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> "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...
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.
vs.
> Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money."
Reality vs. PR BS
FTFGoodarzi
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 have found almost every single chat experience to be lousy and hurting the brand/product...
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 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.
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 desktop version seems like a webapp embedded inside browser frame; I don't understand why they can't make it available on the web.
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.
In the UK almost nobody needs to "file their takes" and if you do you just do it online without the need for software.
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.
(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.)
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
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 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.
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)
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.
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 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.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
This is the primary reason that Americans hate paying their taxes.
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.
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.
>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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
So profits are up 50% YOY and the CEO got a $30M package, but they're cutting 3000 employees.
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.
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.
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.