
TurboTax pushed low-income taxpayers to paid tier to make up for Trump tax law - pseudolus
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/20696643/turbotax-president-trump-tax-law-charging-students-disabled-unemployed
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gringoDan
What Intuit/TurboTax is doing here is a classic bait and switch. TurboTax is
legally required to make filing free for many individuals, but funnels them
into unnecessary paid products. They make it almost impossible to find the
free product, going as far as making sure those pages are unindexed from
search engines.

I highly recommend this Reply All podcast and the links on the page to learn
more: [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nhgol/144-dark-
patt...](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nhgol/144-dark-pattern)

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kop316
I saw this first hand with their tax filing. They would ask vague questions on
if something applied to you or not. If you answered yes it applying to you,
they immediately forced you to use their paid tier. If you went back and
clicked "no", you were unable to go back to the free tier. I was also unable
to delete any of my data off of their system, so I was left with TurboTax
having a lot of my personal data and a half filled out tax return.

I ended up going through a different tax software to file my taxes.

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msravi
This is such a mess... In India, the income tax department releases both Excel
and Java versions of their forms that you can fill, verify, sign, and upload
(as xml) - see
[https://www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/downloads/incomeTax...](https://www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/downloads/incomeTaxReturnUtilities?lang=eng)

And what is this about a 2002 deal between Intuit and the IRS agreeing for the
IRS not to release a tool that competes against TurboTax? That's so completely
bizzare. Why in the world would the IRS strike a deal like that, that is
detrimental to their own interests?

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neo4sure
The same in Australia. Tax department offers free software

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wtf_is_up
Isn't this essentially upselling? I struggle to see how this is newsworthy
considering this is a common sales tactic across virtually all domains.

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audiometry
This story originally broken by a Planet Money podcast.

