Why are other outlets quoting the CEO as having said that the layoffs have "nothing to do with AI"? Is TC distinguishing between using AI versus building AI products?
> "None of it had to do with AI," Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." "Everything was about how do we become more effective."
There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.
I don’t think it’s AI. AI would at least keep the article body consistent with the title even if it had to bend over backward and hallucinate new facts.
>>There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.
Thank you for saying this, I keep arguing the same. "This is llm" has become lazy for "I dont like this so I will pretend its llm"
People usually make the determination by reading at least part of the text and then find multiple smoking guns / llm-isms
The comment you responded to did not have those.
Fwiw, the article we're commenting on was likely not LLM written. The sentence structure is too convoluted, no LLM would've generated it like that - unless very carefully prompted ... But at that point it's no longer pure AI slop (imo).
Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.
It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and...
These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written.
If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know?
"This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.
Trying to treat law as code-in-English-form is going to lead you horribly astray, however.
The behavior of C code is something that we can, in principle, reduce to semantics in a formal model we know how to describe the behavior of. Now, there's some issues getting there--the specification is more ambiguous than we'd like, and there's definitely certain behaviors that are very challenging to incorporate in a formal model (say, signal handlers). But even something like UB is something that we have good, well-understand models of what exactly it means to hit UB. At the end of the day, whether or not C code is correct, whether or not the compiler is correctly compiling the C code, is a question that has a clearly objective answer.
Law doesn't work like that. Laws are written and interpreted with the understanding that there is flexibility in the mater. If you compute the law and get an absurd result, then people are going to shrug and throw out the absurd result; rather different it is to a compiler where the absurdity is accepted as correct. As a result, there's not really an objective answer to whether or not something is legal, to understanding what will happen in a legal case, like there is to code.
This is partly because the law predates compilers and modern communication. Why should a crime get different sentences? Often because judges are humans and somehow that makes it okay to lock some people up for years longer than others.
No it isn't, at least not in common law systems like the US. It is part of the principle of how statutes are drafted that they will be interpreted by human judges and shaped by precedent. It's not a technological limitation.
Your example is somewhat apropos because one of the more algorithmic portions of law is sentencing. Since the 1980s (i.e., after the development of compilers!), the US has enacted guidelines for sentencing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentenci...) that allows anyone to read the criminal complaint and compute the expected sentence via a calculator (e.g., https://www.sentencing.us/).
And yet the sentencing guidelines are not binding on outcomes, in part because of the necessary flexibility in law. Sometimes you crunch the numbers and you get absurd results (SBF's fraud conviction is a good example I ran through myself), and so you need the flexibility to throw the algorithm out when the algorithm produces wrong results.
> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place
> These things are knowable
There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined.
Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions.
Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and appeals courts / state supreme courts can rule quite inconsistently.
That’s by definition not just undefined behavior but also non-deterministic results.
I agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state, at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.
Someone has to be in the news first, and then you learn about it. To that someone, the change you see in tomorrow's legal news is today, was yesterday. It's more a gamble than you think, you just don't feel it until it bites you.
FWIW, we're in complete agreement. I stand by mt original statement that these things are nearly impossible for a layperson to be competent in. It's hard enough for people who do it every day for a living. An equivalent would be non-techies saying "I'm not going to pay a software engineer. Just tell the computer what you want it to do!" And that might sound reasonable to other non-techies, while you and I roll our eyes and laugh. I'm sure CPAs and tax attorneys and the like think the same when they hear engineers talk about filing their own non-trivial taxes.
Well, to put it precisely, an omniscient being would theoretically be capable of knowing today's state of the law with probabilities assigned to the results.
I'm serious. Pick any non-trivial issues of law, ask a world leading expert, and you'd very quickly hear the word "probably" somewhere. Less often than "it depends", but you'll hear those words often nonetheless.
If that's "knowable" to you, I guess it's knowable.
Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
Those questions all have discrete answers, including the much-misunderstood home office. The correct tax outcomes are very much deterministic, in the sense that the same inputs always result in the same outputs. It's simply that there are a lot of options to change the inputs (for example, choosing FIFO vs LIFO for stock sales, using an S-corp vs a sole proprietorship for a personal business).
For example, the home office deduction is only available to individuals who have a home office that is used exclusively for their individual business, not as an employee for someone else's business (the only exception being for flow-through entities where the taxpayer is a shareholder/partner). The "exclusive use" is meant in the all-or-nothing sense. Use your office computer after hours for games? The home office deduction no longer applies. Uses the office space to store personal documents, or really any other activity except for the business activity? The HOD no longer applies. Don't have any income from that business activity you claim are doing in the home office? The HOD no longer applies.
It's simply that enforcement is not deterministic, so people think they get away with a lot of positions that do not survive actual audits. Talk to an IRS agent that handles audits and you'll learn that a failed home office deduction claim is the #2 adjustment to the tax returns of white collar professionals.[1] At a relatively recent tax mixer, IRS agents from the Los Angeles branch office could only recall about a dozen cases in which the home office deduction actually survived an audit, out of thousands, and those taxpayers were extremely rigorous about following the rules to the letter (to the extent that all of them locked their home offices when they were not being used for work).
[1] The #1 reason for adjustments to the tax returns of white collar professionals is attempting to claim business expense deductions without matching business income to deduct against. Technically, the home office deduction is one of these deductions, which is why it is #2 and not #1.
There are also a lot of non-deterministinc choices one can make. Things like carry forward losses or gains, that no algorithm could know. They depend on your personal plans for the future. You can make specific filing choices that have massive consequences on your future. There are choices like 83(b) elections that can save you tens of millions of dollars a decade in the future, contingent on the events after you file.
And there are basic things that shouldn’t be subjective at all but that the IRS refuses to give a clear answer to, like if/how the SALT cap affects deduction for NIIT. There are at least 3 possible interpretations and no consensus.
That's because it's law, and the IRS doesn't get to decide that, courts do.
There are parts of the tax code that mean different things in different parts of the US because of conflicting circuit court decisions that haven't made it to the Supreme Court.
I use to think that. I'm capable of putting numbers in a form correctly. A good tax preparer can point out things like "did you know that your specific commuting pattern entitles you to claim mileage?", or "the law says the way you have your working environment set up at home means you can deduct some of your utility bills", and so on ad infinitum.
Basically, unless you get someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, if your tax situation is non-trivial (see my post above this) then you might be leaving money on the table. It's a terrible, idea to evade taxes. It's a fantastic idea to realize when you're paying more than you're legally required to so that you can fix it.
Ultimately, taxes is just filling out a spreadsheet and doing basic math... but the hard part of taxes is understanding how to fill out that spreadsheet correctly. Doing that requires answering several questions that many tax filers may simply not have the background to understand--I'm always struck whenever answering the question about "do you need to correct your W-2?" is how would I know when the answer is "yes." I can see how AI could be helpful here... at least were not AI plagued with hallucinations.
That said, Intuit's actual business model is convincing millions of people that their taxes are so complicated they need to spend $60 on a program that is just copy-pasting numbers from one document to another.
tbf doing taxes is way more than copy from W2; paste into 1040. There are tax credits. Tax incentives. 1099 income (which a lot of people receive!). Loopholes. So many loopholes.
As far as I understand it, a lot of this guidance can be/has been automated programmatically. I can see how LLMs can become useful for niche scenarios if you feed it *a LOT* of data as they become more accurate.
There are actually very few "loopholes" available to individuals.
What most accountants call "loopholes" are actually just misunderstandings of the tax rules (e.g., the home office deduction, home business expense deductions, hiring family members being some of the biggest), and their clients usually end up paying penalties the IRS if they get audited.
Or tax situations that aren't taken advantage of! There are folks who are definitely brave about using those deductions, but there are also people that can who don't. That's what I meant by "loophole" here.
Nah, Free Fillable Forms paired with ChatGPT (free, not even plus) is adequate for the vast majority of the tax population now and none of it is hard. I expect that 2027 is the last year for the tax preparation software companies to still exist.
I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”
When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.
I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
You're being deprived of government services and a sustainable economy because the wealthy are allowed to game the system they've rigged for themselves. I wouldn't call that luck.
Gemini is a pretty bad choice for an LLM. Most people using it are doing so because Google bundled it for free with a couple things, not for its quality.
Serious question: to figure out the answer why did you not go to the IRS website for that field? This is how I ultimately answer any tax questions I have.
This. An important property of tax calculations is being consistently reproducible. In the context of an audit, the calculations don’t need to be accurate per se just precise.
