TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

I am the developer in charge of CalFile, the free filing software that everyone asks for here for state of California. https://www.ftb.ca.gov/file/ways-to-file/online/calfile/inde... I am pushing so hard to make it better and more useful to more people, like being able to add capital gain that is not currently supported. these are the push backs that I am getting: 1. Last time they tried to do what all of you ask, a ready return. TurboTax and others hired bunch of lobbyist…

Precisely why I built https://freetofile.com (it’s a simple static site with React for internationalization that automatically renders in Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, or English depending on browser settings). It’s shocking and depressing how many low income people don’t know they don’t need to spend $100-200 to file their taxes. I want to blanket my area (well the whole country really but baby steps…) in signs with the URL during tax season. I really do loathe the entire industry at this…

The leaked internal slides from Intuit are really disgusting [0][1]. From the article: > 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…

They use all sorts of dark patterns to upsell you on their paid services. I still use them because TurboTax is generally easy to use and gets the job done.