“We are asking a court to immediately halt this bait-and-switch, and to protect taxpayers at the peak of filing season,” Samuel Levine, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a prepared statement

Intuit rejected the allegations. “The FTC’s arguments are simply not credible. Far from steering taxpayers away from free tax preparation offerings, our free advertising campaigns have led to more Americans filing their taxes for free than ever before and have been central to raising awareness of free tax prep,” Kerry McLean, Intuit EVP and general counsel of Intuit, said this week.

Ironically, McLean’s statement pointed to Intuit’s supporting “filing for free as a founding member of the IRS Free File program and in our other practices.”  That statement runs counter to Intuit’s withdrawal from the Free File program, via which companies provide software to qualifying taxpayers for free. H&R Block left the program in 2020.

In answer to a question about a possible contradiction, Intuit spokesperson Derrick Plummer said, “With the help of Intuit, the IRS Free File program far surpassed its stated goals for e-file and free tax filing.” The statement said that free filing is available to 100 percent of taxpayers. Plumer’s statement continued, “Intuit did not renew as a member of the IRS Free File program so we can better serve the complete financial health of consumers in ways not allowable under the program.”

Intuit has been under fire for its free ads for several years from investigative reporting business ProPublica, which says Intuit and others deliberately made it difficult for taxpayers to find their FreeFile offering while continuing to promote their own “free” services.

In a March 1 article, Pro Publica reporter, Brooke Stephenson, a free-lancer tried TurboTax and  FreeTax USA for preparing her return, and concluded, “The takeaway, at least for me, is that filing your taxes for “free” online is confusing and soul-sucking by design.”

Stephenson’s article said the confusion appeared deliberate in TurboTax to make users rely on the advice generated for the software and that they were repeated efforts to upsell her to other Intuit offerings—far more than were found in FreeTax. Her bill ended up at $156 versus $45 for FreeTax.

Bob Scott

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Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards.  Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He  has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that.  A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind