> Joseph Bankman, a Stanford Law School professor who helped design ReadyReturn, says he spent close to $30,000 of his own money to hire a lobbyist to defend the program in the legislature. Intuit made political contributions to scores of legislative candidates, Bankman said, and gave $1 million in 2006 to a group backing a ReadyReturn opponent for state controller.

> ReadyReturn survived, but with essentially no marketing budget it is not widely known. Fewer than 90,000 California taxpayers used it last year – although those who do use it seem to be happy. Ninety-eight percent of users who filled out a survey said they would use it again.

http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-...

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/21/opinion/la-oe-ventry... - an op-ed from 2010

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/intuit-turbotax-... - another, more recent, report.

Intuit's lobbying is intended (it seems) to reduce funding to the program and replace it with their own variation. Not in CA so this whole thing is news to me, otherwise I'd probably have been paying attention to the details (like I did when Time-Warner-bought legislators were screwing over city-owned broadband in NC).