I have a formative story where a large industrial company was counting things for tax purposes using my software. Given the same data and same binary, the count was off by one depending on if it was running on Intel or AMD CPUs. They didn’t care so much what the count was, they just needed it to be the same value at all times in all places so they could defend it in an audit.
The inability to consistently reproduce the value was a bigger liability for tax purposes than small variances in accuracy that fell out of the process.
If an LLM hallucinates your income or deductions, the IRS is not going to go after the LLM, it's going to go after the taxpayer. I can't believe what I'm seeing in some of these replies. Making a mistake on your taxes is at best, a stressful letter from the IRS, and at worse, prison time. Place your trust appropriately.
Intuit has a pretty broad financial software portfolio, not just a tax company.
Also, yes the actual arithmetic at the end should be handled by deterministic code. I doubt anyone, including Intuit, thinks otherwise. But there's a ton of uses for LLMs before you get to 2+2 = 4, explaining concepts, document extraction, understanding the full financial picture, etc.
Kind of feels like you're criticizing a cartoonish idea of AI's place in their products.
You would think arithmetic should be deterministic, but just days ago I received paper mail from IRS saying my tax software computed federal tax underpayment penalty incorrectly, and they are refunding me > $300.
I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself.
So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway.
This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful.
If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
I had some very basic "double check" type questions about my very straightforward taxes I threw at the bot because it was handy and it didn't seem to know that it was even related to taxes or tax software and literally directed me to seek out someone who might know about taxes. I then asked it about the weather and it was able to talk freely about that, just seems like they're reselling another model with a different prompt up front or a RAG.
I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software.
If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com/.
I made the switch to FreeTaxUSA from H&R Block online this year. It was very easy and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You can upload your previous year's PDF from your other software to import the data.
It's been good for so long I hope it doesn't get popular and go to shit. Free federal return and $15 state return if needed. If Intuit died tomorrow the world would be a better place.
Not for me! I would have to hire an accountant or CPA. Then I would have to spend a lot of time and energy meeting with them and taking their phone calls.
TurboTax occupies a middle ground and it saves me enormous amounts of time.
So sad! I used it for at least a decade, maybe like 2006-2018 or so. Their Mac desktop software was excellent then, and no Electron tomfoolery or other nonsense. And you could just keep every year's TT app installed in case you wanted to open an old return to amend it or something.
I eventually decided to abandon them a couple years after they started forcing me to buy some ultra premium pro edition because I had a small amount of "business income." Switched to Credit Karma Taxes, which Intuit then bought, but miraculously some regulator forced them to divest that product, which landed at Cash App. So I have used that (now called Cash App Taxes) since then. It's a free product and even supports business income and state taxes (IIRC, state e-filing was always an additional add-on with TT). It was a little annoying to have to re-enter more that first year, but it's done a good job of rolling forward, and not that I've ever needed it, but they also have that "Audit Defense" thing included for free, another add-on upcharge TT offered.
I was forced to use their shitty desktop version inside a Windows VM because I don't have any Windows or Mac machines, and the web version doesn't support married filing federal jointly and state separately.
Their desktop version seems like a webapp embedded inside browser frame; I don't understand why they can't make it available on the web.
Same for domestic partners. They push you into their desktop version for some reason, but the desktop version is a buggy pile of trash. I wasn't able to use it at all even on a windows machine. To their credit, they did refund the software without too much of a hassle (I expected a giant fight).
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.
I WAS a happy TurboTax customer for over 33 years, until this year when I used HR Block TaxCut to file my 2025 returns. Intuit insisted that only Windows 11 would be supported, for no technical reason whatsoever. I assume they got a payoff from Microsoft for doing this.
So now I see they're laying off 3000 employees and wonder if it has something to do with poor sales of TurboTax because of their lame policy.
They did the same with Windows 7 going to 10. (I used to use a containment VM for their products, since they aren't particularly clean installs. I used the same one year after year and was too lazy to update it.) I seem to remember that that check was easy to patch out. (As are several other checks of interest.)
Some of those layoffs were certainly people supporting dead versions of Windows, and high-touch low-sophistication users with old broken-down computers. At some point, they/you were getting dropped as a customer and, checking the news, now is the time to do that.
(But most of these people were probably working on some Intuit Whatsit that you and I have never heard of. Every profitable software company has a bunch of products which failed to launch.)
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.
It's getting tough for shitters with some old ass legacy PC who depend on online services. Hopefully they were smart enough to understand they were living on borrowed time.
edit, also there are government subsided smartphones if you need one.
A bunch of the unsupported PCs aren't even that old.
I bought a Ryzen 5 1600X in 2017, which is noticeably higher performance than the basic tier of processors supported by windows 11, but it's not on the supported list, and you have to bypass the installer to get windows 11 running.
My PCs are modern. I (used to) run TurboTax in a VM. I've got three VMs with different older versions of Windows, that contain about 20 years of Tax data. It's more secure to keep my tax data in VMs that I don't use for anything else. I do have a Windows 11 partition on my PC, but I haven't booted it in over a year, and I have no need to.
I don't think I'll ever need to make a Windows 11 VM.
Cool, a super technical dude like you can just spin a secure Win11 VM to run TurboTax then. You probably have a bash script or something. What are you complaining about.
I mean, sure; you can come up with some kind of justification to call just about anything "a technical reason".
But there's no genuinely technical reason—one you don't have to twist yourself into pretzels over—that fairly ordinary software, working fine on Win11, would not work on Win10.
Easy question because you need to evaluate every dependency for Win10 compatibility, Win10 bugs that MS fixed in Win11, running unsupported Win10 CI somehow, QA testing team for Windows 10 (programmers won't do this)... and on and on.
All for an dead operating system. I guess this works in your basement mind where people work for free or something.
Finally being able to stop paying Intuit $150 every year as a reward for their lobbying against tax code simplification and free e-file is one of the most exciting possibilities for AI imo
I used Claude Code to prepare my personal income tax return this year, and so far the IRS hasn’t come after me.
Had Claude generate yaml files for the input/source documents, then had it generate code to process the return into output yaml files.
Manually typed the results into the IRS Free File Forms website, and was pleased to see that it did some input validation.
Had it generate Code modules to match the IRS forms and schedules by name, keeping the nomenclature in code as close as possible to that in the official IRS instructions.
Spot checked a whole lot of it and found very, very little of it that needed correction.
Stored all of it in git so that I could monitor the diffs as it went along.
Maybe the neatest part was when I asked Claude why I wound up owing so much it gave me a list of reasons and dollar amounts in descending order.
A lot of people in the UK file their taxes (~12 million, roughly 35% of employed adults, not taking into account those unemployed with assets and pensions), but the self assessment is straightforward and very easy to use.
In my country income taxes are automatically deducted. If you've got a single job and don't own large amounts of properties there's a decent chance your tax bill is exactly €0 and that there's no requirement for you to file.
In the UK tax on interest earned on plain savings accounts isn't deducted at source - so if you have a rainy day pot chances are you're required to register for self assessment and pay tax on it (particularly now that interest rates are higher and it's relatively easy to go above the tax free threshold, which has been frozen for a long time).
If you have investments outside of an ISA (tax free investment wrapper) then same story - you need to report disposals and dividends for tax purposes.
That's before we get into side hustles/self employment and investment properties, etc.
> In the UK tax on interest earned on plain savings accounts isn't deducted at source
Yes, but as you point out you should really be using the ISA wrapper or a pension of some sort for most investments. I suspect most of those doing self assessment will either (a) be in the upper 25% of earners or (b) self-employed (~4.5m people).
It is annoying how the government has chosen to make tax slightly more annoying with "making tax digital" for self-employed people with quarterly reporting.
No, you don't have to. If you are employed through a company, stay below £100K income and don't have other income then (generally) you don't need to do a tax return - it's all handled automatically through pay as you earn payroll. However, as shown, a lot of people are self employed, want to claim deductions, have some side income etc. However, for those that do need to, it is really straightforward.
Until you have to deal with bed and breakfast rules for RSUs. Good luck getting free software to understand that. There are a couple of open source attempts but they are skeleton at best.
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.
Once you get habituated to it, it really is easy. When I was younger I was appalled by how much I was losing to taxes. Now I don't even glance at the line items. All that matters is that the end numbers. Hell, if I didn't need to enroll my kid in school which requires a receipt for property taxes, I wouldn't even know that literally 80% of my local taxes to schooling. My property taxes are pretty invisible to me. I don't file, my bank does. It really puts into frame why when a city gets old, they start cutting taxes and squeezing schools.
