Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free
Any thoughts from folks who work at Intuit? https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free
ProPublica
This is pretty evil. I don't know about banning lobbying, maybe, but really people should boycott companies that do this and it should be publicly condemned. Somebody needs to create a kick starter campaign to buy advertising raising awareness of this issue during the next election, naming and shaming both the companies that did this and the politicians who voted for it
Your ad would include literally every public company because they all do this. They all lobby and all get legislation passed. That being said, I would contribute to this PAC.
Really, they all got bills passed preventing the IRS from pre-filling returns with known data?
I think there’s a lot of cronyism in America, but I don’t find ours to be the worst. Truthfully, there is no central authority that captures all of your financial data. We ask a lot of questions to turn over every stone that could lead to a tax deduction. There’s a value add to that endeavor of asking our customers.
IRS has enough information to generate a return for the majority of Americans who only get income from employment, savings accounts, and investments in financial securities. In fact, that includes me, even though my income is relatively high, it comes in those forms. At the very least those things could be prepopulated by IRS and you only need to add additional forms if you have self employment income, rental income, or other untracked sources. Your employer lobbied hard to have Congress pass a bill making it ILLEGAL for IRS to do so.
IRS doesn’t know what tax deductible donations you made. They get a lot of reports, but not everything. Other countries do a prefab return based off what they know: but what they know isn’t everything. I don’t oppose the government doing this. But it’s true they don’t know everything. You can’t legitimately dispute that. They don’t know know what crypto you mined or airdropped (which is treated like an investable asset; not cash). For early bitcoin investors, they could owe millions to the IRS! Yeah and your employer illegally holds blue collar workers to search them since they can’t trust them—without pay— at the end of their shift. This is what I wanted to avoid, but ultimately I think there are greater moral travesties than Intuit out there. Facebook especially. All employers lobby for awful shit. Amazon has done it. Facebook has done it. It doesn’t make Intuit unique or unusual for you to point out that fact. We all work for shitty 1%ers that steal from the middle class. Fight them instead of fighting me for making a living. I don’t criticize you even though Amazon is awful.
https://youtu.be/Fj4anUL-LvY nothing surprising here. We should have return free filling but as pointed out here the tax companies are preventing it
Good, how else will I get paid doing almost no work if it is not for Intuit. And honestly, I don’t give a fk if it is fair or not, isn’t that how corporate America works? Intuit is the lesser evil comparing to Facebook, Uber
Of course it is how it works. When it’s corrupt and unchecked that is.
Lobbying should be illegal in a democracy change my mind
Lobbying is just talking with your representatives. There is no democracy without lobbying.
The alternative seems to be worse: under the table payments and even more hidden corruption.