Damn it, the unbelievable greed. I have been using Intuit software since the early nineties - it is good software for small businesses, easy to learn, but can be used for some very complicated situations. I have used it to keep track of the freelance work I do, and record the business transactions of a long time client. I have been using Turbotax for about 10 years for my personal income taxes - it is software that I like using, rather bug-free considering the complexity of the tax code it is dealing with. So while I like the product, I am extremely pissed about what they did this year. And based on an email I got from the General Manager of the "Turbotax Team", I was not alone. The gritty details follow below the orange croissant.
My freelance income is reported on Schedule C. Previously this was always available in the basic version of Turbotax. This year, support for this schedule has suddenly been moved to the most expensive version of Turbotax. And if you have just one non-retirement account stock sale you now need to "upgrade" to the intermediate version for another $30 bucks.
Following is some of the email I received from Intuit:
We messed up. We made a change this year to TurboTax desktop software and we didn't do enough to communicate this change to you as proactively and broadly as we could or should have. I am very sorry for the anger and frustration we may have caused you.
Wow, I would love to see some of the flaming emails they must have received to warrant full-blown corporation public relations verbage!
you may now be required to upgrade the version of TurboTax you use even though your tax situation hasn't changed from last year.
Are you fracking kidding me!?!
Here's why we made the change. Over the years, we have worked hard to make it easy for you to choose the TurboTax product that is right for you and your unique tax situation. We want that choice to be clear and confidence inspiring. However, as new online and mobile technologies emerged, our products, and the tax scope and features they included, began to differ, leading to customer confusion. These differences also impeded our ability to introduce new innovations across our entire product line.
Following this is more marketing gobbledygook about how the changes will be better for their customers. And how they are really, really sorry (about assuming we wouldn't react to their nearly theft-like dramatic price increases).
BULLSHIT! As far as I am concerned, Intuit has now gone beyond being a company that prospered by selling good software products at reasonable prices, and has become another greedy corporation. In our wonderful economy where middle class wages have been stagnate for more than ten years, more and more people are doing freelance work in addition to their full time jobs, or maybe because they can't find a full-time job. And like the good citizens they are, they are reporting their income and paying taxes on it. Intuit, an already very profitable company, has decided to increase profits by coming up with an excuse to squeeze another $30 or $40 out of a vast cohort of their returning customers. This is a more than 60% increase in the product that is just the same as last year. Or would have been if they hadn't snipped out a bunch of last year's code and replaced it with warnings that you need to upgrade. Capitalism at it best!
Sorry, I don't believe their product costs have increased this much, and you know their employees aren't getting 40% raises. This is a corporation in the modern model, and all profits go to the top. Sasan Goodarzi, whose name is appended to the damage control email, sold 12,000 shares last September for $985,000. You can bet he didn't pay a dime for these shares, and the tax code has been rigged so he won't be paying the same percentage on this income that the majority of us do. (Hat tip to Warren Buffet.) This is just a another example of how the wealth of the middle class is skimmed, dollar by dollar, into the coffers of those who already have more than they could spend in several lifespans.
Your local small business owner, they need to have happy, repeat customers, they can't treat you this way. But the large corporation with a customer base numbering in the millions, what's a few hundred thousand angry customers? I doubt Mr. Goodarzi had to take any phone calls from extremely pissed off Turbotax users. Unfortunately the employees who had to field those calls had nothing to do with the decision to redesign software with the primary intent of squeezing more money out their customers.
Intuit is offering returning customers who are forced into the upgrade a $25 refund after you complete and file your return. This merely delays the excessive customer gouging for one year. Next year you will pay the full price, although I expect the various versions will all have another price bump, just because they can get away with it.
I may be able to avoid the upgrade by ditching the "Interview" interface and diving directly into the forms themselves, but I won't know for sure until I am done and run the error check function in the last step before filing. Wish me luck!