Why I’m Boycotting TurboTax This Year
15th April 2018
TurboTax is an evil, parasitic product that exists entirely because taxes are confusing and hard to file. Worse than that, Intuit is one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. Years ago, the Obama administration proposed a system of automatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from Intuit and H&R Block.
Don’t give Intuit money. Don’t give H&R Block money. To do so is to perpetuate the status quo in which you have to file your own taxes in the first place. The best way to escape this trap is for millions of taxpayers to start doing their own taxes in hopes of weakening Intuit and H&R Block and depriving them of money they could use to lobby against auto-filing. This requires privileging your own long-term interests ahead of your short-term ones; it’s mildly annoying to do your taxes by hand for now, but in the long run, if the plan works, you won’t have to do your own taxes at all.
There is no reason that the government oughtn’t to do your taxes for you — all of the relevant documents are sent to the IRS, and they will re-do your return anyway just to make sure you haven’t made any mistakes.
This isn’t a purely hypothetical proposal. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Chile, and Spain already offer “pre-populated returns” to their citizens. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have exact enough tax withholding procedures that most people don’t have to file income tax returns at all, whether pre-populated or not. California has a voluntary return-free filing program called ReadyReturn for its income taxes.
You can imagine what the lobbyists had to say about that.
So why hasn’t return-free filing happened yet? The short answer is lobbying, and in particular lobbying by companies like Intuit.
My, what a surprise.
They haven’t stopped; in 2014, Day reported that Intuit was involved with an astroturfing effort meant to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition to automatic filing. Intuit spent $13 million lobbying Congress from 2011 to 2015, with 41 lobbying reports relating to taxes in 2015 alone. Most of the reports reference lobbying to “enhance voluntary compliance” — a euphemism for opposing automatic filing.
These companies are NOT your friends.