TurboTax: Hidden Free File Pages, $11M Lobbying and a $141M Settlement

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TurboTax began in 1984 as a product of Michael A. Chipman's ChipSoft and was sold to Intuit in 1993, where it outpaced H&R Block's software and TaxAct. Its reach showed in 2009, when Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner told the Senate he had used TurboTax on returns that left him owing over $42,000 in self-employment taxes from his International Monetary Fund years, and Intuit answered that the software only calculates from what users enter. Under the IRS Free File program, the IRS agreed not to build its own free online filing system, and Intuit agreed to offer genuinely free filing to people under income limits that ranged from about $39,000 to $72,000.

In 2019 ProPublica reported that Intuit added noindex and nofollow tags that hid its Free File page from search engines and steered filers to products marketed as free that charged for state returns at the end, along with a military discount that charged service members who qualified to file for nothing. Between 2008 and 2012 Intuit spent over $11 million lobbying against return-free filing, while its 2012 10-K called government encroachment a continued competitive threat. In May 2022 it agreed to a $141 million settlement that sent $30 to $85 checks to 4.4 million users, the FTC ordered its misleading ads stopped in early 2024, and Intuit shut down its free TurboTax service by March 2024.

• In 2003 TurboTax copy protection wrote to sector 33 of users' hard drives, leaving some computers unable to boot.
• A 2008 charge of $9.95 to print or e-file each extra return from desktop software was rescinded by December.
• In 2015 Intuit removed Schedule C, D, E and F interview support from the Deluxe version and apologized twice.
• In 2021 some stimulus payments went to temporary accounts set up to collect TurboTax fees, leaving users unable to reach the money.
• In 2025 Global News in Canada reported that TurboTax calculated an Ontario childcare credit using only the lower-earning spouse's income.