Leaks reveal how creepy, cultish monopolist Intuit lobbied Congress and the IRS to kill free tax-filing

Virtually every rich country on Earth provides pre-completed tax-returns that you can either ignore (and pay an accountant or do your own taxes), or just sign and return: after all, the government already knows what you're earning and how much tax you paid, so they can do all the heavy lifting for your annual return.

But when Congress tried to create a similar program in the USA, it faced a blizzard of lobbying from the tax-prep industry, led by Intuit, a tax-prep monopolist that grew to scale by buying or merging with its competitors -- growth tactics that are illegal under US antitrust law, but have been permitted since Ronald Reagan gutted antitrust enforcement 40 years ago.

Under its weird, cultlike billionaire CEO Brad Smith (whose employees don t-shirts bearing his favorite aphorisms, like "Repetition doesnt ruin the prayer") Intuit led a coalition that created "Free File," which would, in theory, allow 60% of Americans to file their taxes for free, using no-cost options offered by the tax-prep industry. But then the industry used "dark patterns" and out-and-out fraud to ensure that no one actually used the service, even as they stepped up their lobbying efforts, zeroing out the IRS's budget for advertising Free File.

In a long, well-reported piece on Propublica, Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel lean on leaked Intuit documents to show exactly how crooked and corrupt the Intuit lobbying effort was, and how effective it was at ensuring that Americans -- especially poor Americans -- continued to funnel millions into his company's coffers for use of its flagship Turbotax product, now with the help of former IRS employees who once ran Free File for the US government and now work to ensure that Americans continue to pay to use Turbo Tax. Read the rest