The Bush administration was looking at doing what a lot of other developed countries ended up doing, which is having the IRS create essentially its own version of TurboTax: tax prep software that you could get online, from the government, for free, that would be easier than filling out an actual paper tax return. Bush administration decided to take a hard look at how tax prep worked. Really the key moment that ushered in the contemporary paradigm of all of this came in the early 2000s. It was an actual box that you would buy with CDs in it with this tax prep software that you’d put on your desktop computer. People who have been doing their taxes for a while may recall that TurboTax was big even going back to the ’90s, but back then it wasn’t a website. They have two main businesses: one is Turbo Tax, and the other is accounting software called QuickBooks. Justin Elliot: Intuit is a Silicon Valley company. Lizzie O’Leary: What kind of company is Intuit? What are its priorities? Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
TURBOTAX SMALL BUSINESS START FOR FREE FREE
On Sunday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Justin Elliot about how Intuit built its TurboTax empire and muscled out what could have been an easy and truly free way to file your taxes online. It filed an administrative complaint investigating TurboTax’s advertising, and it asked a judge for an injunction to stop TurboTax’s ads. At the end of March, in part because of Justin’s work, the Federal Trade Commission sued Intuit. What he found is that while TurboTax advertised its filing services as free, millions of customers were in fact lured into paying for its products when they didn’t have to. 1 tax prep software in the country: Intuit’s TurboTax. Instead of telling us, though, the IRS tasks us with filling out a slew of complicated forms and doing a bunch of arithmetic, which drives many people to tax-prep services.įor years, ProPublica reporter Justin Elliot has been investigating the No.
For the vast majority of Americans, the IRS already knows what we owe in taxes.
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