TurboTax to pay $141M in agreement reached by all 50 states

This is the important part of the article:<p>&gt; Consumers are expected to receive a direct payment of approximately $30 for each year that they were deceived into paying for filing services. Impacted consumers will automatically receive notices and a check by mail.<p>It looks like TurboTax is being required to return the money they fraudulently obtained, but they&#x27;re not even required to pay interest or any additional restitution or punitive damages. It&#x27;s definitely disappointing and a minor miscarriage of justice.<p>Edit: Two things I want to clarify from my original comment. First, I wasn&#x27;t able to find pricing info from the years in question so I went from what I remembered as their lowest pricing tier which I think was $30. Second, I use the term &quot;minor miscarriage of justice&quot; as a comparison to the Sackler BS which was a gross (as in disgusting) miscarriage of justice.

How about instead of fining them, we just create a free tax filing website at the IRS to spite them? $141MM is just the cost of doing business, and that&#x27;s ridiculous.

My only confusion in this ongoing saga is, how is there no open source free hosted solution for people to do this? Or are there any but they&#x27;re not reliable&#x2F;famous?<p>I have worked at Intuit, Bangalore for a short time as a contractor and once during a weekly feature demo, a guy joked that &quot;user shouldn&#x27;t see the obvious way to cancel the payment&quot;. There was laughter around. It was a dark pattern but no one cared. They were boasting about being one of the best places to work all the time.<p>But it was hell. They simply don&#x27;t give contractors a place to sit and work. You&#x27;re called &#x27;Mobile&#x27;. So you get to sit only where the full time employees don&#x27;t sit or when they are on leave. It was humiliating and i simply don&#x27;t understand why they have that as a policy. The manager was talking as if he moved mountains for us a couple of contractors to sit. But it was actually a couple of desks where there was direct sun light and no full time employees would sit because it&#x27;s so hot and you get sweaty in minutes. I left in a couple of months and didn&#x27;t even say good bye.

Can we please just solve the much bigger problem which is that ordinary people should not need to use any third party services to create, validate, and submit individual income tax returns. The IRS can and should be the provider of this software.

Can we do the same to Dunn &amp; Bradstreet DUNS number? This is free as well, required for business credit score creation and reporting, federal contracting, and oddly for posting an app on the Apple App Store.<p>But they have an insane number of anti-patterns to get you to pay for it and other products in the way.

A lot of people here asking &quot;Why is the fine so low, how does this happen!&quot; I recommend reading &quot;The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives&quot;[0] which is obviously a bit broader than just fines, but does touch on the history and current state of things with respect to corporate malfeasance.<p>One thing that I did not know (too young to be paying close enough attention at the time), but was interesting to me was the backlash from Arthur Andersen collapsing and the resulting loss of jobs as part of the whole Enron scandal. This was at least somewhat blamed on government overreach in going after Enron, even if that wasn&#x27;t exactly the case, and helped to set the table for quite a slide in standards over time.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;30&#x2F;535799735&#x2F;corporate-bungling-and-political-scandal-abound-in-jesse-eisinger-s-new-book" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;30&#x2F;535799735&#x2F;corporate-bungling-...</a>

&gt; New York Will Receive Over $5.4 Million for More Than 176,000 New Yorkers<p>That&#x27;s $30 each for users who are already onboarded and very likely to use this high-margin product again next year. As customer acquisition strategies go, &quot;outright fraud&quot; is looking pretty good!

“This agreement should serve as a reminder to companies large and small that engaging in these deceptive marketing ploys is illegal.” I think he meant profitable. From Intuit’s perspective this is like a court order to dump out the cup of coffee you bought.<p>Forget the people who signed up from their ad, let’s add up the money the country has collectively spent (wasted) on CPAs, TurboTax, H&amp;R Block, etc due to the complex income tax code Intuit and friends perpetually lobby to maintain.<p>Intuit is a parasite on our society. Their newest strategy is to force businesses using QuickBooks into software subscriptions because we all know the logical rules for double entry bookkeeping are constantly in flux &#x2F;s

141M would be like me having to pay 1000$ fine for robbing a federal bank where I stole $10 billion.

$2.5M of the $141M is for “admin fees” ಠ_ಠ

Is the IRS under any obligation to provide e-filing systems access to companies like Intuit that knowingly flout the law?<p>If not, they should revoke it.

I am not without complaints over my government (United Kingdom) - but they did manage to built an online tax system, without suddenly deciding that private companies would enhance the experience.<p>By all means fine the bejeesus out of Intuit - but do not think for one moment the actual problem wasn&#x27;t that they managed to lobby their way into that position.<p>If anybody is interested, I quite like the UK government website - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;</a><p>It has the appearance that it was knocked up in notepad, but after using it, I have a modicum of respect for how it makes government usable.

So, basically no fine at all. This is nothing to a company that size. Nothing.

&gt;Intuit will pay $141 million in restitution, of which roughly $2.5 million will be used for administrative fund costs.<p>A total joke. It would be better to hold a $141,000,000 lottery instead of giving out $30&#x2F;house.

I used Intuit online for about 10 years... at the beginning it was fantastic however year over year it just became worse until I had to abandon them and use a different online tax service... My returns are very straightforward and I did my own on paper prior to Intuit... I can only say Intuit seems to have intentionally made the flow of questions unwieldy over the years... almost as if they intentionally sabotaged their own business... so sad

IT&#x27;S STILL ALIVE! FINE IT AGAIN! FINE IT AGAIN!

&gt; In contrast, the IRS Free File products were free for 70 percent of taxpayers.<p>I wonder why the IRS &quot;Free&quot; version isn&#x27;t actually free!

Im Canadian.<p>I filed my taxes using WealthSimple Tax.<p>It cost $0.<p>It took &lt;5 minutes.<p>I really don&#x27;t understand why people pay for TurboTax.

They made $2 billion in profit in 2021, so this is about 7% of that.

I guess TurboTax made much more money than 141M? A fine is fine only if it is higher than the profits.

The Federal Government should simply buy TurboTax from Intuit and make it a free service

141 million, is a minor footnote in their profits.

Good. They totally rigamarolled me at checkout.

Nice. About half of the process of filing taxes with TurboTax is dodging all the dark patterns to try get you to pay...

All the best facets of capitalism at play: regulatory capture, decentralized costs &amp; concentrated profits, and fees small enough to be a cost of business rather than long-term deterrent.

How is this company getting away with 50cents per person for defrauding a whole nation?

$1.41 parking ticket

I&#x27;d prefer the IRS provide a truly free website. Screw Intuit, they broke the agreement.

Pay 141M and change nothing hmm

Phase 2: Get get rid of the Income Tax itself ...