If taxes were filed automatically, honestly, I'd pay no attention at all to them, but having to sit once a year an actually look at the amount I paid, does get me to think about taxes and what they go towards, at least a little.
I’d wager the money from lobbies and companies like Intuit more than make up for it.
Also, republics are “anti-tax” in word and pro-tax in practice, as is the American way. When it comes to particularly republicans, anti-tax is code for removing social safety nets. They want taxes if it pays them, or pays the right contractors, or funds the military etc but when those tax dollars could go to social welfare they suddenly think it’s time to trim the fat.
To have the tax code easily dealt with and returns filed by IRS's own software will be a happy day. At that point maybe most of Intuit's employees can find other jobs.
> If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
This isn't actually about AI. it's just classic human psychology.
You’ve had a rock-solid workflow for 25 years, so it makes total sense to be cautious and reject features you don't need.
Right now, keeping it at "arm's length" and "read-only" feels safe. But that's usually just phase one. Once that initial trust is established, those boundaries naturally start to melt away. Give it a couple of tax seasons, and you’ll probably find yourself wanting it to take on more of the heavy lifting.
> I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years.
I've been using TurboTax for about 20 years now and I am not happy. I hate it with a passion, it has more dark patterns than even LinkedIn and with my basic W-2 tax return with HDHP I managed to hit all their 'know issues' 4 years in a row. They of course offered me to upgrade several times during the 'work flow' to make up for it.
I loathe the existence of Intuit and I still have some hope that a future administration will kill it by having the IRS implement a basic digital product for federal tax filing for the 90% of people who use the standard deduction. Intuit should not exist in its current form in any civilized country, it is a form of cancer which only exists because our politicians are a bunch of greedy fucks.
"happy", I don't understand how any user can be happy using these tools. Begrudging, maybe. These tools don't even need to exist. The government already knows all it needs to know and just needs your signature and a check. The only reason TurboTax exists is because of lobbying.
I used the IRS free fillable forms this year and it was much easier than I expected, including contractor, investment income, and foreign income declarations.
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 because every other country has a government method to submit your taxes, yup, we're dumb, thanks mostly to that shitty company.
Oh, we do have another 'free' filing method for those with income below a certain level, which the lobbyists made sure would be handled by those same private companies. They are allowed to obfuscate and hide it, so when you search for it, you will probably end up on their main, paid product. Kind of the identical story with how our credit reports work (annualcreditreport dot com being the site the CRAs really don't want you to find)
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 probably mostly BS Deluxe/Audit Defense just because I felt guilty about using it for free so long.
> 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.
> 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) for at least the last 15 years so I might underestimate some complexity here. The key idea behind it though is that nearly all deductions are automatically and unambiguously applied, already when the cost is charged in most cases. So they're always already done when I file my taxes. And the key to that is making sure the tax law is written with this in mind.
I suspect a lot of it is to ensure people who are paid in cash have a strong moment where it can be argued that they took significant agency to hide that from the IRS.
“I just clicked yes on the web form.” might not feel as compelling to a jury filling out paper forms and conveniently forgetting my cash-based income. (I suspect the same reason is why you have to carry your luggage a few hundred feet over a line and recheck it when connecting on an international to domestic flight coming into the US: so there is a clear moment when you personally carried your luggage over a line, so if there’s material that wasn’t allowed to come over that line, you’re attached to it when it happened.)
Wow, I've never thought of that before, but that is actually pretty compelling.
It doesn't mean our current way (and the massive private industry scam) is the only and best way, but at least it is some explanation rather than it seeming totally insane.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
That would be nice. I fear the modern system, with Citizens United, SuperPACs etc. seems to have been the final nail in the coffin of that concept though. Especially with the FPTP system preventing third parties. Someone in one of the two parties will win, they're both in the thrall of lobbyists, and even if there was one not taking that money (I think that's becoming more and more rare) the money firehose makes a substantial difference in elections. Hard to see how "we" can do a lot about this. I hate it, but I don't see it changing. And it seems like astroturfing will be easier in future elections than ever before - Now a few million dollars from a billionaire or even from foreign adversaries will be able to generate 'overwhelming groundswells' of completely synthetic public opinion on platforms like TikTok. To me, the result will be an acceleration of the tilt toward buying elections vs. convincing people of your ideas organically.
Unfortunately I tend to agree with you. But, at least we're actually talking about the real problem instead of pointing the finger at Inuit and their lobbyists.
I had a mixed experience with it. I think it has enormous potential but it needs to be more deeply integrated with their system (while staying read only by default, as you said).
1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading.
2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making judgement calls. However, for something like quickbooks, I can imagine many uses for AI. For example, categorizing expenses, organizing receipts, noticing odd patterns, etc.
I can think of very few less appropriate places for LLMs than accounting.
They can't do basic arithmetic reliably, and will confidently tell you completely made-up figures when you ask for reports.
Meanwhile, existing accounting software is mature and does a great job at keeping numbers straight, and producing good reports, especially in the hands of a professional.
this company Intuit is going to train their internal models on your data and other customers too. In order to train useful models in aggregate, they will ingest your very specific PII and you will do "nothing" about it. The entire set of tax paying citizens (almost) are now going to have their financial-legal lives ingested into models you cannot see, cannot use yourself and do not derive income from, IMHO.
ps- small caveat to this personal information doomerism is that very wealthy and capable people will have this happen to them and their companies, and that will possibly set off some kid of hardball.
I used to be a pretty happy TurboTax user due to all the automatic handlers/connectors.
This year I leaned fully into LLMs and had Claude build everything from scratch then used the Gemini & Chatgpt to check. While it took time to get all the marking just right, it was, relatively speaking, pretty easy since I downloaded the previous years to start as the basis which allowed for multi-year customization and back testing.
It's worth pointing out that TurboTax is just one of their products... even if it went away overnight, they'd still have a lucrative business publishing QuickBooks. It is basically the standard in small business accounting software in the US, and a majority of small businesses probably use it, pay an outside accountant that does, or both.
The vast majority of people in the UK don't have to fill out a self assessment because their tax situation is simple and handed by their employers. For the people who do have more complicated tax arrangements, the process takes like 10-15 minutes on the HMRC portal and importantly it's free.
So all these commercial software offerings for SAs exist just for fun? I guess I just don't understand why these exist. Europeans have yet to explain this adequately.
Can you show me the free option that existed in HMRC's portal for non-domiciled statuses? I can only find websites that contradict your point:
>You will need to use commercial software that supports the SA109 form (such as DTax Filer), You cannot submit the SA109 form through HMRC’s free online service. . If you do not use compatible software, you will need to print and post your tax return instead.
Clearly they're lying and you should correct them post-haste.
There are multiple similar companies in many European countries, even though the government provides (often somewhat basic) tools to file taxes. A large percentage of citizens in the Germany and Austria use paid software because it's more comfortable, same in the UK and Poland. But yes, it would be better if that was not the case, like in Scandinavia.
1) Because in the US your employer doesn't withhold tax at the correct rate - they withhold tax at whatever rate you tell them to (this is just a down payment). Places like banks don't withhold taxes at all. So, the US system forces everyone to file taxes (as long as your income is over some very minimal level).
2) Because in the US once your finances get remotely complex, filing taxes is a horrible experience, so most people are willing to either pay for someone else to do it for them, or for software like TurboTax to help do it themselves.
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.
Same as Russian. The state provides all needed software for filling documents related to taxes. It's been so for at least 15 years, most likely longer.
> In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier.
So profits are up 50% YOY and the CEO got a $30M package, but they're cutting 3000 employees.
Was scanning the comments to see if anyone had recommended freetaxusa. I think this was my third or fourth year on it. I’ve been nothing but pleased, personally.
Their desktop software. If you’re going to switch off the desktop software to something, it may as well be something that isn’t turbotax.
My dad had to upgrade his PC recently to do his taxes as it was stuck on Windows 10 due to CPU support. I suggested a Mac Mini, but neglected to confirm that turbotax Canada supports macOS with their desktop software. My dad had no interest the website version, so he bought another Windows laptop and now has both the Mac Mini and his “tax laptop” that he plans to only use once a year.
Some people are just ingrained in their habits and not interested in change. (Though my retired father was perfectly willing to try a Mac for the first time - apparently new tax software was a bridge too far.)
