Judge orders Intuit to stop lying about TurboTax being "free"

[adamrice]

Money is speech
Corporations are people
Slavery is freedom

[Alan_Wendt]

It might not have been written by IRS employees. They probably contracted it to McKinsey who subcontracted it to Haliburton.

[hand2mouse]

I worked with a firm in the software quality biz, and they’d show some pretty dire statistics.

“only 6.4 percent of federal IT projects with $10 million or more in labor costs were successful. Projects like the healthcare.gov website seem to be very easy to implement, yet despite their political importance, they are often over budget and off schedule.” ( Doomed: Challenges and solutions to government IT projects | Brookings )

And it’s positively touching how commenters here trust the federal government. /s Did no one read the news when healthcare.gov was rolled out?

[smulder]

BTW @orenwolf the “Show Full Post” button does not reveal @beschizza’s words, but rather only the quote from Ars Technica

[gatto]

@hand2mouse

“only 6.4 percent of federal IT projects with $10 million or more in labor costs were successful

welcome to software. industry usually mitigates this presenting opaque public goals, under delivering even on those goals, and reclassifying bugs as features. and is anyone out there happy with products like windows or office? were people thrilled when cyberpunk 2077 came out? was equifax a pillar of security?

then look at nasa, and tell me again how incapable government is.

@kmoser

That’s great for you, but not for the millions of Americans who make at least some of their income from sources which are not required to report it to the government, not to mention business expenses which the government has no way of knowing

with the current structure, the pressure is to make the tax code more complicated over time. let the irs administer it, kneecap the power of the tax prep lobby, and the pressure will be to make the tax code simpler over time

it won’t be a magical fix for everyone all at once, true. but, we need to start that ball rolling in the right direction to have any hope at all

[Bonivus_elderheart]

@Alan_Wendt

It might not have been written by IRS employees. They probably contracted it to McKinsey who subcontracted it to Haliburton.

… who then further sub-contracted it out to… Intuit. /rimshot

[Groundman]

Intuit and HR Block lobby yearly to keep the IRS from implementing return-free filing, which something like 36 other countries have. Last year I filed with FreeTaxUSA, which was, indeed, 100% free for the federal return ($14 for state) and I would recommend it.

I don’t know their stance on return-free filing or other ethical questions - I couldn’t find much when I looked - so if you do know, please comment.

[RobJ]

@VenTatsu

I’ve gotten letters from the IRS telling me I missed taking a credit that they had information telling them I should have taken, and they sent me a second check for the difference.

I had a similar situation last year. I send estimated tax payments, and had a brain fart and forgot to mention the last payment. The IRS caught that and my refund was for the corrected amount, followed by a letter telling me about my error, in their favor. Note I got the refund money first, and a month later they let me know what happened. This was quite the positive experience.