- #TURBOTAX FOR S CORP STAND ALONE FOR FREE#
- #TURBOTAX FOR S CORP STAND ALONE SOFTWARE#
- #TURBOTAX FOR S CORP STAND ALONE FREE#
#TURBOTAX FOR S CORP STAND ALONE FREE#
So, despite that site being laced with as many “free”s as could be mustered, you can’t actually get to free filing at all. It turns out that if you start the process from, it’s impossible to find the truly free version. Even though TurboTax could tell we were eligible to file for free, the company never told us about the truly free version.
#TURBOTAX FOR S CORP STAND ALONE FOR FREE#
In the source code, TurboTax had branded us as “NONFFA.” That stands for “Non Free File Alliance.” In other words, we were not on track to file for free after all. From there, the researchers dug into TurboTax’s source code.Įven though we clicked on the “FREE Guaranteed” option and met all the requirements to file for free, the company had tagged us as a potential paying customer. That agreement is quite simple: if you make less than $66k in the year, you get to file for free, period. Per the article, both instances are not kosher based on the agreement with the IRS. We went back to and clicked on “FREE Guaranteed.” This time, we went through the process as a Walgreens cashier without health insurance, entering personal information and giving the company lots of sensitive data.Īgain, TurboTax told us we had to pay - this time because there’s an extra form if you don’t have insurance.
Instead, the tax prep would cost $119.99. Despite ads that mentioned “free” several times over, the researchers that created a profile of a house cleaner making $29k for the year, TurboTax’s site declared that free to file wasn’t an option because the fictional citizen was an independent contractor. Spoiler alert: those products didn’t end up being free. We searched for “irs free file taxes.” And we thought we found what we were looking for: Ads from TurboTax and others directing us to free products. Here’s what happened when we went looking. In exchange, the companies have entered into an agreement with the IRS to offer a “Free File” product to most Americans - but good luck finding it.
#TURBOTAX FOR S CORP STAND ALONE SOFTWARE#
Intuit and other tax software companies have spent millions lobbying to make sure that the IRS doesn’t offer its own tax preparation and filing service. While that’s true, ProPublica has a nice write up of just how far Intuit in particular goes to hide this program from the very public it’s supposed to be serving. One of the ways companies like Intuit hand-wave concerns that its lobbying efforts are coercing the poor and middle class to pay for tax prep that is so simple it should be free is by pointing out that it entered into an agreement with the IRS to offer their own free-to-file programs for anyone that makes less than $66k in a given year. Now, if all of that seems like shady shit, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Intuit, makers of TurboTax software, has been particularly active on this front, with novel arguments that amount to, “But if you make this law, then we’ll make less money.” When that messaging became a PR disaster, the company tricked a bunch of mouth-pieces to say all this for it. Well, for just as many years, the companies that make money by doing this tax prep work have lobbied heavily in Congress to keep this from becoming law.
Why make most people do tax prep when they don’t have to?
The idea is that, for the vast majority of Americans, the IRS already has all the information it needs for the tax filing. Several politicians have put versions of this plan forward, including Elizabeth Warren. Mon, Apr 29th 2019 11:57am - Timothy Geignerįor years, advocates for the non-wealthy public have put forward plans to simplify the tax-preparation process by having the IRS pre-prepare a tax filing with the information it already has, sending it to citizens, and allowing those citizens to either sign and return it or do their own tax preparation if they think there are errors.
0 kommentar(er)
