Intuit has been doing this for a long time, just in case anyone was wondering why $1 million seems like a low bribe. And it goes beyond preventing you from filing your taxes for free, with one of their goals being to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible, so you are too frustrated to do it yourself.
This if from a 2019 Pro Publica article:
But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.
For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”
Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.
It’s a little late now, but don’t forget that FreeTaxUSA is free for federal and cheap for state. Also much less annoying to use than Intuit TurboTax. They don’t do those fake loading animations like “checking the best deal!” As if a computer can’t do like a billion of those a second.
If I had to guess, this is a holdover from the 90s where people didn’t trust a quick calculation, and probably doubted the application was properly choosing the standard or itemized deductions.
A million dollars is all it takes to buy whatever laws you want? That’s a really good deal for Intuit.
Remember all those (exactly) 1 million dollar “donations” all those CEOs were giving to Trump’s inaugural campaign? Those weren’t donations, they were bribes and kissing of the ring. Pledge loyalty (and pay a small fee) and the government will work for you.
Except if you’re Google or Facebook. Trump will accept your money and still fuck you over. Why anyone trusts him is beyond me.
Politicians are cheap, I remember once seeing a list of how much a lobbyist buys support from politicians for and the list was like $5k $2k $3k $6k. It’s ridiculous
That’s affordable. Maybe I’ll buy one
Now you need to save it for your tax filing fees
1 million to make filing taxes annoying af, well I’m not filing anything again
wait you guys have to pay to file taxes???
do they actually want you to evade taxes??
I mean, yes, because if they catch you evading taxes then they get a free slave for the term of your incarceration. To them it’s a win-win.
oh shit yeah, theres that too.
beacon of democracy.
The tax system is so complicated, most people can’t handle navigating it on their own. Most people have jobs where taxes are automatically removed from pay checks and sent to both state and federal tax agencies. However, that amount is just an estimate and once a year (or quarter) you need to file paperwork to confirm whether you over or underpaid and then you either get a rebate (without interest), or you’ll need to send in a payment to make up the difference. That paperwork has been lobbied to remain as complicated as possible so that companies like Intuit can provide services that tax payers find useful and continue to pay for. This is more complicated for business owners, both big and small.
Well, in my opinion this will be a good platform for American progressives to run on: make taxes less complicated by getting rid of middle men.
This will absolutely 10000% never happen as long as lobbying exists in my opinion.
There is nothing wrong with lobbying…. There are lobbies for woman’s rights, black rights, all sorts of good causes have lobbies.
The politicians just bend over for corporate lobbies. Very important distinction. I think what would fit your argument better is will never happen as long as citizens United exists.
Any paid lobbying is bribery. Legislators should raise people’s opinion who voted them in and act as representative, not say what others pay them to say.
I can’t believe it is legal in so many countries. Apparently though it seems more problematic in the US but European countries aren’t immune either.
There needs to be more citizen lobbying. What really needs to happen is citizens organizing, pooling their money, and hiring lobbyists, just like big corporations do.
A look at the Forbes Fortune500 should point out why that’s basically impossible.
Just looking at the top one, Walmart, not even considering anyone else on this list, their raw profit in 2024 after all expenses and payrolls and everything was
$15,511,000,000.00
Amazon in the #2 spot made almost double that. Remember this isn’t revenue, this is profit, this is extra money after all normal expenses are paid.
If I pulled together every single person I’ve ever met in my life, regardless of their opinion of me, and we all donated all the money we had ever made in our lives, we might approach a tenth of Walmart’s 2024 profits.
The wealth inequality gap in America is large enough that it is actually difficult to wrap your head around. The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars - to be exact, you’ll need 999 million more dollars to reach it after you have your first million in the bank. Fighting corporate money with citizens’ money is not only wasteful but impossible.
Working within a corrupt system often serves to more deeply entrench that system.
No they just want us to do our part by both paying taxes to the government and paying corporations that pay the government. All makes sense in a tidy corporofascisit system.
No, and no. It is typically more convenient to pay to file taxes though. These companies hand hold you through the process and often have some protection for you if you get audited.
