?
> There are also a lot of Senators and Representatives
Which ones? How many?
> that have a larger re-election campaign fund now as well.
Who contributed? How much did they contribute? Was it illegal?
> There are probably elected officials on the IRS committee.
Do you mean the United States Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation? Because by definition yes, only members of congress would be on a congressional committee. But the Joint Committee on Taxation isn’t the IRS, whose employees are not elected, because it’s a government agency, not part of congress.
> They also might own shares of INTU... Even that is not criminal.
Right but acting on inside information would be illegal.
> Verbs or adjective, your grammar doesn't matter.
In this case your grammar matters a lot. If Intuit broke lobbying laws that would be a big deal.
> All you have to do is follow the money.
I don’t have to do anything. You made the claim. The burden of proof is on you. If congress is really in Intuit’s pocket then that should be easy to demonstrate. Otherwise you are needlessly undermining faith in our institutions with tired apathetic cliches.
“Follow the money” is lame because profit alone is no evidence of wrongdoing.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Without that you are just perpetuating toxic rhetoric.
I’m no fan of Intuit but so far your comments have contributed nothing but cliche unfounded anti-government negativity.
Your comments suggest you have significantly more time to spare than I do. (However, I understand this is just my interpretation.)
I'm entitled to my opinion on INTU and the government, regardless of whether it's factual or not. You're interpreting my views as anti-government negativity, which I don't agree with. Additionally, I wasn't aware that writing a research paper with proper citations was part of the conversation. To conclude, it seems your primary interest lies in debate.
Right but acting on inside information would be illegal.
You're 100% incorrect on that last point. Although not a formal legal document this article makes it pretty clear Senators and Representatives have a loophole in regards to trading on stocks. https://blogs.luc.edu/compliance/?p=4459
I will no longer respond to this thread as it's now reached the point of no return. In the meantime have a great day!
Do you have any reason to believe that?
Are they your documents? Can you accrue taxes independently?
just from my personal experiences... either way, the IRS has that info, if they assume people are honest... not sure why it isn't public.
There are 36 countries that manage to do return-free taxes. They seem to have a base rate that covers most (~64% in the UK) people. The US tax code is way more complicated than one base rate for everyone. It's unclear to me how anything other than income tax is handled in these countries. Does the UK have a capital gains tax? Tax deductions?
Edit: I looked it up.
Yes, the UK has capital gains taxes and they must be calculated by the taxpayer.
https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/reporting-and-paying-ca...
There are also deductions for savings and dividends. Those deductions look a lot like the US deductions. They also (sometimes?) have to be calculated by the taxpayer.
Saving interest is often paid gross but if you go over the savings allowance and don't fill in a tax return HMRC will just automatically take more tax from your payslip.
There is also a £20,000/year ISA allowance which shields investment from tax so any holdings within an ISA can be ignored for tax purposes.
However, the dividend and CGT allowances have been reduced recently as the government tries to find ways to raise more revenue without raising the headline tax rates, and the £20k ISA allowance hasn't been raised for years despite inflation.
So as it stands, in the future a lot more people will have to start filling in tax returns.
Interest and capital gains come in sooner for Americans. Plus we have way more deductions. I can deduct business use of a home office and personal vehicle. That’s not something the IRS can know.
They just won't do it before you do. That way, they might learn things they didn't yet know, from people who decide (as legally obligated) to divulge additional information. I assume that they assume that far fewer people would divulge additional information, if their "you talk first, I talk second" tactic went away.
The thing that is blocking that happening is intense lobbying by intuit (and a few others) plus anti-tax groups. See https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax... for what was probably that best quick summary from about 10 years ago.
Corrected it for you: email it to you at your personal @gov.us email (I know it is not a thing yet).
Maybe the IRS should start by building a tool that points you in the right direction before it tries to build a TurboTax clone.
It’s probably technically in the fine print, but it certainly felt like bait and switch the first time I ran into it over 20 years ago. I’m still bitter all these years later, and get reminded on a yearly basis, as it’s still standard practice. They can make federal “free”, because they can just lump all the costs in on the state taxes. Nothing is actually free.
It also makes no sense to me that it costs money to e-file, while sending in paperwork that a person needs to open and process is free. It seems so backward.
I hire a CPA to do my dead simple returns that I can do myself.
Why?
Because I don't trust myself to have done it correctly. No, I can't sincerely swear everything written is true and correct to the best of my knowledge because I do not trust myself.
