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Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

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121–130 of 205 posts

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#121
post #96

Earlier 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…

> 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.

I feel we’re all complicit in this. Lobbying as they have only works when elected officials disregard their constituents interests. Elected officials whose constituents continue to keep in power.

We as a people need to quit with this attitude and own our part in the stupidity our entire nation has embodied in recent history.

Businesses lobbying for their interests is exactly what they should be doing and exactly what everyone should expect them to do. Elected officials and the democratic process are supposed to be the check and fix. Start by placing blame more appropriately where it’s due.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#122

I wonder how many windows 10 users discovered freetaxusa.com works as well as turbotax this year (since Intuit doesn't support Windows 10 any more)

Unfortunately doesn't work with foreign addresses. For me, TurboTax is a godsend. Or I'd be paying a preparer $1000+

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#123
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big feature for Microsoft is you have to pay them lots of money to still run supported Windows 10. Are you paying Intuit too? Probably not. I say again this is really a filter against "high support" customers because most of them are not technical and running derelict setups.

That's not a technical reason.

Calls to tech support are by accounting defintion. So that makes it easy to draw the line somewhere, and cut off groups of negative-value customers. Its 2026 and times are tough baby.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#124
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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)

Most people have W-2/1099 and some real estate deductions. Not hard to beat that in complexity.

Try AMT, controlled foreign corporations, nested K-1s, and 1040X prior year amendments with $100k-$1 million+ pending refunds.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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) Most people have W-2/1099 and some real estate deductions. Not hard to beat that in complexity. Try AMT, controlled foreign corporations, nested K-1s, and 1040X prior year amendments with $100k-$1 million+ pending refunds.

I feel like you just stated what I said but with more details. Admittedly, it's not for everyone. But it will work for the vast majority of filers.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#127
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Portugal, tax comes pre calculated from the government on a free web application. It works very well! I just need to do very small adjustments every year before deliver the taxes.

In the US every Republican takes the Grover Norquist pledge to always make taxes as salient and as unpleasant as possible. The idea being that it will make voters more anti tax

I wish this were true but they get paid by taxes. Besides, there are few things more unpleasant than having your hard earned money taken away from you, regardless of how it happens. I don't think it takes fancy paperwork to make people oppose it.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#128
post #78

As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.

In order to create enough loopholes for their wealthy clients, the politicians have made the tax rules so complicated that very few people have confidence that they understand them.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf

This is the primary reason that Americans hate paying their taxes.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#129
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer that years ago, I was impressed at how slick the TurboTax website was. So I'm surprised they even still have a desktop version (...presumably not just some electron wrapper). And given how it works, I'd guess most of your data isn't staying local for much of this.

Their website is pretty garbage IMO. Every single click is a spinner image for 1 second while the layout adjusts and fetches data. I’m not certain if this is a react or vue or whatever FE JavaScript thing but it’s extremely prevalent across the web and pretty much completely defeats the purpose of having a SPA design.

TT was/is old-style "slick", like at the time it put my bank to shame in terms of UI. It probably wasn't using a 'popular framework' and if it was, it wasn't a naive implementation. It also was/is optimized for desktop, while many financial corps now only care about mobile. So as of last April, it was still good enough for me.

Was it fast? No. Just fast enough. That's why I doubt the desktop app is really any different. They must have a bunch of API endpoints, and the 'slowness' is all on the backend.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#130
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes. Shouldn't the correct way to file simple taxes be to just accept (sign) a value? Why is any arithmetic needed at all? Doesn't the tax authority know the numbers (What you earned, how much you paid in taxes) and they could figure out what you owe automatically? I've just "accepted" or "signed" my tax return (not in the US obviously) fo…

I've actually had this discussion quite a few times (for someone in a field not at all related to taxes)

Where it gets "complicated" (aka no longer a "one click sign and verify") is when you start adding things that are "nonstandard" - "standard" meaning single w2, standardized deduction, etc. According to Intuit[0] as well as other research[1], only ~40% of US taxpayers follow this format. This is compared to the 87.7% of surveyed tax administrations[2] (which does include the US) that have the infrastructure to pre-populate basic wage and salary data. The difference is that in countries like Denmark or Sweden, that simple data represents near-100% of what is needed for the vast majority of citizens.

So for example, even if the US might know exactly how much you made on a 1099 (which is freelance, independent contractor, etc), they wouldn't know your expenses. Oftentimes though, even if you do have these more complicated returns your W2 (which is the "simple" part) can at least be auto-filled. It's just the rest of the stuff the government doesn't necessarily know about.

(note: I'm by no means a tax expert and may be misinterpreting this data)

[0] https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-simple-return-reducin...

[2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/tax-administration-2025...

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