That said, this still means the government needs to make things easier for everyone. You shouldn’t feel like you need help to just file a standard tax return if all you do is have a regular job, no investments, and no deductions. Which is something like half of the US.
Oh good I’m not the only one who doesn’t understand.
Yeah I figured the Canadian system we have was as bad as the US’s but apparently not. Having to pay to file is wild
Imagine having to pay to give the government money. I had to open this to confirm what I was reading.
every time this comes up i am flabbergasted.
this year was my most complicated tax filing yet since i was involved in a bankruptcy, switched jobs, bought a house, contracted work on the house which was eligible for tax credit, and got an inheritance within the span of a few months. it took me almost 20 minutes to do, which was basically only because the tax agency don’t package their various calculators in the pre-filled form and i had to double-check the credit thing.
it drives me mental, then i hear about “tax month” and i feel it could be worse.
I spent the entirety of apr 15th making fun of my friends for not doing their taxes in feblueberry.
Next year we’re going to be making fun of the people who paid taxes
Intuit
donatedinvested $1millionMillion dollar is practically nothing for this kind of company, they will net billions from this.
Even their corruption is incompetent.
Historically senators and representatives side with companies who’ve only given them thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in contributions. It’s very cheap to buy a vote.
Though often there’s also the understanding that a career spent supporting them will be rewarded with a cushy, high-paying lobbying job once they leave politics. Or paid speaking gigs if you’re the President.
It’s not incompetent to give someone a penny and have them give you back $100. That’s a great investment. So I would have to say their corruption is very confident if they can give a million dollar bribe and get back a billion dollars of revenue.
I meant that the administration (i.e. Trump) is incompetent for selling the country for pennies.
Art of the deal baby
I think they mean the government corruption. How cheap it is to buy votes. You can buy a Supreme Court justice with an RV.
Fuck Intuit!
Wait sorry what? Non-USian here, bear with me.
What does “program” mean here? Why is this program necessary to file your taxes for free? Do you guys have PAY to file your taxes if you don’t use/apply/qualify for that program?? Am I misunderstanding what it means to “file” taxes? It’s been a while since I was this confused by a US thing.
US tax code is (deliberately) complicated and unlike other countries, you need to manually fill out the forms with your financial data even though the government already knows it and what you owe (minus exemptions that the vast majority of citizens won’t claim). This is because there is a major industry around tax preparation, and the big names (such as Intuit) have aggressively lobbied for decades to keep the process as complicated and inconvenient as possible so that people are forced to pay them to fill out their tax forms. This lobbying has also resulted in the legally mandated free filing options being buried and hard to find, with many people not even knowing they exist.
Tax prep is a huge scam with many billions of dollars behind it. Weather providers are probably going to be next in the news, since they’ve been trying to kill the free government-run forecasts and force people onto their paid platforms for just as long.
Free Tax USA is easy to use and free for federal, $15 for state. I used it last time. This time I filed for an extension because the IRS might be so gutted by October I won’t even have to pay. And I owe a lot because I was a contractor for most of 2024.
Normally I have no problem paying taxes but this time it’s different.
The existing paid weather and mapping services are not excited. Right now they just repackage days that’s provided by the government for free, so while their customer base isn’t as big as it would be without NOAA, NWS, and USGS data available to anyone, their expenses are super low.
They’d need 1000x at many customers to cover the expense of gathering their own data.
Instead, what they’ll all end up doing is paying huge money to third party services (e.g.SpaceX), who have existing infrastructure that can be used to launch weather monitoring services and will end up being the only ones to benefit from this.
Okay so the “paying” is for when you use third parties to “help” you file, yes? You don’t pay the government for the privilege of being able to file, yes? So what does/did this Free File thing do?
Taxes aren’t easy in Germany either, I’m glad I have a husband who is level-headed enough to do them for us both because I’d always have a near mental breakdown when I tried. But it’s always been obvious to me where and how to file without involving anyone I’d have to pay. Fuck.
Personal filing is always free, the “free” in “free filing” refers to the prep part. It just means you fill out and submit your taxes yourself rather than paying a tax firm’s accountants to do it for you. Calling it that makes it seem like the firms are part of the process rather than bloated parasites feeding off taxpayers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the name was also a result of their influence.