That's why I hire a CPA, because I need someone I can point to for legal liability purposes. Am I throwing away money, so to speak? Perhaps, and I don't care; I'm buying peace of mind.
But if that's your concern I'm not sure automated or fill in the blanks tax software, free or not, is necessarily a good substitute.
Intuit has blocked government attempts to do that by offering free taxes for half of Americans (that was the deal).
Of course they decided to renegade and only do 37% per their advertising.
Hilarious since they had the "federal is free but you need to pay for state" scam going already.
This is how pretty much every “free” tax program works.
Now maybe you miss out on some deductions if you just transfer a few numbers to the forms. But the standard deduction is going to cover most people until you get into big mortgages or charitable writeoffs.
Instead, US has corporations. Corporations like Intuit, which it uses to decide what its policies should be.
Oh us? We merely live here.
That was the entire point of Obama's speech that republican news sources and libertarians eviscerated him for: "You didn't build that". He wasn't saying that you didn't build your business; he was stating you didn't build all the infrastructure that allowed you to build and run your business, and that is why taxes are not theft.
There is a legitimate argument over how much taxes and what is should be spent on, but those nuanced discussions are entirely replaced by BS.
>50% of the country believes tax is theft, and they also imagine if there were no taxes and the IRS abolished we'd somehow still continue to support an army, have a federal court system, a patent office, etc, etc, and that their state will continue to get federal subsidies.
That is not at all what 50% of the country believes, its a hyperbolic strawman. Obviously taxation is necessary to fund public services, just because someone criticizes the litany of flaws in our specific system doesn't mean they don't believe in the concept of taxation. Funny that you go on to complain about lack of nuance.
> Every dollar I've ever paid in federal taxes has been thrown into a black hole of debt never to be seen again
This contradicts what you say later: taxes are returned in the form of public services.
Back in the 50s the max tax rate (for a very few, but very rich people) was 90%. Corporations collectively contributed about half of what individual taxes did; now it is about 10%. The 2017 (?) tax bill forgave more than $1T in corporate taxes that were owed and gave some people a couple thousand dollars tax break; but while those corporate tax cuts were permanent, that same law that dropped the rate for some individuals was written to increase individual tax rates every two years and in no time those people are paying more in taxes than before.
If the Bush and Trump tax cuts for corporations and rich people had not ever happened, the debt would be going down (ignoring the extraordinary circumstances of covid).
Rich people and rich corporations can afford to get the laws written in their favor.
corporate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX individual: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A074RC1Q027SBEA
chart showing the ratios over time: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/composition-of-fe...
Sure, funding the IRS increases revenue. But we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. The amount of revenue they collect is utterly massive and should be more than enough to pay for all the public services we need, but it's not because they are wildly irresponsible with it. I find it hard to swallow that the solution is to squeeze us for even more.
> Every dollar I've ever paid in federal taxes has been thrown into a black hole of debt never to be seen again
> This contradicts what you say later: taxes are returned in the form of public services.
Taxes are returned in the form of public services in a healthy functional system, one which I would like to live in. My argument is that our system is not healthy and functional. Public services are provided but taxes have little relevance in how those services are paid for, at least on a federal level. If the government has the authority to simply print all the money it needs, and does so frequently with seemingly no limits, then what is the point of taxes? As I said, I think it's just to relieve inflationary pressure caused by fundamentally irresponsible monetary policy, whereas in an ideal functioning system there would be a direct relation between revenue -> spending on public services, as you say.
As for the rest of your post I basically agree, our tax code is quite obviously the product of corporate interest. But I don't think it's fair to conflate the opinions of "50% of the country" with that of the GOP party brass corpos. I think the predominant feeling on this topic among the GOP base is that of mistrust for the IRS (which is justified considering their previous political scandals) and more general sentiments of smaller government, which is not the same thing as 'taxation is theft'
Free doesn’t mean paid for someone you paid to handle it for you.
Where’s the downside?
I switched to FreeTaxUSA.com last year and it was dead simple. Never going back.
Also, the only reason I used Mint was to see a net worth widget on my phone. During the forced migration to Credit Karma, halfway through being made to create an entirely new account, I found that they have no such widget. Bye.
