Tax Day is here, so have a wonderful day! In the opinion of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, you may be the victim of fraud.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Katie Porter and Brad Sherman, took aim at Intuit’s CEO Sasan Goodarzi in a letter. Legislators claim that TurboTax delivers services that “scam American taxpayers into paying for free services.”
Tax preparation services for low-income taxpayers were to be provided for free via the IRS Free File programme, which TurboTax and other companies were scheduled to participate in. Legislators, though, labelled the programme a “failure” for its little use and highlighted that Intuit withdrew from the initiative last year. By 2018, barely 3% of Americans were benefiting from the programme, according to the numbers in the letter.
In light of ProPublica’s investigation that revealed the firm installing coding to its Free File site that prevented it from appearing in Google results, Warren, Porter, and Sherman held TurboTax partially responsible for that. As reported by ProPublica, the corporation has subsequently altered that code, but Warren and her coworkers still seem to be unhappy about it.
Because of Intuit’s political power, these flaws have been allowed to go unnoticed, they claim. According to the letter, Intuit also engaged former FTC chair Jon Leibowitz to defend the business against a lawsuit filed recently by the FTC, in addition to the former IRS official appointed to serve as its chief tax officer.
With this lawsuit, TurboTax is accused of spreading the “deceptive notion that customers may file their taxes for free using TurboTax” when, in reality, many of them end up having to pay. “Not believable,” according to Intuit, were the FTC’s assertions.
This lawsuit was welcomed and long overdue, according to a letter from the legislators.
Intuit is now being questioned by Warren, Porter, and Sherman regarding its “revolving door” with the IRS and other federal authorities. Requested information on the number of workers and external partners Intuit has worked with since 1999, including those who have had executive-branch positions, in the letter How many of our workers or partners have gone on to become executive branch personnel since 1999? Intuit is also being asked to disclose how much money it has earned from taxpayers making less than $73,000 since 1999.
The deadline for Intuit to respond is May 2.
But in the end, the letter isn’t simply looking for a response to anything. The Tax Filing Simplification Act is also a focus of the campaign. Taxpayers would be given a pre-filled tax return that they could simply sign and send to the IRS. For years now, the law has only been mentioned around Tax Day, so don’t hold your breath for it to be enacted.
There are several reasons why Warren is writing this letter, but one of the most important is to acquire the answers she needs to her inquiries. The senator, after all, has a long history of utilising letters to achieve her goals.