Their accountants can claim exemptions and rebates buried in the tax code that laymen wouldn’t know exist - ones that they lobbied for to make their services more attractive. It makes them worthwhile for some households, but only because they’re solving a problem they birthed and grew in the first place.
IRS Direct File was just a free government-run alternative to the tax filing programs like TurboTax.
You can still do your taxes by hand without the help of any software for free, but they’ve killed the website that fills out the forms automatically and the manual process is significantly more complicated.
Free file is software that people use to file. As far as I’m aware, it’s always been free to print out the forms and mail it all in.
Definition: A system of services, opportunities, or projects, usually designed to meet a social need.
In this case, a digital service provided directly by the IRS, hence the name “Direct File.” In contrast, filing by paper is still supported. Tax preparation businesses have been actively preventing the US filing process from being simplified, naturally because that’s the reason they make money.
So this Direct File thing is simply for filing your taxes online? Because we have a thing like that too (doesn’t every “civilised” country?). And that’s what they want to abolish? US lobbyists are something else, man.
They want to be the middleman, so requirements for them to provide a free filing service are hidden and direct competition is in this case buried.
FYI if you live in Canada don’t use TurboTax, use Wealthsimple(a Canadian company) to file your taxes.
EDIT: There are other companies as well that are Canadian that support CRA NETFILE. Can find all supported listed here. The list doesn’t list which are fully Canadian so you’ll need to do some digging to confirm. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/digital-services-individuals/netfile-overview/certified-software-netfile-program.html
And if you’re in France, don’t use TurboTax, use the official government website that calculates everything for you reliably every year :o
With the nice simulator mode so you can run the numbers and see how much you need to budget for well beforehand.
Nice! Wish our CRA would do that. Just review, approve, and submit all using their systems and no third party nonsense.
Well that is just a tip of the iceberg.
What do u think his digital currency was for?
Corpos buy currency, he sells his coin, he does whatever corpos want, done.
Corpos write off as failed investment, Trump gets paid.All digital currencies are for some shit like this - fraud.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Trump could have held the Saudis up for $50 billion on Inauguration Day 2016. Five minutes with the ambassador and he could have walked away with plenty of loot.
Yosemite Sam could have figured it out.
Some of this is about accepting bribes. A lot more is simply ideology.
Trump’s people do not believe the IRS should exist and they are trying to dismantle it. DirectFile is just low hanging fruit, intended to make people more frustrated with tax filing and more easy to radicalized in an attempt dismantle and replace with tariffs.
Like, this is a real decades long project that goes way beyond Trump. Abolishing the income tax was Goldwater’s wet dream.
I agree with you that the Project 2025 folks are important, but I’m talking about Trump in particular.
The shoes, the NFTs, and the crypto schemes are all about fleecing his own people.
There was a lottery where the top prize was dinner at the white House with POTUS. They ran it for months and there was never a single winner.
I think he really likes stealing from poor people. Either that or he’s too chicken to go toe to toe with someone who might hit back.
I’ve always thought the best argument against him being bribed is that the cash he’s pocketing from staying at his own hotels is pretty petty as far as what the president could potentially get in the way of ill-gotten gains.
Trump is incredibly miserly for someone who’s so terrible with money. He straight-up refuses to pay anyone he thinks won’t win a lawsuit against him, stiffing dozens of contractors who worked on his real estate projects over the decades. He even ghosts the venues that host his rallies when it comes time for his campaign to repay them.
There was an experiment where checks were mailed weekly to various random wealthy people with slightly less each week to see at what point they wouldn’t even bother cashing them in. Trump was one of only two people to keep cashing them even when they dropped to pennies per check.
He’s also infamous for lying about his wealth. He is (or was before his presidency gave him endless opportunities to grift) a paper billionaire who in reality was so deep in debt and had such bad credit due to his constant bankruptcies that no bank in America would lend him money. That’s how he got involved with Deutsch Bank, the one with shady connections to the Russian government.
He’s corrupt, incompetent, and willing to do anything for money. And he has so many grifts running that even if they aren’t making much individually, he’s still “earning” a fortune overall.
