"We messed up and we owe you an apology," Smith said. Intuit will contact 1.5 million customers that were affected by the change and offer them the chance to get the $25 difference in price. Competitors, particularly H&R Block, have been offering customers a chance to move to their product and get those forms without paying more.
His remarks did not touch on the concurrent decision to remove schedule C from TurboTax Basic and requires users to move to the Deluxe desktop version for those features.
The change was made because the affected forms had been moved to a different edition of TurboTax Online last year. Intuit's intention was to have the same features in similarly named desktop and online versions. And Smith said the company continues to believe the products "need to be lined up", but Intuit will be studying how to go about that.
"What we failed was to fully appreciate was we have a lot of desktop products that weren't ready to move to online," Smith said. The lesson, he continued was, "We can't surprise customers and we can't hit customers with a massive price increase. We failed our customers and we are going to fix it."
The company was also called to task by speakers during the stockholders meeting. One said companies are hurt when one customer is asking why other customers are paying more for the same product."When you get to the point you are nickel and diming customers, you dilute the brand," he said.
