How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

So many people offering explanations, and yet not a single one of them answers the OP's question. If you're upset that Intuit is engaging in lobbying (as you should be!), that might be an appropriate answer for a different question (eg: why doesn't the IRS just send us their own reports for us to approve?). Again, I am not defending Intuit's involvement in politics, but that's not the answer to the dark patterns question - let me try to answer that specific question:

For years, I kept experimenting with different approaches to filing my taxes. I started out with TurboTax, and being so painfully aware of their bad reputation, I kept trying out every alternative I could think of - including their biggest competitor TaxAct and three different tax firms. After all that work, I am back to using TurboTax. Obviously, it was not an easy decision given how hard I tried to avoid that path, and no, I didn't return to TurboTax because I got tricked by one of their dark patterns.

The simple answer for why the tax firms didn't work out is that the work they required in their onboarding equaled or exceeded the amount of work it would have taken me to do the whole thing in TurboTax myself. Mind you, this is just the onboarding piece - not including the emails and calls leading up to the onboarding and following the onboarding.

The least sophisticated firm just said: send us everything in a zip file. That sounded appealing until they started following up with a million questions. The medium-sophisticated firm (which was the most painful of all of them) asked me to use their web app which was essentially TurboTax except that the questions were incredibly confusing so that I had to look up a ton of stuff just to make sure I was submitting the right thing. The third firm used a better web app, but it was still the same thing - the onboarding was essentially the same as just using TurboTax.

The obvious added value with tax firms is that they might catch something that you would have done wrong without their assistance, but these days TurboTax does offer the same service as well (and no, I never received some valuable piece of advice that justified the additional time and effort of working with a tax firm).

TaxAct is not bad, and would be my close second preference. In fact, they actually cover more niche cases (eg: filing certain types of corporate taxes). Even so, their UI/UX is only almost as good as TurboTax but not quite. As unpopular as TurboTax might be in this community, I think we can take a moment and appreciate their PM+UI/UX team, who used some pretty delightful copy and super slick design to turn an awful task into a rather pleasant experience.

And that's the ultimate answer to the OP's question as I see it... most people who are aware of the dark patterns in TurboTax know that it is not the cheapest way to file, but it's certainly not the most expensive either - and if you're looking for the easiest-to-use and fastest method to get the tax report checked off your list, then it's hard to find a better solution (granted, partially because they are helping create the world we live in).

They are frustrated, they're simply not aware that Intuit and other players have exercised regulatory capture to make it so awful and blame "the government" since the IRS is the face of it.

Other modernized nations have nothing like this insanity, often sending people yearly reports they can accept (since for most cases they are accurate) or send in amendments. This is far from the only issue that business interests have made the USA almost uniquely fucking stupid about.

Why would I be mad at Intuit? They’re an amoral profit-seeking company seeking profit. I’m furious at the IRS and Congress for not providing me with a free, simple federal tax filing solution. I know there are free file programs for certain income brackets or tax situations, but it’s outrageous that the IRS has colluded with Intuit (and other paid tax preparers) by strongly recommending that taxpayers file electronically but then not provide a free solution across the board.

I recently had Intuit delete all my personal data, across all their products. Doing this was exhausting. Their online process for deleting an account did not work. Contacting customer support resulted in unhelpful back and forth. Finally, I gave up and filed a complaint with the CA Attorney General. Within two weeks, I got a call from someone at Intuit who quickly resolved the issue and promised to delete all my Intuit-owned accounts (it seems to have worked).

I tell the story because I think it illustrates a lot of reasons companies can get away with bad behavior:

1. Only a subset of consumers recognize the bad behavior and know who to contact.

2. Most consumers are not motivated to complain. In the above story, most people would probably stop when the Intuit website doesn't work (I usually give up too). There is a free-rider problem. My complaint could benefit lots of people if a company changes its behavior, but I alone incur the cost of complaining.

3. When a consumer successfully complains, companies can sometimes quietly make the problem go away for the one consumer and avoid regulatory action. Intuit called me, resolved the issue only for me, and we both move on. With the issue resolved, the regulator has less reason to continue investigating.

4. Even when regulators get enough complaints and go after bad behavior, they are up against powerful attorneys and lobbyists. And even if the regulators win, the company probably has lots of substitute ways of achieving the same goals that weren't contemplated or prohibited by the settlement/law/etc.

You would think there would be more political will for a government to make taxation as smooth and painless as possible for its citizens. I don't hate paying income tax because I "lose" money, I hate it because the process is a massive pain in the ass, and if I make a mistake (how can you not), I risk being fined, or worse.

Turbo Tax also provides some kind of service to help you if the IRS comes after you for some errors. One of my friends paid extra for this, him made a simple calculation error in their tax return, the IRS came after him for it, and Turbo Tax didn't do shit because he made the error, not Turbo Tax. So they're giving you the opportunity to pay them extra to cover the cost of their mistakes.

I honestly think more people would be willing to pay higher taxes if the process was low-effort for most people. For example, if you work for a company that witholds taxes from your paycheck, you shouldn't have to do anything; either you get a check in the mail if you over-payed, or a bill if you under-payed, and you answer a yes/no question to adjust your W-4 for the next year.

>How

They have lobbyists [0][1], and you don't. But don't worry, "experts" and oligarchs tell us that corruption here is among the lowest in the World.

>Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

>The biggest obstacle, the New America experts warn, is the lobbying power of Intuit and its allies.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california...

The final straw for me was in 2019. My 3 year old version of QuickBooks Pro refused to import any more bank transactions until I upgraded to a newer version. Nothing had changed with data formats or anything -- it was simple extortion: upgrade or the software you own will cease working (fully).

Fuck them. I just wrote my own. I first tried some alternatives like GNUcash, but found it best to just write what I needed (account ledgers, reconcile bank statements, generate P&L and BS reports). I refused any other solution with any dependencies on "the cloud" or any entity.

QB is truly about the shittiest software on the planet, a reputation maintained and expanded over the decades. The simplest recourse, with minimal emotional toll, is to just not use their crap.

Actually the worst dark pattern is implemented by the IRS. No doubt lobbying keeps it this way.

The process for online filing with the IRS is a hot mess, and extremely difficult to navigate. For example, it is impossible for me to file 1099-NEC for my contractors without first obtaining a special ID delivered via mail in 45 days. I can't print and mail from the IRS website either -- I have to first request the form. Check out this cryptic mess

https://fire.irs.gov/

I'm working with some other contributors on ustaxes, an open source project aimed at helping tackle free tax filing https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes

A client of mine sent me a 1099 last month through their QuickBooks account. I never used any of Intuit's products before.

In order to download it I (the recipient of the 1099 which is nothing but a PDF file) had to create a QuickBooks account.

During this process:

1. I was denied being able to make an account unless I used a password less than 33 characters (my normal passwords are well above that but it was blocked). Here's a tweet and screenshot of the form validation https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1486793382789885960.

2. Their page tried to get me to sign up to their paid services multiple times while attempting to download the 1099.

3. Their page tried to get me to upgrade my account to a paid account after I downloaded the 1099.

4. In order to close my account I had to call an 800 number and speak to a human. I ended up not doing this, but someone else in another comment said they tried unsuccessfully and ultimately filed a complaint against them through their state's Attorney General.

Pretty much every dark pattern you can ask for tied into an activity where incorrectly paying your taxes can lead to fines or imprisonment.

Intuit forever lost my business when they tried to run my QuickBooks Payroll from a bank account I deactivated, after moving to a new bank (and updating my bank information in QuickBooks). They then charged me a $100 non-sufficient funds fee because they tried to pull the money from the deactivated account.

After 6-7 hours of dealing with the most aggressively-incompetent "support" I've ever had the misfortune to encounter, I cancelled every Intuit product/service I was using.

The reason they get away with this type of behavior is because we're all trained to fear the IRS to such a degree that we just want someone else who promises to "take care of everything" for us. And what recourse do we have when they behave badly? The court system? That's just as obfuscated and frustrating as the IRS. How much more of my time and money am I willing to put into dealing with Inuit? By the numbers, the smartest move is to just let this go.

It's everyone just settling for the lesser of evils/frustrations - until they get burnt badly enough.

The entire us tax system is a legislative dark pattern that funnels people into accounting outfits like TurboTax.

I use TurboTax.

The reason I use it is that I've used it in the past and I know it works for my somewhat weird tax situation. It sucks. Intuit is a terrible company. But there is no way to know that I'll be able to actually navigate the wizard for some other product before I dive in. And all of the free options definitely don't support my situation. If I wanted free I'd be stuck with the raw forms and I'm not confident I'd do it all right.

I'm a weirdo and I actually like the precision of doing taxes, but the consequences of botching it are very high. So I go with the thing I'm familiar with and I get mad that TurboTax is taking $110 of my dollars every year for crap that should be done much more simply.

There are a couple of open source projects like http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ and https://ustaxes.org/ ; perhaps we should support these to get to the point where they can actually replace TurboTax and H&R.

I bet the laws are unnecessarily complicated and they probably continue to get more complicated due to Intuit's lobbying but opposing that is a much more expensive proposition than supporting an open source project (with code, or financially).

Here's a Pocket article explaining it: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-irs-already-has-all-y...

> Consequently, of the more than 100 million taxpayers eligible for free help, 35% end up paying for tax preparation and 60% never even visit the free websites. Instead of 70% of Americans receiving free tax preparation, commercial companies whittled that percentage down to 3%.

BTW the US Treasury has been trying to get corporations to comply for years (since 2009). Here's a link to their report: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/2020...

Serious question:

Tax laws change constantly as do the amounts you need to pay.

Accountants tend to use automated tools to calculate accurate taxes which they routinely pay yearly updates for.

What is stopping an accountant who is also a programmer to release a tool which they feed in the accurate / up to date info from whatever tools they are paying for to produce an accurate tax return?

It could be open source and donation based or priced at something that makes it a no brainer to use for everyone who isn't eligible to do free tax returns. I have to think they would make many orders of magnitude more money from this than charging their usual accounting fees to a small local group of folks but this is such a basic idea that there has to be something stopping them from doing it.

Is this because of liability concerns around providing inaccurate numbers or is there a lot of manual work being done to calculate taxes that a tool can't accurately calculate on its own without a huge amount of domain knowledge?

People only file their taxes once a year and just want to move on.

Industries with infrequent transactions are more prone to abuse like this.

Aside from the "you only use it once a year" answer that's already been mentioned - there are ways to get out of the dark patterns, if you're alert enough. It's the same reason there isn't more of an outcry against abusive practices in the credit card industry - the most affluent and educated CC users, those who would be likely to lead an effective campaign for change, always pay off their bill in full and never deal with the CC industry's abusive practices. So it goes with TurboTax - if you give consumers an out, their much more likely to blame themselves (or blame the people caught up in it) when they're taken advantage of.

"with little complaint from consumers" -- how do you know there isn't a great deal of complaint?

"I don’t understand why consumers are not more frustrated." -- they are extremely frustrated, why do you think they're not frustrated?

Switched from TurboTax to FreeTaxUSA four years ago. Same product with a cleaner interface and far less expensive. https://www.freetaxusa.com/

I hate Intuit for the reasons mentioned here. I’ll need to choose business accounting software soon and QuickBooks seems have a grip on that market, what are the alternatives I should look at?

Dark patterns are evil, not illegal (usually). And virtually anyone with sufficient political influence to do anything about this uses an actual accountant rather than DIY.