Anyone paying attention already knows that anything of value you don't pay for directly will have indirect costs, most often in the form of strings attached, advertising, upsells and annoyances. Today, whenever I hear something offered for "Free" it immediately implies two things. First, any actual value on offer is relatively low (or net negative), and second, the entity offering it has made a choice to obfuscate the true cost for reasons I'd need to understand before engaging.
This means I probably don't want it and even if I might want something like the promise of it, I'd have to navigate and parse a maze of obfuscation crafted by someone who's already not being entirely upfront with me. Since A) I generally value my time (and related intangibles like vendor grief, inconsistency, etc) more than my money, and B) I've learned I'm usually not happy with the lower cost versions of things that matter to me - I've adopted a default stance of "I don't want anything that's free". It's possible I'm some kind of oddball outlier but I don't think so. In fact, I'm fairly confident a good chunk of the highly-desirable "reasonably affluent consumer" segment are similarly jaded and now associate any offer pushing "FREE" in the top-line with a negative connotation.
For example, look at all the Facebook posts from older people who repost things like "TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY!!! SHARE AND YOU WILL FIND $10K TODAY!!!" They don't realize it's fake. They don't understand where that $10k comes from. There could be some secret hidden value stream built into Facebook that's promoting this. Maybe I'll find out later. Maybe I'll have to sit through a seminar for a timeshare. Maybe it will all be worth it.
The people who fall for this would fall for anything. The reason why it's so dangerous here, is that the IRS wants tax filing to be free. They've been trying to make it free, actually free, for years. And taxes are something that 100% of Americans have to do. So the market is literally 1*[entire population], annually. But these capitalists keep finding predatory ways to ignore the IRS and FTC. They just need to be fined so substantially that it wipes out a couple years profit. That's the only way the risk will no longer be worth the reward and these companies will stop.
When I learn something is very cheap or free, my first though is definitely not "what an occasion!", my first thought is to look for the fine print and start from the position of distrust.
"You will not get what you haven't paid for."
Paying for things does not guarantee good service or product, but buying things for cheap or getting them for free (from commercial entities) pretty much ensures you get crap and/or strings attached.
I can understand people who have no money trying to get by paying as little as possible for things. And I do not criticise.
What you're saying is, of course, correct. I personally know (and in some cases am related to) such people. However, you highlight an interesting aspect of this. I think this is one of those things that is "eternally true" in a meta sense. What I mean is that the ability of some meaningful number of humans to be stupid, gullible, silly or crazy will always exceed the well-meaning attempts of other humans to prevent negative consequences from those, apparently bottomless, intrinsically human abilities.
Obviously, there are many scenarios where it's reasonable and worthwhile to enact preventative measures, which is why we collectively do so in the form of laws and regulations. But at the same time, as a society, we need to remember that such preventative efforts will always be limited in scope due to costs, practicality and, ultimately, individual freedom to choose unwise things. At some point, being free includes the freedom to be stupid. The hard part is choosing where to draw the lines between "society will try to protect you from that" but "choose to do this and the consequences are on you." I'll never forget the bitter disillusionment I felt the day my teenaged self realized that the nature of reality is that some bad things will happen to good people and there's little we can do about many of those things other than grant Darwin Awards or turn them into cautionary tales (or both).
How transparent is the web site version? Do you have to spend an hour entering all your tax info just to find out that you'll have to pay to file? Or are they pretty good about notifying you up front?
In the paid installable version, I can still print out my CA tax return and mail it in to avoid paying the e-filing fee, but I'm not sure how that works with the web version, either.
I would like to see "fine print" completely disallowed for video ads. Don't let people read out loud a claim like "Get your blah for free" or "For only thirty dollars a month", if that claim is only legal because the exceptions are explained in words too small for most people to notice.
E.g you could advertise “free filing” if your free filing applied to 90% off people filing on your platform, you could say up to 20% off everything if more than 90% of expected sales are in the 19-20% range (also prohibit”sale” prices that are functionally the normal price with a fake markdown)
I used to use Turbo Tax and paid about $100 per year on average, but it was simple to switch to using another provider, I just had to get the previous year's return out to fill some stuff that is filled automatically if you use the service each year.
In 2024, we're launching a new pilot tax filing service
called Direct File. If you're eligible and choose to
participate, file your 2023 federal tax return online,
for free, directly with IRS.
0 - https://www.irs.gov/about-irs/strategic-plan/direct-file
> Does it offer the same as the site?
Typically more, in fact.
Still probably a rip-off compared to other places.