This was the last year for me and my wife to use Turbo Tax, it's been ok for 15 years but I know AI will do it all for us next year, for free. Gemini was very helpful with questions and some skills building this year, I should have tried more.
N ext year I'll basically feed in my W2, 1099s, fidelity forms, insurance, maybe 20-30 documents, and ask for my completed 1040 and related forms. The LLMs already have the data extraction capability, vast tax knowlege, large enough context for personal taxes. We don't need another year to make tax software obsolete.
Actually I'll try a test first, easymgiven I have my 2025 input docs and TurboTax outputs, see howma few models do.
I’d be quite careful, giving it your financial information.
I have a friend that uses ChatGPT for medical advice, so it has a lot of very personal information. He asked it if he could trust it with his financial information, and it told him no.
I’ve used a (human) CPA for over a decade. Been well worth it. He easily earns his fees back.
The more I hear about companies shifting to focus on AI the more it makes me want to start a direct "successor"/"competitor" company that does what the original company did without shifting to AI. As a bet on the AI enshittifying the original company so much that they either cannot develop the software any more and have to start anew, or that they create so many errors and chaos that they get fined & sued into oblivion, or both.
I think you're on to something here. For a multi-product dev company, they could (if domain still available) brand as 'without.ai' or 'no.ai' or 'sans.ai' and do 'taxware.sans.ai', 'todo-mvc.sans.ai', 'basecampclone.sans.ai' etc..
Intuit lobbies to keep our complex tax code for the benefit of their revenue. Intuit is a parasite. If they could go ahead and lay off the rest of their workforce and fold it up that would be great.
My favorite Intuit experience was hiring one of their ex engineers to convert my QuickBooks file back to the last version that didn’t require a subscription which they intentionally tried to make impossible.
Double entry bookkeeping doesn’t need a subscription and their connectors are constantly broken. Fuck Intuit very much.
Recently needed to start tracking expenses for a new business I started. Sole prop, no payroll to fuss with.
I literally reached for the oldest version of QB I had available. 2014! Greatest experience of my life. Brought back memories of when Intuit didn't suck. I despise what they've done to QB Desktop over the years...they have been torpedoing it for a while so people are left to move to Online. I like QB Online. But their Fast, old versions of QB Desktop are pure bliss.
How does this work, concretely? Do you just upload your W2/1099s/etc and prompt it to "do my taxes"? I imagine it's not that easy, but filing my (trivial) taxes with any of the well known tax prep services is easy enough that the LLM version can't get very much more complex than "do my taxes" and still be an improvement.
Upload all the needed forms, upload the forms to be filled, but output instead to a spreadsheet instead of trying to get the model to fill out the .pdfs. I then manually filled out the forms from the spreadsheets.
Depends on how good Intuit's lobbyists are at complicating any attempt at getting a UBI legislated.
One of the concepts often used to describe/"sell" a UBI is that a UBI may be thought of as changing the tax code to provide larger rebates and/or the government doing cash advance "loans" on a person's tax rebates so that people can make use of the time value of money. Those perspectives make a UBI easier to sell to legislators ("it's just a stranger tax code with some new accounting tricks"), but unfortunately also give plenty of room to tax code lobbyists to complicate and corrupt a UBI.
whatever the framing, Intuit runs ~80% gross margins. these cuts arent about saving money — its about shifting R&D to AI before TurboTax's moat erodes from the bottom up
Makes sense. After I finished my taxes this time I ran them through Claude Code and it found things I’d forgotten to include that would actually help things.
A quick reminder to all commentators that in addition to Turbotax and Quickbooks, Intuit also owns MailChimp for (nowadays pretty broad) marketing, CreditKarma for your credit scores/analysis (and pitching you credit cards), and professional enterprise tax prep software. There’s a lot of red-queening happening in AI for marketing and financial assessment software. Individual tax prep, maybe not as much?
I've been using TurboTax forever, mostly due to laziness.
This year they made you take a survey at the end, asking why you're still using boomer desktop software and haven't switched to their totally-not-worse web version. I think the writing is on the wall.
If they kill the desktop version of TurboTax, I'm gone. I despise doing taxes in a browser. I'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
If there aren't humans involved in tax filing, the process of moving from private-entities-are-needed-to-do-your-taxes to the-government-can-figure-out-your-taxes becomes politically easier as we won't be taking jobs away from families.
We got somewhat close to this ideal before Trump Round 2, so ideally eight years of a more normal admin will be enough.
Interesting article and an accelerating trend that will continue for some time in the tech industry. The challenge and the opportunity will be for legacy companies to ensure their legacy stack is well mapped to the newfound AI capabilities.
My biggest fear is human laziness - AI coding is good for the most part and will get many times better over the next few months - BUT IT'LL NOT BE PERFECT. Overloaded employees are likely to get lazy and ship features cheaper and faster without checking - this will lead to small businesses being hit for no fault of their own. Anyway - short term share price gains beckon.
Why are other outlets quoting the CEO as having said that the layoffs have "nothing to do with AI"? Is TC distinguishing between using AI versus building AI products?
> "None of it had to do with AI," Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." "Everything was about how do we become more effective."
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/intuit-ceo-says-companys-17p...
Seriously, the article says exactly the opposite.
The article was written by AI
How do you know?
There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.
"You're absolutely right to question that.
Let me restate that correctly. Just facts. No fluff."
I don’t think it’s AI. AI would at least keep the article body consistent with the title even if it had to bend over backward and hallucinate new facts.
That would maybe be true, if AI wrote both the title and the body of the article.
In human practice, some hack usually writes the body, but the editor decides the title. And that can happen after the article is written or before.
I don't think they would change that workflow, even if the writer, or both writer and editor, were replaced with a AI.
So yours was a good observation, but it's rather weak evidence.
It's becoming the modern adult equivalent of the old kids saying:
" I know you are but what AmI ? "
>>There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.
Thank you for saying this, I keep arguing the same. "This is llm" has become lazy for "I dont like this so I will pretend its llm"
That's because most of the LLM output is associated with low effort spam, and they are not wrong. You keep fighting for LLM rights, lol.
^ this comment was written by an llm.
See the problem?
People usually make the determination by reading at least part of the text and then find multiple smoking guns / llm-isms
The comment you responded to did not have those.
Fwiw, the article we're commenting on was likely not LLM written. The sentence structure is too convoluted, no LLM would've generated it like that - unless very carefully prompted ... But at that point it's no longer pure AI slop (imo).
I'll start downvoting all posts that are about criticizing something solely because it was "made by AI". Humans using AI can make great things.
If the article is bad, just say "this is a bad article without coherent arguments" or something like that.
> according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
vs.
> Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money."
Reality vs. PR BS
> "Everything was about how do we become more effective at extracting profits from this business."
FTFGoodarzi
They're laying people off to focus more on lobbying.
The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.
Boy, do I have bad news for you.
Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.
Not to detract from your point, but the French tax system is defined as code.
https://rmonat.fr/talk/impots_gallium19/
It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and...
These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written.
If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know?
"This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.
Trying to treat law as code-in-English-form is going to lead you horribly astray, however.
The behavior of C code is something that we can, in principle, reduce to semantics in a formal model we know how to describe the behavior of. Now, there's some issues getting there--the specification is more ambiguous than we'd like, and there's definitely certain behaviors that are very challenging to incorporate in a formal model (say, signal handlers). But even something like UB is something that we have good, well-understand models of what exactly it means to hit UB. At the end of the day, whether or not C code is correct, whether or not the compiler is correctly compiling the C code, is a question that has a clearly objective answer.
Law doesn't work like that. Laws are written and interpreted with the understanding that there is flexibility in the mater. If you compute the law and get an absurd result, then people are going to shrug and throw out the absurd result; rather different it is to a compiler where the absurdity is accepted as correct. As a result, there's not really an objective answer to whether or not something is legal, to understanding what will happen in a legal case, like there is to code.
> Law doesn't work like that
This is partly because the law predates compilers and modern communication. Why should a crime get different sentences? Often because judges are humans and somehow that makes it okay to lock some people up for years longer than others.
No it isn't, at least not in common law systems like the US. It is part of the principle of how statutes are drafted that they will be interpreted by human judges and shaped by precedent. It's not a technological limitation.
Your example is somewhat apropos because one of the more algorithmic portions of law is sentencing. Since the 1980s (i.e., after the development of compilers!), the US has enacted guidelines for sentencing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentenci...) that allows anyone to read the criminal complaint and compute the expected sentence via a calculator (e.g., https://www.sentencing.us/).
