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FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

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Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#101

Post by gavinhoward »

fakedang wrote: post #99
gavinhoward wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tell your relative they're doing really good work, but a little change to their website might do wonders. You're absolutely correct. Fortunately, my relative is aware. Unfortunately, she's tried to tell them, and they don't believe her. It annoys her so much.

Tell her to show them this thread and how they're effectively turning into a laughing stock in spite of a great product (well, at least hoping my comment sends the message so she doesn't have to be so upfront about it :P).

Already did!

Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#102

Post by willcipriano »

harpooniker wrote: post #100
willcipriano wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has nothing to do with force the vote. Force the vote proved establishment democrats are never going to even try to give you healthcare. They are terrified of a medicare for all vote hitting the floor when they have a majority.

How did it prove that?

They fought kicking and screaming to not have to bring a medicare for all vote to the floor. If they wanted it, you'd expect the opposite, but that never happens.

Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#103

Post by sokoloff »

RajT88 wrote: post #22
thousand_nights wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been seeing this pattern on so many posts on hn that criticize basically anything. i'm not trying to have a stab at you specifically btw, this is more meta > x is bad because of this obvious reason that it is bad > "but y and z are also bad!" what is that supposed to be a rebuttal to? is the implication that we should.. do nothing because everything else is also shit? i don't see why turbotax in this instance sh…

> i don't see why turbotax in this instance shouldn't be punished. I don't see why they should only be punished 141 million dollars - they undoubtedly made a lot more money than that out of these shady practices. Therefore, this is just a "cost of doing business" and won't curtail such behavior in the future. Not until the penalty is severe enough to put the fear into them.

I feel like these penalties for corporate misbehavior are exactly as you describe: heads I-win; tails I-win-now-then-pay-it-back-later.

If we don't make the fines something like 3x the gains by default, but leave it at 1x disgorgement, we should expect rational players to keep playing the game the same way.

Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#104

Post by distract8901 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #57
distract8901 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name is sketchy and the website is just as bad. Every instinct I have says they're a shady scam site just waiting to steal my info. But no, they're actually good and just have terrible marketing and design. Sure makes doing my taxes interesting. I've been using them for three years

>But no, they're actually good and just have terrible marketing and design. Maybe we should realize WE are in the wrong for conflating "Shiny, animation filled website" with "not scam".

I dunno, it's a little hard to trust a website is up to date on present day tax law when the entire site design came from a 1990s reject bin.

Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#105

Post by distract8901 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #8

After a surprise bill of over $100 from H&R block I've been using FreeTaxUSA and have been very happy to pay $15 for state filing. The UI is just as good as TurboTax or H&R block.

HR block got me once. They said I needed the premium package for some slightly unusual form that I ended up not actually needing. But once you click that button to enable premium features, there is no possible way of removing it. You're forced to pay the $80 no matter what.

I just copied my data to FreeTaxUSA and filed everything for free. Fuck them.

Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#106

Post by dmoy »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #60
dmoy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UI for 8949 is worse than TurboTax, for the edge case of having a lot of non-covered shares. (Technically you can mail a paper copy of all the 1099-B to the IRS to work around this problem) And I think some 1099-R codes used to have buggy question flow, but it's better now. So far that's the only two things I've found worse than TurboTax, and certainly not worth paying Intuit for.

> (Technically you can mail a paper copy of all the 1099-B to the IRS to work around this problem) I do this every year. Got into the habit because some index fund thing I had a couple bucks of in my portfolio did some weird shit with stock dividends and ended up producing over a hundred transactions amounting to just over the "round to zero" amount of profit. It's really not that much of a headache as long as you ha…

> Not a soul is going to bother checking the details anyway, since they already have the contents of your 1099.

the issue is for non-covered shares, where they don't have the full contents of the 1099.

Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#107

Post by JAlexoid »

pkulak wrote: post #78
JAlexoid wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real - us paying them $4000 per year isn't going to make them money. Tricking your parents into paying for things that they don't even need - that's where the money is. Selling 20 $2mil cars per years isn't as valuable as selling 1mil "cheap" $700 iPhones per year.

Holy smokes do you ever have complicated taxes!

I do, and when I do I get a tax person. But 7 out of 8 years in a row my taxes were standard deduction...

Question is - how does it excuse Intuit at all?

Re: FTC judge decides Intuit’s ‘free’ TurboTax ads misled consumers

#108

Post by yencabulator »

distract8901 wrote: post #104
mrguyorama wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But no, they're actually good and just have terrible marketing and design. Maybe we should realize WE are in the wrong for conflating "Shiny, animation filled website" with "not scam".

I dunno, it's a little hard to trust a website is up to date on present day tax law when the entire site design came from a 1990s reject bin.

Those two are very different talent pools.
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