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Apple, which has an annual income about 40 times that of Intuit, also spent about $13 million on lobbying in the same period. That is about the same amount that companies many times its size have spent on lobbying. In the last five years, according to disclosure documents, Intuit spent nearly $13 million on federal lobbying. Ventry said.īut Intuit’s opposition to return-free filing has been ferocious. “It can help all 145 million taxpayers,” Mr. You would be able to do your return without hunting for every stray W-2 or 1099 in your household. Tens of millions of additional taxpayers with more complex returns would be able to save time by downloading all the financial information that the government has collected about them during the year. People who disputed the I.R.S.’s calculation would be able to do their taxes the old-fashioned way. The return would be completely voluntary. would send them a tax return that had already been filled in with their financial data, and if everything looked in order, they would file it either through the mail or electronically. Ventry said that if return-free filing were operated nationally, tens of millions of people with simple tax situations might have to do just a few minutes of work at tax time every year.
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Williams said might not be very secure - Intuit prefers to connect its systems to banks, employers and other private companies to obtain taxpayers’ information, he said.ĭennis Ventry, a professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Davis, who has studied the issue, said that while Free File and Intuit’s integrations with private companies were beneficial, they won’t be nearly as helpful as a government program to reform tax filing.
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And rather than download people’s financial data from government sources - which Mr.
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already works with Intuit and other tax preparation companies on a system called Free File, which lets people with low incomes use software like TurboTax free. He added that some of the aims of return-free filing, including lower prices and simplified filing, could be provided by the private sector. official, said the company opposed return-free filing because the plan “minimizes the taxpayers’ voice and control over the tax process by reducing their role in filing their taxes and getting their own money back.” Echoing some conservative critics of the plan, he argued that the return-free plan “necessarily prioritizes revenue generation for government but does not advance taxpayer rights, citizen empowerment or real simplification of the tax code.” In a statement, David Williams, Intuit’s chief tax officer and a former I.R.S. to create a tax-filing system that might free us from having to use software like TurboTax. And as the investigative news organization ProPublica reported in 20, some of the most intense opposition has come from Intuit, which has spent millions lobbying to oppose methods for the I.R.S. The idea of the government filling our tax returns for us, known as “return-free filing,” has been met with much opposition from several groups, including conservatives suspicious of the I.R.S.
After you file your taxes, the government matches its two sets of documents to make sure you have filed correctly. These organizations also send you, the taxpayer, a similar set of documents, which are forms with names like W. The reform plan would work like this: Today, employers, banks, brokerage firms and pretty much every other financial organization in the country send the federal government detailed records about our economic activity every year. Intuit has been a primary obstacle to the effort. Bankman and a small group of tax experts have called on the government to create a tax preparation method that they say would vastly reduce the time and cost of tax-filing for most people. Instead it is the private sector - specifically, the software company Intuit, which makes TurboTax, the most popular tax program in the country.įor more than a decade, Mr. It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time, he adds. Every year he says pretty much the same thing: No other industrialized country asks its citizens to jump through as many hoops to calculate their taxes as ours.
Around this time every year, Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School and a longtime advocate of using technology to simplify tax filing, gets on the phone with reporters to explain what is wrong with how we do our taxes in the United States.