And yet the sentencing guidelines are not binding on outcomes, in part because of the necessary flexibility in law. Sometimes you crunch the numbers and you get absurd results (SBF's fraud conviction is a good example I ran through myself), and so you need the flexibility to throw the algorithm out when the algorithm produces wrong results.
> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place
> These things are knowable
There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined.
Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions.
Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and appeals courts / state supreme courts can rule quite inconsistently.
That’s by definition not just undefined behavior but also non-deterministic results.
I agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state, at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.
Someone has to be in the news first, and then you learn about it. To that someone, the change you see in tomorrow's legal news is today, was yesterday. It's more a gamble than you think, you just don't feel it until it bites you.
FWIW, we're in complete agreement. I stand by mt original statement that these things are nearly impossible for a layperson to be competent in. It's hard enough for people who do it every day for a living. An equivalent would be non-techies saying "I'm not going to pay a software engineer. Just tell the computer what you want it to do!" And that might sound reasonable to other non-techies, while you and I roll our eyes and laugh. I'm sure CPAs and tax attorneys and the like think the same when they hear engineers talk about filing their own non-trivial taxes.
Well, to put it precisely, an omniscient being would theoretically be capable of knowing today's state of the law with probabilities assigned to the results.
I'm serious. Pick any non-trivial issues of law, ask a world leading expert, and you'd very quickly hear the word "probably" somewhere. Less often than "it depends", but you'll hear those words often nonetheless.
If that's "knowable" to you, I guess it's knowable.
What's a SCOTUS?
Supreme Court of the US
[dead]
> [US] tax law drafting style follows default logic, a non-monotonic logic that is hard to encode in languages with first-order logic (FOL).
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07966.pdf
Most law generally is non-monotonic. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic) The French tax code is one of the few exceptions.
A point echoed by Nilay Patel (who used to be a law professional) here https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...
Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
Those questions all have discrete answers, including the much-misunderstood home office. The correct tax outcomes are very much deterministic, in the sense that the same inputs always result in the same outputs. It's simply that there are a lot of options to change the inputs (for example, choosing FIFO vs LIFO for stock sales, using an S-corp vs a sole proprietorship for a personal business).
For example, the home office deduction is only available to individuals who have a home office that is used exclusively for their individual business, not as an employee for someone else's business (the only exception being for flow-through entities where the taxpayer is a shareholder/partner). The "exclusive use" is meant in the all-or-nothing sense. Use your office computer after hours for games? The home office deduction no longer applies. Uses the office space to store personal documents, or really any other activity except for the business activity? The HOD no longer applies. Don't have any income from that business activity you claim are doing in the home office? The HOD no longer applies.
It's simply that enforcement is not deterministic, so people think they get away with a lot of positions that do not survive actual audits. Talk to an IRS agent that handles audits and you'll learn that a failed home office deduction claim is the #2 adjustment to the tax returns of white collar professionals.[1] At a relatively recent tax mixer, IRS agents from the Los Angeles branch office could only recall about a dozen cases in which the home office deduction actually survived an audit, out of thousands, and those taxpayers were extremely rigorous about following the rules to the letter (to the extent that all of them locked their home offices when they were not being used for work).
[1] The #1 reason for adjustments to the tax returns of white collar professionals is attempting to claim business expense deductions without matching business income to deduct against. Technically, the home office deduction is one of these deductions, which is why it is #2 and not #1.
There are also a lot of non-deterministinc choices one can make. Things like carry forward losses or gains, that no algorithm could know. They depend on your personal plans for the future. You can make specific filing choices that have massive consequences on your future. There are choices like 83(b) elections that can save you tens of millions of dollars a decade in the future, contingent on the events after you file.
Those are deterministic choices...
Deterministic means that the results are not random, not that they are known at the time of the initial choice.
This seems like splitting hairs. The outcome are not known or calcuable.
I suppose a dice roll or the motions of a butterfly are deterministic as well, if you have a full model capable of fully modeling the world.
And there are basic things that shouldn’t be subjective at all but that the IRS refuses to give a clear answer to, like if/how the SALT cap affects deduction for NIIT. There are at least 3 possible interpretations and no consensus.
That's because it's law, and the IRS doesn't get to decide that, courts do.
There are parts of the tax code that mean different things in different parts of the US because of conflicting circuit court decisions that haven't made it to the Supreme Court.
I know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time.
I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare!
The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.
I use to think that. I'm capable of putting numbers in a form correctly. A good tax preparer can point out things like "did you know that your specific commuting pattern entitles you to claim mileage?", or "the law says the way you have your working environment set up at home means you can deduct some of your utility bills", and so on ad infinitum.
Basically, unless you get someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, if your tax situation is non-trivial (see my post above this) then you might be leaving money on the table. It's a terrible, idea to evade taxes. It's a fantastic idea to realize when you're paying more than you're legally required to so that you can fix it.
The IRS's fillable forms do a perfectly fine job of copying values around and doing the basic arithmetic that they can automate.
No, that's Intuit lobbying.
Taxes are not objective. No software can reach into your life and classify your activies into legal categories.
That’s a true side fact, but that has nothing to do with how the software behaves once you input your answers.
Ultimately, taxes is just filling out a spreadsheet and doing basic math... but the hard part of taxes is understanding how to fill out that spreadsheet correctly. Doing that requires answering several questions that many tax filers may simply not have the background to understand--I'm always struck whenever answering the question about "do you need to correct your W-2?" is how would I know when the answer is "yes." I can see how AI could be helpful here... at least were not AI plagued with hallucinations.
That said, Intuit's actual business model is convincing millions of people that their taxes are so complicated they need to spend $60 on a program that is just copy-pasting numbers from one document to another.
tbf doing taxes is way more than copy from W2; paste into 1040. There are tax credits. Tax incentives. 1099 income (which a lot of people receive!). Loopholes. So many loopholes.
As far as I understand it, a lot of this guidance can be/has been automated programmatically. I can see how LLMs can become useful for niche scenarios if you feed it *a LOT* of data as they become more accurate.
There are actually very few "loopholes" available to individuals.
What most accountants call "loopholes" are actually just misunderstandings of the tax rules (e.g., the home office deduction, home business expense deductions, hiring family members being some of the biggest), and their clients usually end up paying penalties the IRS if they get audited.
Or tax situations that aren't taken advantage of! There are folks who are definitely brave about using those deductions, but there are also people that can who don't. That's what I meant by "loophole" here.
You would correct your W2 when the amount you receive wasn't what was reported - this is exceptionally rare.
Nah, Free Fillable Forms paired with ChatGPT (free, not even plus) is adequate for the vast majority of the tax population now and none of it is hard. I expect that 2027 is the last year for the tax preparation software companies to still exist.
There have been free alternatives for years.
People still pay accountants to do their very basic taxes and pay $200 for twenty minutes worth of work.
Why?
For the same reason paid software exists in this space - knowing you have someone else to blame.
I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”
When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.
I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
You're being deprived of government services and a sustainable economy because the wealthy are allowed to game the system they've rigged for themselves. I wouldn't call that luck.
Gemini is a pretty bad choice for an LLM. Most people using it are doing so because Google bundled it for free with a couple things, not for its quality.
Serious question: to figure out the answer why did you not go to the IRS website for that field? This is how I ultimately answer any tax questions I have.
This. An important property of tax calculations is being consistently reproducible. In the context of an audit, the calculations don’t need to be accurate per se just precise.
I have a formative story where a large industrial company was counting things for tax purposes using my software. Given the same data and same binary, the count was off by one depending on if it was running on Intel or AMD CPUs. They didn’t care so much what the count was, they just needed it to be the same value at all times in all places so they could defend it in an audit.
The inability to consistently reproduce the value was a bigger liability for tax purposes than small variances in accuracy that fell out of the process.
Why? What's wrong with some non determism if Intuit foots any mistakes? I am all for AI auto filling taxes where the filer offering takes the burden.
To be honest I'm kinda sceptical that they will be paying fines for you.
Software licenses usually explicitly disclaim all financial damages. I assume Intuit does too (I don't use Turbotax myself).
If an LLM hallucinates your income or deductions, the IRS is not going to go after the LLM, it's going to go after the taxpayer. I can't believe what I'm seeing in some of these replies. Making a mistake on your taxes is at best, a stressful letter from the IRS, and at worse, prison time. Place your trust appropriately.
Intuit actually will indemnify any penalties in case of filing errors on their part.
Intuit has a pretty broad financial software portfolio, not just a tax company.