If not, then federal free through FreeTaxUSA. Depending on your state, the state taxes manually via PDF + paper may be extremely quick - like five or so lines, and a single table lookup.
It has been remarkably absent in this thread.
Edit: Meant to scope this comment solely to TurboTax. Replies correcting me are well deserved.
For consumer segment TurboTax still drives 30% of their entire revenue.
TurboTax
Mint
QuickBooks
Credit Karma
MailChimp
Like a lot of companies, tech and not, they use their power and resources to keep their position.
The difference is that their actual competitor is the government. But that's also a big part of why private healthcare is way too expensive in the US, for worse results than other places.
I think the government is more of an enabler, than a competitor. At least up until now.
I always feel the need to point out that anger at this is misplaced. Intuit is a business lobbying on behalf of itself like countless other businesses do. If the result makes you upset, you should be upset at our political system and the politicians who are willing to sell out the country for whatever those lobbyists are pushing. It is those politicians who are supposed to prioritize the good of the country, not Intuit or their lobbyists.
We can be upset at lobbyists for pushing things that they know aren't in the best interests of consumers.
We can be upset at businesses for wanting to take advantage of consumers for their own gain.
All of these can be true at the same time.
Or, would you say something like "The outcomes are not perfect but that's how the system works and stays as fair as possible for everyone"?
And the idea that things are "as fair as possible for everyone" in this particular (read: Intuit) scenario is laughable at best.
This is an obvious Straw man[0] fallacy.
Intuit is a corporation engaged in lobbying efforts in order to retain and/or expand its market-share and not an individual needing representation in a criminal indictment.
Unless your position is that Intuit corporate officers should be criminally prosecuted, which, if that is the case, I apologize for my misunderstanding and can see your point.
Similarly, the system requires that anyone (including shareholders or employees of companies) be able to communicate with their political representatives about political policy. Even if sometimes this results in bad outcomes in specific situations.
The larger corporations, even more so.
But still, the Congressional office buildings are open to the public. Anyone can walk in and present their case. Yes, of course a senator cannot make as much time to meet with the millions of individual citizens as they can with the 500 individual Fortune 500 companies. I don’t think this defeats my argument. An individual citizen is objectively less important than a company involving tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens.
More broadly, a country whose politicians represent the interests of corporations is no longer a democracy. Democracy is for people. Corporations are not people. They are abstract legal entities wired to maximize profits. The fact that they are composed of people is immaterial, since they do many things contrary to the interests of those people all the time.
In point of fact, Intuit's lobbying in this very instance also negatively impacts their own employees.
Edit: A generic example to further drive the point home would be oil companies lobbying against environmental protections. Such moves only benefit the business and directly harm everyone, including their own employees.
Edit 2: And then there are all of the instances where businesses have lobbied against changes to labor laws, wages, etc. that would objectively improve the lives of their own employees...
Lobbyists are supposed to lobby on behalf of whoever pays them.
Businesses are supposed to advocate for the interest of themselves, their shareholders, and their employees. It would be verging on incompetence for a business to ignore a political debate that would effectively destroy the business overnight. Intuit lobbying on its behalf is our system working as intended. If you have a problem with that (which you should), your problem should be with the system and not Intuit.
Politicians are supposed to work for the betterment of their constituents and they clearly aren't in the case of tax prep. They deserve a majority of the blame above any other group because they are the ones failing to do their job.
There's no reason they shouldn't be able to find a way to remain a profitable business between most of what they own. To go above and beyond with such an anti-consumer perspective with regards to filing is absolutely egregious.
Put simply (or reductively, take your pick) - there's "advocating for the interest of their business" (nods head) and "advocating for the interest of their business" (shakes head).
As most of their revenue is from businesses who wouldn't easily be able to free-file, I wouldn't be surprised if Intuit's lobbying to prevent a free tax filing offering from the government was causing them more harm than good.
You've been able to file for free on paper since forever. But again, it's 2024. Paper is not a reasonable solution for either filers or the IRS in 2024. It's difficult to handle, error-prone, and all the software they use to validate paper forms could be repurposed to accept online forms.
And the online forms should be pre-filled with all the information the IRS already has about your income for the prior year.
It's not acceptable to have to pay companies like Intuit (and give them all your personal financial information) for software to file an individual tax return. I don't care if you're wealthy or poor, this should be free and provided by the IRS.
Contact your representatives. Demand that they get it done.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/17/politics/irs-free-tax-filing-...