Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit

Regardless of which political party is responsible, the Federal government has a lot of benefits programs that have a lot of roadblocks to actually take advantage of. That isn't an accident. You could look at it as the GOP tending to send up roadblocks (e.g. they famously forced the IRS to strike a deal with Intuit) OR you can look at it as a class divide where the GOP are just the "baddies" everyone can scream about without actually needing to hold the government accountable.

And it's shocking how bad some of the QBO integrations are, especially for newish technologies. Intuit even screwed up PayPal in a way that some accountants don't want to use it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT5zKWBXtQU), forcing a labor intensive manual process.

I haven't found any other software that is practical to use in this way and has all the forms I need.

I tried H&R Block's free software one year, I think, because I was mad at Intuit, but it was useless because there were big gaping holes in the functionality.

Corporations are legal fictions. If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component.

Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are proven. They are precedented and they work.

If you wantonly break the law, you should not be a going concern. But "nationalization" and "corporate death penalty" are political hot potatoes. (I'm entirely sidestepping the argument as to whether that's reasonable.) If you want these companies shut down, or fearful of being shut down, credibly threatening to break them up, fine them into bankruptcy or suspend their licenses (e.g. for Intuit, their tax preparation license) is more effective.

You can’t say “the IRS makes this too complicated in order to funnel money into Intuit’s pocket so I am going to pay my taxes elsewhere.”

And it's a perfect example of why accepting broad government power provides an avenue for this sort of corruption to exist, especially in areas that people don't care enough about to spend time influencing government policy.

In a free market, it requires very little effort for you to make your opinion felt - you give your money to the people you think have the best product. Done. Those people see that they are making money - the people with lesser products see they are losing money. This requires very little effort on your part other than forming an opinion on what product you want to use.

In the government, what can you do if you think the IRS is doing a shitty job? Write a letter to your Congressmen? Vote for another Congressman in 2 years (what if you agree with their position on the IRS, but disagree on something more important, e.g. guns?) Run for office yourself?

The result is that relatively little attention is paid to public policy around tax preparation. There are no single-issue voters around IRS Free-file policy. There is too much else going on in national politics that is inarguably more important. And because no one really cares about this other than the tax preparation industry, the tax preparation industry is left largely unchallenged in pushing government to enact regulations that favor them.