Also, yes the actual arithmetic at the end should be handled by deterministic code. I doubt anyone, including Intuit, thinks otherwise. But there's a ton of uses for LLMs before you get to 2+2 = 4, explaining concepts, document extraction, understanding the full financial picture, etc.
Kind of feels like you're criticizing a cartoonish idea of AI's place in their products.
You would think arithmetic should be deterministic, but just days ago I received paper mail from IRS saying my tax software computed federal tax underpayment penalty incorrectly, and they are refunding me > $300.
I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself.
So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway.
This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful.
If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
Your experience is way different from mine.
I had some very basic "double check" type questions about my very straightforward taxes I threw at the bot because it was handy and it didn't seem to know that it was even related to taxes or tax software and literally directed me to seek out someone who might know about taxes. I then asked it about the weather and it was able to talk freely about that, just seems like they're reselling another model with a different prompt up front or a RAG.
I feel like every time when us devs use a chatbot we think it's crap. Whatever we built ourselves though is truly next level.
I have found almost every single chat experience to be lousy and hurting the brand/product...
This is so bad, it's funny. But I'd expect no less from Intuit.
I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software.
If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com/.
I made the switch to FreeTaxUSA from H&R Block online this year. It was very easy and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You can upload your previous year's PDF from your other software to import the data.
It's been good for so long I hope it doesn't get popular and go to shit. Free federal return and $15 state return if needed. If Intuit died tomorrow the world would be a better place.
Not for me! I would have to hire an accountant or CPA. Then I would have to spend a lot of time and energy meeting with them and taking their phone calls.
TurboTax occupies a middle ground and it saves me enormous amounts of time.
I've been using it for a few years now and it seems fine. I'm already stuck with one Intuit product (Quicken), I'm not using any more.
Intuit sold off Quicken a decade ago, and it's been a standalone company since then: https://www.pcworld.com/article/419931/intuit-selling-quicke...
So sad! I used it for at least a decade, maybe like 2006-2018 or so. Their Mac desktop software was excellent then, and no Electron tomfoolery or other nonsense. And you could just keep every year's TT app installed in case you wanted to open an old return to amend it or something.
I eventually decided to abandon them a couple years after they started forcing me to buy some ultra premium pro edition because I had a small amount of "business income." Switched to Credit Karma Taxes, which Intuit then bought, but miraculously some regulator forced them to divest that product, which landed at Cash App. So I have used that (now called Cash App Taxes) since then. It's a free product and even supports business income and state taxes (IIRC, state e-filing was always an additional add-on with TT). It was a little annoying to have to re-enter more that first year, but it's done a good job of rolling forward, and not that I've ever needed it, but they also have that "Audit Defense" thing included for free, another add-on upcharge TT offered.
I was forced to use their shitty desktop version inside a Windows VM because I don't have any Windows or Mac machines, and the web version doesn't support married filing federal jointly and state separately.
Their desktop version seems like a webapp embedded inside browser frame; I don't understand why they can't make it available on the web.
Same for domestic partners. They push you into their desktop version for some reason, but the desktop version is a buggy pile of trash. I wasn't able to use it at all even on a windows machine. To their credit, they did refund the software without too much of a hassle (I expected a giant fight).
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.
I WAS a happy TurboTax customer for over 33 years, until this year when I used HR Block TaxCut to file my 2025 returns. Intuit insisted that only Windows 11 would be supported, for no technical reason whatsoever. I assume they got a payoff from Microsoft for doing this.
So now I see they're laying off 3000 employees and wonder if it has something to do with poor sales of TurboTax because of their lame policy.
They did the same with Windows 7 going to 10. (I used to use a containment VM for their products, since they aren't particularly clean installs. I used the same one year after year and was too lazy to update it.) I seem to remember that that check was easy to patch out. (As are several other checks of interest.)
Some of those layoffs were certainly people supporting dead versions of Windows, and high-touch low-sophistication users with old broken-down computers. At some point, they/you were getting dropped as a customer and, checking the news, now is the time to do that.
(But most of these people were probably working on some Intuit Whatsit that you and I have never heard of. Every profitable software company has a bunch of products which failed to launch.)
> for no technical reason whatsoever
Bold of you to state that without anything to back up your claim.
Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t, but you shouldn’t state it as fact unless you have information backing it up
Name one feature of Windows 11 that could be so mandatory to a web app inside an electron shell, that it couldn't run on windows 10?
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.
> Its 2026 and times are tough baby
Tough even for firms that have regulatory capture in a ~$48 billion market?
You know it as well as I, no gotcha here buddy.
It's getting tough for shitters with some old ass legacy PC who depend on online services. Hopefully they were smart enough to understand they were living on borrowed time.
edit, also there are government subsided smartphones if you need one.
> old ass legacy PC
A bunch of the unsupported PCs aren't even that old.
I bought a Ryzen 5 1600X in 2017, which is noticeably higher performance than the basic tier of processors supported by windows 11, but it's not on the supported list, and you have to bypass the installer to get windows 11 running.
Ok, lets start planning its 10th birthday party.
My PCs are modern. I (used to) run TurboTax in a VM. I've got three VMs with different older versions of Windows, that contain about 20 years of Tax data. It's more secure to keep my tax data in VMs that I don't use for anything else. I do have a Windows 11 partition on my PC, but I haven't booted it in over a year, and I have no need to.
I don't think I'll ever need to make a Windows 11 VM.
Cool, a super technical dude like you can just spin a secure Win11 VM to run TurboTax then. You probably have a bash script or something. What are you complaining about.
I mean, sure; you can come up with some kind of justification to call just about anything "a technical reason".
But there's no genuinely technical reason—one you don't have to twist yourself into pretzels over—that fairly ordinary software, working fine on Win11, would not work on Win10.
Easy question because you need to evaluate every dependency for Win10 compatibility, Win10 bugs that MS fixed in Win11, running unsupported Win10 CI somehow, QA testing team for Windows 10 (programmers won't do this)... and on and on.
All for an dead operating system. I guess this works in your basement mind where people work for free or something.
Finally being able to stop paying Intuit $150 every year as a reward for their lobbying against tax code simplification and free e-file is one of the most exciting possibilities for AI imo
I used Claude Code to prepare my personal income tax return this year, and so far the IRS hasn’t come after me.
Had Claude generate yaml files for the input/source documents, then had it generate code to process the return into output yaml files.
Manually typed the results into the IRS Free File Forms website, and was pleased to see that it did some input validation.
Had it generate Code modules to match the IRS forms and schedules by name, keeping the nomenclature in code as close as possible to that in the official IRS instructions.
Spot checked a whole lot of it and found very, very little of it that needed correction.
Stored all of it in git so that I could monitor the diffs as it went along.
Maybe the neatest part was when I asked Claude why I wound up owing so much it gave me a list of reasons and dollar amounts in descending order.
Still blows my mind that Americans have to do this.
In the UK almost nobody needs to "file their takes" and if you do you just do it online without the need for software.
A lot of people in the UK file their taxes (~12 million, roughly 35% of employed adults, not taking into account those unemployed with assets and pensions), but the self assessment is straightforward and very easy to use.
But do they have to?
In my country income taxes are automatically deducted. If you've got a single job and don't own large amounts of properties there's a decent chance your tax bill is exactly €0 and that there's no requirement for you to file.
In the UK tax on interest earned on plain savings accounts isn't deducted at source - so if you have a rainy day pot chances are you're required to register for self assessment and pay tax on it (particularly now that interest rates are higher and it's relatively easy to go above the tax free threshold, which has been frozen for a long time).
If you have investments outside of an ISA (tax free investment wrapper) then same story - you need to report disposals and dividends for tax purposes.
That's before we get into side hustles/self employment and investment properties, etc.
> In the UK tax on interest earned on plain savings accounts isn't deducted at source
Yes, but as you point out you should really be using the ISA wrapper or a pension of some sort for most investments. I suspect most of those doing self assessment will either (a) be in the upper 25% of earners or (b) self-employed (~4.5m people).
It is annoying how the government has chosen to make tax slightly more annoying with "making tax digital" for self-employed people with quarterly reporting.
No, you don't have to. If you are employed through a company, stay below £100K income and don't have other income then (generally) you don't need to do a tax return - it's all handled automatically through pay as you earn payroll. However, as shown, a lot of people are self employed, want to claim deductions, have some side income etc. However, for those that do need to, it is really straightforward.
Would you prefer to pay $100 for software, or a 50% marginal tax on a meager £100K?