Consumers are frustrated, or at least I am frustrated (eg when they mislead me into upgrading my plan and entering many expenses before learning the standard deduction will still grant me the biggest refund), but I'm vigilant enough to avoid granting them permission to sell my data to Mint and Credit Karma, and the amount of money I could save by going elsewhere is not great enough to make up for the inconvenience of doing my taxes some other way.

Article mentions lots of complaints: https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-intuit-fac...

Between self-doers and people that just give their forms to their accountant lie Turbo-tax customers, at the knowledge minimum.

Is there a consensus on whose software we should be using instead? I get that they're all bad, but which one is least bad?

They pay off a lot of politicians to keep tax filing complicated.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

Are you using online version or Amazon downloadable one? I've been using the latter for 20 years and have never felt like it was being deliberately misleading.

I just say no to everything. I don't even e-file. I still print and mail in my tax form. All the data is stored locally on my computer.

From what I understand (and I could be wrong) they spend a decent amount of money lobbying politicians in Congress.

Customers are very much frustrated though and I believe the Cash app started letting people file taxes for free this year.

Past threads. Get ready for more in April...

Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against It (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185484 - Feb 2022 (18 comments)

Killing TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330584 - March 2021 (662 comments)

Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138446 - Feb 2021 (219 comments)

TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102695 - Feb 2021 (306 comments)

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26060414 - Feb 2021 (199 comments)

FTC Is Investigating Intuit over TurboTax Practices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24409093 - Sept 2020 (194 comments)

IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923220 - Dec 2019 (448 comments)

IRS Tried to Hide Emails That Show Tax Industry Influence over Free File Program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393758 - Oct 2019 (188 comments)

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411 - Oct 2019 (447 comments)

TurboTax to charge more lower-income customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461169 - July 2019 (81 comments)

Congress Scraps Provision to Restrict IRS from Competing with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119916 - June 2019 (18 comments)

TurboTax Uses a “Military Discount” to Trick Troops into Paying to File Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19994118 - May 2019 (42 comments)

Listen to TurboTax Lie to Get Out of Refunding Overcharged Customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870242 - May 2019 (44 comments)

TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19810981 - May 2019 (143 comments)

TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126 - April 2019 (262 comments)

TurboTax Uses Dark Patterns to Trick You into Paying to File Your Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718284 - April 2019 (274 comments)

Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725 - April 2019 (696 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673 - March 2019 (253 comments)

H&R Block and Intuit Lobby Against Free and Simple Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18956883 - Jan 2019 (190 comments)

Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751383 - Aug 2018 (424 comments)

Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16844458 - April 2018 (23 comments)

H&R Block and Intuit Lobbying Against Simpler Tax Filing (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16841449 - April 2018 (232 comments)

H&R Block and Intuit Are Lobbying Against Making Tax Filling Free and Easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922482 - March 2017 (234 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150 - March 2017 (439 comments)

TurboTax Takes Aim at Smaller Rival in Fight for Filers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11150694 - Feb 2016 (87 comments)

Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381437 - April 2015 (150 comments)

Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380232 - April 2015 (124 comments)

Filing taxes: It shouldn't be so hard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488084 - April 2013 (56 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203 - March 2013 (330 comments)

Because We The People lack the will to demand a tax code that is other than a Byzantine train wreck.

For the 21st century, this system needs a total re-write.

Because power protects itself. And dark patterns work. Customers are frustrated and angry, and they feel powerless to do anything about it.

Idk. I just give them my info and TurboTax navigates the labyrinth that is the U.S. Tax Code. I was actually pleasantly surprised with how easy TT made things. Maybe it's bad that TT gives my info to third parties, but arguing against the practice is fighting an uphill battle because it requires listing a bunch of hypotheticals.

When it comes to taxes, I simply don't care as long as someone can tell me how much I owe!

I’d love to see Intuit file Chapter eleven.

Remember there are boomers still paying other boomers 100-1000s of dollars to prepare their taxes for them. That and regulatory capture.

They lost our business about five years ago because of them