Have You Paid Your “Intuit Tax”?

Oligarchs have hidden levers to impose private taxes on the rest of us. They use their wealth and clout to snuff out competition and protect their subsidized monopoly to charge you fees and increase their wealth. In this case, the private tax lever is your tax preparation, the imposition of an “Intuit Tax.”

Meet Sasan Goodarzi, the oligarch who in 2025 blocked your ability to access free and simple tax preparation and filing services. Goodarzi, the CEO of Intuit (including TurboTax, Credit Karma, and MailChimp) has just effectively raised your costs.

According to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, US taxpayers will spend roughly $148 billion preparing their taxes—not counting the average 13 hours of prep time amounting to $316 billion in lost productivity in 2024. Hiring a professional CPA to prepare a modest return can cost between $220 and $800.

Imagine a system that is free, with a simple user-friendly online interface where you can enter data, save, and file your return. Or like the systems in most other industrialized countries, where you receive a draft tax return pre-populated with your reported data that you can amend, reject, or file. (However, a simplified tax code is required for these kinds of systems.)

We were almost there, until recently a few “tax prep” oligarchs like Sasan Goodarzi intervened to kill it. Noa Rosinplotz from the Roosevelt Institute observed, “The Trump administration has gutted the IRS and handed the tax filing system back to the companies that profit from making you waste time and money filing your taxes.”

At the dawn of the new century, President George W. Bush moved to upgrade government technologies. He pressed the Office of the Management and Budget and the Department of Treasury to agree to provide “easier, secure, and free opportunities for Americans to file their taxes via the Internet.”

Brad Smith, then CEO of Intuit, understood the existential threat to TurboTax if the US government made tax preparation simple and free for most citizens. In 2019 ProPublica exposed Intuit’s 20-year lobbying effort to eliminate the “public option” for tax preparation. “This was seen as a low-cost, high-payoff initiative,” said Mark Forman, the Bush era official in charge of “e-government” initiatives in 2002. Blocking the way, he told ProPublica two decades later, was an industry “that lives off the complexity of the tax code.”

Intuit successfully fended off the creation of a public free option by agreeing to offer a free-edition option at TurboTax. But as ProPublica later exposed, the free option offered by Intuit was hard to access by design and misled consumers into sometimes paying for TurboTax, even when the service was supposed to be free.

In a 2019 video intended for Intuit employees, new CEO Goodarzi confirmed the accuracy of ProPublica’s reporting that Intuit deliberately hid the TurboTax Free Edition option from its search engine. “To avoid confusion between the IRS Free File program and our own free product,” Goodarzi told colleagues, “we also decided to have the landing page for the IRS product we offer not rank in search results.”

In 2022, TurboTax agreed to pay a $141 million settlement for “unfairly” charging low-income TurboTax customers who should have received the free service. An estimated 4.4 million taxpayers who paid for TurboTax between 2016 and 2018, when the filing software should have been free, were eligible for a settlement payment.