Depends on what I get for it and it is close to NYC and San Francisco it the 100 to 200k range. I do agree though that it is too high.
Maybe its because in the UK, you are basically just giving all of your money to the government so there is nothing to work out.
Until you have to deal with bed and breakfast rules for RSUs. Good luck getting free software to understand that. There are a couple of open source attempts but they are skeleton at best.
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.
Once you get habituated to it, it really is easy. When I was younger I was appalled by how much I was losing to taxes. Now I don't even glance at the line items. All that matters is that the end numbers. Hell, if I didn't need to enroll my kid in school which requires a receipt for property taxes, I wouldn't even know that literally 80% of my local taxes to schooling. My property taxes are pretty invisible to me. I don't file, my bank does. It really puts into frame why when a city gets old, they start cutting taxes and squeezing schools.
If taxes were filed automatically, honestly, I'd pay no attention at all to them, but having to sit once a year an actually look at the amount I paid, does get me to think about taxes and what they go towards, at least a little.
I’d wager the money from lobbies and companies like Intuit more than make up for it.
Also, republics are “anti-tax” in word and pro-tax in practice, as is the American way. When it comes to particularly republicans, anti-tax is code for removing social safety nets. They want taxes if it pays them, or pays the right contractors, or funds the military etc but when those tax dollars could go to social welfare they suddenly think it’s time to trim the fat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpa...
To have the tax code easily dealt with and returns filed by IRS's own software will be a happy day. At that point maybe most of Intuit's employees can find other jobs.
Stop being a "happy customer". We shouldn't be paying in the first place.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
The alternative is a CPA/accountant, which would be annoying and time-consuming
No, the alternative is being able to file for free. Turbotax lobbied for decades to make sure you have to pay.
> If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
This isn't actually about AI. it's just classic human psychology.
You’ve had a rock-solid workflow for 25 years, so it makes total sense to be cautious and reject features you don't need.
Right now, keeping it at "arm's length" and "read-only" feels safe. But that's usually just phase one. Once that initial trust is established, those boundaries naturally start to melt away. Give it a couple of tax seasons, and you’ll probably find yourself wanting it to take on more of the heavy lifting.
We have an app for that. Would you like me to write a new one?
I could feed a lot of posts into ELIZA...
Yes, A rock-solid workflow for 54+ years.
And ELISA.BAS is still running strong. Its just classic human psychology.
> I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years.
I've been using TurboTax for about 20 years now and I am not happy. I hate it with a passion, it has more dark patterns than even LinkedIn and with my basic W-2 tax return with HDHP I managed to hit all their 'know issues' 4 years in a row. They of course offered me to upgrade several times during the 'work flow' to make up for it.
I loathe the existence of Intuit and I still have some hope that a future administration will kill it by having the IRS implement a basic digital product for federal tax filing for the 90% of people who use the standard deduction. Intuit should not exist in its current form in any civilized country, it is a form of cancer which only exists because our politicians are a bunch of greedy fucks.
I just file late every year and there are never any upgrades.
"happy", I don't understand how any user can be happy using these tools. Begrudging, maybe. These tools don't even need to exist. The government already knows all it needs to know and just needs your signature and a check. The only reason TurboTax exists is because of lobbying.
Why pay for tax software? What's wrong with the free tax submission website?
most are limited to a simple 1040
Freetaxusa isn't. I've done complicated schedule K, etc forms on it
I used the IRS free fillable forms this year and it was much easier than I expected, including contractor, investment income, and foreign income declarations.
That hasn't been my experience. freetaxusa has been pretty great honestly.
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 because every other country has a government method to submit your taxes, yup, we're dumb, thanks mostly to that shitty company.
Oh, we do have another 'free' filing method for those with income below a certain level, which the lobbyists made sure would be handled by those same private companies. They are allowed to obfuscate and hide it, so when you search for it, you will probably end up on their main, paid product. Kind of the identical story with how our credit reports work (annualcreditreport dot com being the site the CRAs really don't want you to find)
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 probably mostly BS Deluxe/Audit Defense just because I felt guilty about using it for free so long.
It's great but they don't handle AMT so I had to use TurboTax this year.
> 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.
> 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) for at least the last 15 years so I might underestimate some complexity here. The key idea behind it though is that nearly all deductions are automatically and unambiguously applied, already when the cost is charged in most cases. So they're always already done when I file my taxes. And the key to that is making sure the tax law is written with this in mind.
I suspect a lot of it is to ensure people who are paid in cash have a strong moment where it can be argued that they took significant agency to hide that from the IRS.
“I just clicked yes on the web form.” might not feel as compelling to a jury filling out paper forms and conveniently forgetting my cash-based income. (I suspect the same reason is why you have to carry your luggage a few hundred feet over a line and recheck it when connecting on an international to domestic flight coming into the US: so there is a clear moment when you personally carried your luggage over a line, so if there’s material that wasn’t allowed to come over that line, you’re attached to it when it happened.)
Wow, I've never thought of that before, but that is actually pretty compelling.
It doesn't mean our current way (and the massive private industry scam) is the only and best way, but at least it is some explanation rather than it seeming totally insane.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
That would be nice. I fear the modern system, with Citizens United, SuperPACs etc. seems to have been the final nail in the coffin of that concept though. Especially with the FPTP system preventing third parties. Someone in one of the two parties will win, they're both in the thrall of lobbyists, and even if there was one not taking that money (I think that's becoming more and more rare) the money firehose makes a substantial difference in elections. Hard to see how "we" can do a lot about this. I hate it, but I don't see it changing. And it seems like astroturfing will be easier in future elections than ever before - Now a few million dollars from a billionaire or even from foreign adversaries will be able to generate 'overwhelming groundswells' of completely synthetic public opinion on platforms like TikTok. To me, the result will be an acceleration of the tilt toward buying elections vs. convincing people of your ideas organically.
Unfortunately I tend to agree with you. But, at least we're actually talking about the real problem instead of pointing the finger at Inuit and their lobbyists.
I had a mixed experience with it. I think it has enormous potential but it needs to be more deeply integrated with their system (while staying read only by default, as you said).
Just a quick note that you are also telling a story about how TurboTax could be overstaffed.
If you use TurboTax, you are part of the problem.
1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading.
2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making judgement calls. However, for something like quickbooks, I can imagine many uses for AI. For example, categorizing expenses, organizing receipts, noticing odd patterns, etc.
I can think of very few less appropriate places for LLMs than accounting.
They can't do basic arithmetic reliably, and will confidently tell you completely made-up figures when you ask for reports.
Meanwhile, existing accounting software is mature and does a great job at keeping numbers straight, and producing good reports, especially in the hands of a professional.
this company Intuit is going to train their internal models on your data and other customers too. In order to train useful models in aggregate, they will ingest your very specific PII and you will do "nothing" about it. The entire set of tax paying citizens (almost) are now going to have their financial-legal lives ingested into models you cannot see, cannot use yourself and do not derive income from, IMHO.
ps- small caveat to this personal information doomerism is that very wealthy and capable people will have this happen to them and their companies, and that will possibly set off some kid of hardball.
I used to be a pretty happy TurboTax user due to all the automatic handlers/connectors.
This year I leaned fully into LLMs and had Claude build everything from scratch then used the Gemini & Chatgpt to check. While it took time to get all the marking just right, it was, relatively speaking, pretty easy since I downloaded the previous years to start as the basis which allowed for multi-year customization and back testing.
Guess I'm not using Turbotax anymore.
As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.
It's worth pointing out that TurboTax is just one of their products... even if it went away overnight, they'd still have a lucrative business publishing QuickBooks. It is basically the standard in small business accounting software in the US, and a majority of small businesses probably use it, pay an outside accountant that does, or both.
In the past? Because they make a mostly non-digital system digital and convenient. Currently? Corruption. At least for the TurboTax part of Intuit.
Maybe you, as an infinitely wise European, can explain this page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/self-assessment-c...
The vast majority of people in the UK don't have to fill out a self assessment because their tax situation is simple and handed by their employers. For the people who do have more complicated tax arrangements, the process takes like 10-15 minutes on the HMRC portal and importantly it's free.
So all these commercial software offerings for SAs exist just for fun? I guess I just don't understand why these exist. Europeans have yet to explain this adequately.
Can you show me the free option that existed in HMRC's portal for non-domiciled statuses? I can only find websites that contradict your point:
https://www.dtaxfiler.co.uk/blog/residence-remittance-sa109
>You will need to use commercial software that supports the SA109 form (such as DTax Filer), You cannot submit the SA109 form through HMRC’s free online service. . If you do not use compatible software, you will need to print and post your tax return instead.
