TurboTax maker Intuit spent millions in record lobbying blitz
opensecrets.org
opensecrets.org
I watched it expecting to hear it talk about an army of lobbyists. I watched it expecting to hear about Intuit promoting more complex tax code to ensure to ensure their relevancy. I watched it expecting to hear about how easy it would be for the government to pre-fill forms.
I was not only not expecting what I heard, but I was shocked that it's even worse than I thought. I was not expecting the fraud Intuit did for their "free" offering, nor their extremely bad faith marketing campaign that followed. I didn't know that multiple previous presidencies promised simple free online filing.
Very worth a watch.
But each time he talk about something i already know about, i'm a bit disappointed. And it's worse when he talks about subjects he know little about.
It's true though that Intuit spends so much on advertising that few people understand that there are any alternatives to TurboTax or a CPA
Given the heavy presence of conversion-minded dark patterns in retail TurboTax, this is quite a brash statement.
Consumers must be protected from anything that might make them consider not using TurboTax!
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...
It may be made by a contractor but it’s the IRS’ official free filing solution without the sort of income and situation limitations that exist with the free filing products.
That said, I prefer TurboTax’s better competitors like FreeTaxUSA because filling out the forms yourself still really sucks. In the crappy system we have the best you can do is either find a cheap and decent commercial filing solution or get yourself a tax professional, because everything else is a huge time waste.
These Terms of Service ("Agreement") is a legal agreement between you ("you", "your", "licensee"), and On-Line Taxes, Inc. ("OnLine Taxes", "we", "our" or "us").
That doesn't sounds like the IRS to me. Maybe they do work for the IRS, but it's not them.
Unfortunately it has no support for AMT on Form 1116 (Foreign Tax Credit).
I believe taking any FTC requires doing a full AMT calculation (instructions for schedule 2 line 1) which includes a separate AMT version of 1116, so as far as I know FFF is useless for anyone that takes FTC.
HMRC must provide a free software solution that covers a large portion of income tax and national insurance.
It would be great if the government provided their own website/software for tax calculation, but even then I wouldn't mind paying $15 for polished, professionally designed software (vs $100+ for TurboTax in the case of small business+state)
Overall I'm very happy though. It's not fancy, but there are no dark patterns and the $15 filing is for real. I can even file previous year updates for free (since they're all federal tax changes). And I'm not supporting Intuit!
Individual Registered Users - 118,911,572
No. of returns filed (AY 23-24) - 82,194,557
I've hired a few devs from intuit before and they tell me the Indian portal is far more usable than whatever they were building.
When they introduced the Making Tax Digital scheme, the law mandated the gov must provide a free means of electronic submission.
While HMRC get a lot wrong, this they got right.
Its free.
Then you have companies selling 2 things.
1. Automation, bulk processing, storage, analysis for professional users to file hundreds of returns.
2. Ease of use, PDF processing, manual and electronic preparation of reruns data for end users. Paid service.
Both are complementary to govt provided filing and often require steps that need it.
India famously spent 5 billion dollars to build their indirect taxes portal.
5 Billion dollars or rupees ? And also did they outsource to Infosys / TCS ? Got any source, so that I can dig into it ?
If Intuit wants to value-add to whatever the government makes for filing taxes, I'm fine with that. But actively keeping the government offering poor so that people want to use your product instead is just evil.
The other piece of garbage of software they force us to use, QuickBooks is literally the worst software ever written. Every single page is an ad for another service they offer. And no the core product cannot the bare minimum before throwing random errors.
Your employer can declare and direct tax owed from your paycheck directly each month. Come end of year you can click like 3 links in a tax portal to ensure you’ve not overpaid and that’s the extent of your tax worries.
We obviously don’t have a perfect system here in Ireland (far from it) but Jesus Christ America, your tax system is absolutely insane to Europeans.
The real distinction is the backwards filing process. You have to fill out information on W2s and 1099s that the government already has.
I think this could be streamlined without pissing off the third party tax filing industry. Just make it so that all of the information on those forms can be provided all at once to the tax filing software companies when a person puts in their personal info. TurboTax already kind of sort of does this when you put in a couple of pieces of info from each W2 and it fetches the rest, but it could be streamlined into a standard.
Then for people who file manually, there could be a system where the government sends a consolidated group of summed values for use on the manual forms. I feel like this could be an acceptable compromise that works within our broken lobbying system.
The insane part in the US is that then every year we have to fill out a bunch of forms filling in information the government already knows. For many people this should instead be as you said "click like 3 links".
It gets really complicated when you have investment or partnership income, sell stocks or property, etc. I still do my own (complicated) taxes every year but it gets more and more complex every year and takes more and more time.
Actually $0 of lobbying expenses go to politicians. The money is spent on salaries, ads, research, publications, etc. that are used to communicate to the politicians.