
TurboTax Uses a “Military Discount” to Trick Troops into Paying to File Taxes - kaboro
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-military-discount-trick-troops-paying-to-file-taxes
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LinuxBender
Cheating service members can have consequences. We were TDY and put up in a
hotel in Los Angeles, that was ripping off customers by removing placards that
advised some local 7 digit numbers were now long distance. Both the hotel and
the phone company were making extra money off this little scam. We advised the
Area Defense Counsel of the practice and the military cancelled the contract
with the entire hotel chain. The hotel chain never recovered from that loss.

I presume something similar could be done here. i.e. contact the ADC for each
branch and advise service members are being taken advantage of. The military
could send out a memo globally suggesting how to file for free and to not use
TurboTax.

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HeWhoLurksLate
I sure hope so. This is _not_ acceptable, especially when they're being paid
_by the taxpayers_ \- so not only is Intuit dipping once, they're double-
dipping.

Why, oh why, do they deserve to exist anymore? This is not cool.
Unfortunately, I expect that they'll get either nothing or some flavor of
penalty that'll only momentarily stun them.

Not to mention the fact that class-action lawsuits disproportionately help the
_lawyers_ get money out of it, either.

Ugh.

~~~
YawningAngel
I use ArgoCD professionally and Quickbooks personally. Their stuff is pretty
good. It's hard to blame them for participating in the tax return scam when
everyone in their industry does it.

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whenchamenia
No, it is not.

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jwally
Anecdote:

My wife and I normally file with turbo-tax, and usually end up owing money to
the government. This year was different, and we actually got money back.

We have to pay to use turbo-tax (like 39.95 or whatever). When it was asking
how we wanted to pay, there was an option where it could be taken out of our
refund. We selected this; and were about to hit submit before we noticed that
39.95 figure twice.

Turns out they were going to charge us 39.95 to use their product, and (I
doubt accidentally) 39.95 to pay them out of our refund. We sprinted back,
chose to pay with our card (which was free) and filed.

I felt like I needed to shower after.

~~~
catslaps
I had the same experience LAST year when I used them as well. It is no
accident that the normal fee is the same as this surprise additional fee to
pay them out of the refund. Deliberately meant to go under the customer's
radar.

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mrosett
TurboTax is one of the most aggressive rent-seekers out there. I consider what
they do to be so unethical that I try to avoid Intuit's other services even
though they're very useful. (I also don't love how Intuit has done its best to
run Mint into the ground after acquiring it.)

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bongobongo
Intuit is one of the largest players in San Diego's tech scene, but I will
never, ever work there for precisely this reason, despite the fact that they
are almost always hiring/recruiting and offer competitive compensation
packages.

The problem for me is that they appear to be total scumbags.

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sharps_xp
what's the range you see for "competitive compensation"?

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bongobongo
AFAIK a "senior" dev there can expect to make just shy of $150K, which is just
about slightly above-average for SD for a large company (excluding the defense
industry, which depresses the average, and there's a lot of it)

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natrik
Many junior devs can have a starting salary of $120K-150K and senior starts at
$200K+ imo for large companies

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bongobongo
Not in San Diego

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Yhippa
Intuit has weaponized tax filing against the American taxpayer for great
profit. Their lobbying efforts are very impressive.

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r00fus
While I agree with Intuit being complete rent-seekers, I don't think it's
"weaponized". It's every-day lobbying (aka corruption) to limit government
from doing what many other countries do successfully: automate tax filing.

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vonmoltke
Lobbying is not the same thing as corruption, and conflating the two does not
help the conversation or address the problems with either.

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kraftman
How are they different, for ignorant people like me?

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lucasmullens
Lobbying is legal. There's plenty of good reasons for it, for example some
tech companies lobbied against net neutrality, which I certainly wouldn't call
corruption.

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programmer_dude
So lobbying is legalized corruption then? Also why is net neutrality bad?

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lucasmullens
Whoops, I meant _for_ net neutrality.

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User23
This sounds like stupidity not malice. There’s clearly a usability issue when
different UI flows charge the same person differently for the same service.

Edit: that’s just it. I don’t believe there was a meeting where a PM sat down
and said “muhaha let’s make our UI confusing to screw service members.” That’s
ludicrous. What likely happened is substandard engineering practices created
an overly complicated UI and then failed to correctly handle all cases due to
poor coding.

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austincheney
I believe the appropriate term for such an experience is _dark pattern_. It
takes extra effort to blame the user when the intention of the experience is
deception (a lie).

Evidence that the lie is intentional is this:

 _To find TurboTax’s Free File landing page, service members typically have to
go through the IRS website. TurboTax Military, by contrast, is promoted on the
company’s home page and elsewhere. Starting through the Military landing page
directs many users to paid products even when they are eligible to get the
same service for no cost using the Free File edition.

An Intuit press release this year announced “TurboTax Offers Free Filing for
Military E1- E5” — but refers users to TurboTax Military and does not mention
the actual Free File option. (E1-E5 refers to military pay grades.)_

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phjesusthatguy3
That's just a custom "fuck you" page for the military. Its the same process
for every taxpayer.