Clearly they're lying and you should correct them post-haste.
Those are accounting packages that can submit your tax return for you automatically based on your figures.
You don’t have to use them, there’s a free electronic form. But it’s easier if you’re using an accounting system to just plug the numbers straight in.
Congratulations, you now magically seem to understand what TurboTax is.
>You don’t have to use them, there’s a free electronic form.
If only the IRS also had a free fillable form you can use: https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
There are multiple similar companies in many European countries, even though the government provides (often somewhat basic) tools to file taxes. A large percentage of citizens in the Germany and Austria use paid software because it's more comfortable, same in the UK and Poland. But yes, it would be better if that was not the case, like in Scandinavia.
1) Because in the US your employer doesn't withhold tax at the correct rate - they withhold tax at whatever rate you tell them to (this is just a down payment). Places like banks don't withhold taxes at all. So, the US system forces everyone to file taxes (as long as your income is over some very minimal level).
2) Because in the US once your finances get remotely complex, filing taxes is a horrible experience, so most people are willing to either pay for someone else to do it for them, or for software like TurboTax to help do it themselves.
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.
Accounting still exists in Europe, it turns out. Tax preparation/filing software is only about 25% part of Intuit's business.
Same as Russian. The state provides all needed software for filling documents related to taxes. It's been so for at least 15 years, most likely longer.
Has anyone in these comments ever heard of QuickBooks?
Everything in the US is done to make money, for someone.
Education. Healthcare. Prisons. Even filing taxes is a profit centre for someone.
It’s not a very successful country. It’s a very successful business.
> In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier.
So profits are up 50% YOY and the CEO got a $30M package, but they're cutting 3000 employees.
Companies aren’t charities. If those 3k employees were important to the revenue or profit, we’ll find out in the next couple quarters.
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)
Was scanning the comments to see if anyone had recommended freetaxusa. I think this was my third or fourth year on it. I’ve been nothing but pleased, personally.
Unfortunately doesn't work with foreign addresses. For me, TurboTax is a godsend. Or I'd be paying a preparer $1000+
Their website doesn't support windows 10?
Their desktop software. If you’re going to switch off the desktop software to something, it may as well be something that isn’t turbotax.
My dad had to upgrade his PC recently to do his taxes as it was stuck on Windows 10 due to CPU support. I suggested a Mac Mini, but neglected to confirm that turbotax Canada supports macOS with their desktop software. My dad had no interest the website version, so he bought another Windows laptop and now has both the Mac Mini and his “tax laptop” that he plans to only use once a year.
Some people are just ingrained in their habits and not interested in change. (Though my retired father was perfectly willing to try a Mac for the first time - apparently new tax software was a bridge too far.)
This was the last year for me and my wife to use Turbo Tax, it's been ok for 15 years but I know AI will do it all for us next year, for free. Gemini was very helpful with questions and some skills building this year, I should have tried more.
N ext year I'll basically feed in my W2, 1099s, fidelity forms, insurance, maybe 20-30 documents, and ask for my completed 1040 and related forms. The LLMs already have the data extraction capability, vast tax knowlege, large enough context for personal taxes. We don't need another year to make tax software obsolete.
Actually I'll try a test first, easymgiven I have my 2025 input docs and TurboTax outputs, see howma few models do.
I’d be quite careful, giving it your financial information.
I have a friend that uses ChatGPT for medical advice, so it has a lot of very personal information. He asked it if he could trust it with his financial information, and it told him no.
I’ve used a (human) CPA for over a decade. Been well worth it. He easily earns his fees back.
Be sure to give it your bank account details and pin number too, so it can fill out that section of the 1040.
Well if you also have your 2024 input docs as well, you may want to check that too in separate sessions. Post your findings. I'm interested.
The more I hear about companies shifting to focus on AI the more it makes me want to start a direct "successor"/"competitor" company that does what the original company did without shifting to AI. As a bet on the AI enshittifying the original company so much that they either cannot develop the software any more and have to start anew, or that they create so many errors and chaos that they get fined & sued into oblivion, or both.
I think you're on to something here. For a multi-product dev company, they could (if domain still available) brand as 'without.ai' or 'no.ai' or 'sans.ai' and do 'taxware.sans.ai', 'todo-mvc.sans.ai', 'basecampclone.sans.ai' etc..
Intuit lobbies to keep our complex tax code for the benefit of their revenue. Intuit is a parasite. If they could go ahead and lay off the rest of their workforce and fold it up that would be great.
My favorite Intuit experience was hiring one of their ex engineers to convert my QuickBooks file back to the last version that didn’t require a subscription which they intentionally tried to make impossible.
Double entry bookkeeping doesn’t need a subscription and their connectors are constantly broken. Fuck Intuit very much.
Recently needed to start tracking expenses for a new business I started. Sole prop, no payroll to fuss with.
I literally reached for the oldest version of QB I had available. 2014! Greatest experience of my life. Brought back memories of when Intuit didn't suck. I despise what they've done to QB Desktop over the years...they have been torpedoing it for a while so people are left to move to Online. I like QB Online. But their Fast, old versions of QB Desktop are pure bliss.
Gemini and GPT did my (non-trivial) taxes this year. They're going to be laying off way more than 3k people.
How does this work, concretely? Do you just upload your W2/1099s/etc and prompt it to "do my taxes"? I imagine it's not that easy, but filing my (trivial) taxes with any of the well known tax prep services is easy enough that the LLM version can't get very much more complex than "do my taxes" and still be an improvement.
Upload all the needed forms, upload the forms to be filled, but output instead to a spreadsheet instead of trying to get the model to fill out the .pdfs. I then manually filled out the forms from the spreadsheets.
You can also ask antigravity to fill out the forms if it is in the browser (from the spreadsheet data).
In the long term Intuit is probably a $0 because you don't need TurboTax to file a UBI report.
Depends on how good Intuit's lobbyists are at complicating any attempt at getting a UBI legislated.
One of the concepts often used to describe/"sell" a UBI is that a UBI may be thought of as changing the tax code to provide larger rebates and/or the government doing cash advance "loans" on a person's tax rebates so that people can make use of the time value of money. Those perspectives make a UBI easier to sell to legislators ("it's just a stranger tax code with some new accounting tricks"), but unfortunately also give plenty of room to tax code lobbyists to complicate and corrupt a UBI.
whatever the framing, Intuit runs ~80% gross margins. these cuts arent about saving money — its about shifting R&D to AI before TurboTax's moat erodes from the bottom up
Makes sense. After I finished my taxes this time I ran them through Claude Code and it found things I’d forgotten to include that would actually help things.
A quick reminder to all commentators that in addition to Turbotax and Quickbooks, Intuit also owns MailChimp for (nowadays pretty broad) marketing, CreditKarma for your credit scores/analysis (and pitching you credit cards), and professional enterprise tax prep software. There’s a lot of red-queening happening in AI for marketing and financial assessment software. Individual tax prep, maybe not as much?
Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/intuit-cut-17... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214516)
I've been using TurboTax forever, mostly due to laziness.
This year they made you take a survey at the end, asking why you're still using boomer desktop software and haven't switched to their totally-not-worse web version. I think the writing is on the wall.
If they kill the desktop version of TurboTax, I'm gone. I despise doing taxes in a browser. I'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
I guess 3k users less for TurboTax
TurboLayoffs
i mean layoffs used to happen every year no? the companies are just piggybacking atp
no, they did not. certainly not at this level or publicity. do not normalize this.
I think this isn't terrible, actually.
If there aren't humans involved in tax filing, the process of moving from private-entities-are-needed-to-do-your-taxes to the-government-can-figure-out-your-taxes becomes politically easier as we won't be taking jobs away from families.
We got somewhat close to this ideal before Trump Round 2, so ideally eight years of a more normal admin will be enough.
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Well, if all there QA people have left... Their "pivot" is straight off a cliff. Best of luck.
Interesting article and an accelerating trend that will continue for some time in the tech industry. The challenge and the opportunity will be for legacy companies to ensure their legacy stack is well mapped to the newfound AI capabilities. My biggest fear is human laziness - AI coding is good for the most part and will get many times better over the next few months - BUT IT'LL NOT BE PERFECT. Overloaded employees are likely to get lazy and ship features cheaper and faster without checking - this will lead to small businesses being hit for no fault of their own. Anyway - short term share price gains beckon.