As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.
In the past? Because they make a mostly non-digital system digital and convenient. Currently? Corruption. At least for the TurboTax part of Intuit.
Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
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Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…
Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations. Those questions all have discrete answers, including the much-misunderstood home office. The correct tax outcomes are very much deterministic, in the sense that the same inputs always result in the same outputs. It's simply that th…
There are also a lot of non-deterministinc choices one can make. Things like carry forward losses or gains, that no algorithm could know. They depend on your personal plans for the future. You can make specific filing choices that have massive consequences on your future. There are choices like 83(b) elections that can save you tens of millions of dollars a decade in the future, contingent on the events after you file.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#93I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…
I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software. If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com…
So sad! I used it for at least a decade, maybe like 2006-2018 or so. Their Mac desktop software was excellent then, and no Electron tomfoolery or other nonsense. And you could just keep every year's TT app installed in case you wanted to open an old return to amend it or something.
I eventually decided to abandon them a couple years after they started forcing me to buy some ultra premium pro edition because I had a small amount of "business income." Switched to Credit Karma Taxes, which Intuit then bought, but miraculously some regulator forced them to divest that product, which landed at Cash App. So I have used that (now called Cash App Taxes) since then. It's a free product and even supports business income and state taxes (IIRC, state e-filing was always an additional add-on with TT). It was a little annoying to have to re-enter more that first year, but it's done a good job of rolling forward, and not that I've ever needed it, but they also have that "Audit Defense" thing included for free, another add-on upcharge TT offered.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#94As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.
There are multiple similar companies in many European countries, even though the government provides (often somewhat basic) tools to file taxes. A large percentage of citizens in the Germany and Austria use paid software because it's more comfortable, same in the UK and Poland. But yes, it would be better if that was not the case, like in Scandinavia.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#95I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…
I WAS a happy TurboTax customer for over 33 years, until this year when I used HR Block TaxCut to file my 2025 returns. Intuit insisted that only Windows 11 would be supported, for no technical reason whatsoever. I assume they got a payoff from Microsoft for doing this. So now I see they're laying off 3000 employees and wonder if it has something to do with poor sales of TurboTax because of their lame policy.
> for no technical reason whatsoever
Bold of you to state that without anything to back up your claim.
Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t, but you shouldn’t state it as fact unless you have information backing it up
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#96I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…
Why pay for tax software? What's wrong with the free tax submission website?
We don't have one. Are you talking about Direct File? The Trump admin killed it, though it was successfully nerfed from the start anyway by the Intuit and H&R Block lobbyists -- you couldn't even itemize deductions, or have 1099 income.
If your taxes were that simple, you didn't need software, you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes.
Note: If you're just taking the piss because every other country has a government method to submit your taxes, yup, we're dumb, thanks mostly to that shitty company.
Oh, we do have another 'free' filing method for those with income below a certain level, which the lobbyists made sure would be handled by those same private companies. They are allowed to obfuscate and hide it, so when you search for it, you will probably end up on their main, paid product. Kind of the identical story with how our credit reports work (annualcreditreport dot com being the site the CRAs really don't want you to find)
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why pay for tax software? What's wrong with the free tax submission website?
We don't have one. Are you talking about Direct File? The Trump admin killed it, though it was successfully nerfed from the start anyway by the Intuit and H&R Block lobbyists -- you couldn't even itemize deductions, or have 1099 income. If your taxes were that simple, you didn't need software, you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes. Note: If you're just taking the piss becaus…
FreeTaxUSA is pretty close. I live in a no tax state so it is completely free. I think state tax is $15.
Hate to sound like a shill, but they've been great. I have a more complicated return than most, but not everyone, and it handles it all(multi-state, capital gains/losses and rollovers, depreciations, etc).
The only thing I wish they'd change is the name. It sounds scammy.
I actually have started agreeing to their probably mostly BS Deluxe/Audit Defense just because I felt guilty about using it for free so long.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#98As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.
Has anyone in these comments ever heard of QuickBooks?
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#99I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…
I WAS a happy TurboTax customer for over 33 years, until this year when I used HR Block TaxCut to file my 2025 returns. Intuit insisted that only Windows 11 would be supported, for no technical reason whatsoever. I assume they got a payoff from Microsoft for doing this. So now I see they're laying off 3000 employees and wonder if it has something to do with poor sales of TurboTax because of their lame policy.
Some of those layoffs were certainly people supporting dead versions of Windows, and high-touch low-sophistication users with old broken-down computers. At some point, they/you were getting dropped as a customer and, checking the news, now is the time to do that.
(But most of these people were probably working on some Intuit Whatsit that you and I have never heard of. Every profitable software company has a bunch of products which failed to launch.)
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#100As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.
It's worth pointing out that TurboTax is just one of their products... even if it went away overnight, they'd still have a lucrative business publishing QuickBooks. It is basically the standard in small business accounting software in the US, and a majority of small businesses probably use it, pay an outside accountant that does, or both.