Using lobbying, the revolving door, and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.
An internal Intuit analysis of customer calls this year shows widespread customer confusion about ads for “free” TurboTax. (Highlights added by ProPublica.)
By 2019, nearly 40% of U.S. taxpayers filed online and some 40 million of them did so with TurboTax, far more than with any other product.
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.”
Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published. Last fall, Intuit’s longtime CEO Brad Smith embarked on a farewell tour of the company’s offices around the world.
