<story><title>FTC Is Investigating Intuit over TurboTax Practices</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/the-ftc-is-investigating-intuit-over-turbotax-practices</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klmadfejno</author><text>God I hope this suit is successful. Lots of people here are discussing the regulatory trap they&amp;#x27;ve got, and that&amp;#x27;s a big problem. But the actual problem mentioned in the suit is deceptive marketing. TurboTax is the worst in this regard.&lt;p&gt;Last year, I, at every step of the process, declined the expensive options that say &amp;quot;maybe you&amp;#x27;ll save more money if you permanently switch into this paid mode&amp;quot;. Yet after a couple hours of filling out forms, they said at the end that it wasn&amp;#x27;t possible to file using the free version, and that I would have to pay a couple hundred dollars. That ticked me off. They have all of the information required to figure this out much earlier in the process (income), yet they continue to allow you to pick the free tier up until the very end where the tedium of starting over with a different service is too high. Fuck em.&lt;p&gt;Their UI is very nice though, especially for guiding people through a process that they almost intrinsically hate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loosescrews</author><text>I have tried nearly all of the DIY tax offerings out there. CreditKarma has a relatively new completely free offering that I feel rivals TurboTax in ease of use. I also feel that it is superior to paid offerings such as H&amp;amp;R Block.&lt;p&gt;Another completely free offering is freetax.com. I used them for a few years, and while not quite as easy to use, it works well.&lt;p&gt;Note that both of these free offerings include free state tax filing and have no income limits or up sells.</text></comment>
<story><title>FTC Is Investigating Intuit over TurboTax Practices</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/the-ftc-is-investigating-intuit-over-turbotax-practices</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klmadfejno</author><text>God I hope this suit is successful. Lots of people here are discussing the regulatory trap they&amp;#x27;ve got, and that&amp;#x27;s a big problem. But the actual problem mentioned in the suit is deceptive marketing. TurboTax is the worst in this regard.&lt;p&gt;Last year, I, at every step of the process, declined the expensive options that say &amp;quot;maybe you&amp;#x27;ll save more money if you permanently switch into this paid mode&amp;quot;. Yet after a couple hours of filling out forms, they said at the end that it wasn&amp;#x27;t possible to file using the free version, and that I would have to pay a couple hundred dollars. That ticked me off. They have all of the information required to figure this out much earlier in the process (income), yet they continue to allow you to pick the free tier up until the very end where the tedium of starting over with a different service is too high. Fuck em.&lt;p&gt;Their UI is very nice though, especially for guiding people through a process that they almost intrinsically hate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cactus2093</author><text>Seems like TurboTax is probably not worth the hassle of trying to use for free. They try to steer you at every turn into accidentally accepting the paid features, and if you manage to make it through the maze there doesn&amp;#x27;t really seem to be much left that makes them better than any of the simpler competitors if you stick to the free tiers - no saving your information year over year, no automatically importing the super complex statements from robo-advisors like Betterment, etc.&lt;p&gt;It also seems like most software engineers won&amp;#x27;t qualify for free file anyway, because it has an income limit of $69,000 a year as far as I can tell.&lt;p&gt;One thing I genuinely wonder, at what point will digital&amp;#x2F;web-based services become the default for handling information by the government and every other large institution? Will it ever happen in my lifetime? Why are we still having to pay for 3rd party software to fill out physical forms? Even docusign, while it has become very prevalent for most contracts these days and is very convenient, is still requiring that you fill out a scanned image of a physical piece of paper, instead of just making the contracts web-based. Why?? Why doesn&amp;#x27;t the IRS just have a web app like turbotax for everyone to file taxes through? And if the answer is that the tax code is way too complicated that it&amp;#x27;s prohibitively expensive for the government to build a site as comprehensive as Turbotax, then fix it!</text></comment>