Here’s What TurboTax’s Boss Doesn’t Want You to Hear

TurboTax’s parent company Intuit has stepped in it after its CEO Sasan Saeedi got into a somewhat confrontational exchange during an interview with The Verge for its Decoder podcast.

Saeedi was pressed by the outlet’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel over Intuit’s efforts to prevent a simplification of tax filing in the United States. It’s a pretty obvious thing to ask about: Intuit is one of the most notorious lobbyists in Washington because of its efforts over the years to prevent tax filing from becoming simpler and cheaper.

Following the interview, however, Intuit’s head of communications contacted The Verge to ask that the testy exchange be cut from the interview, or otherwise heavily edited to make it seem less confrontational, such as by removing portions where they are talking over one another. 

Here’s one excerpt from the controversial exchange (Patel’s comments bolded): 

Are you going to lobby to change the tax system to let the government do a filing for you and send people checks?

If government wants to change the tax system —

But I’m asking you, you’re spending the dollars, would you lobby for it?

Lobby for the government changing the tax system?

The simplest version of the tax system would be to just have the government do it and send people their refunds or ask people for money.

I have more important things to do than to lobby the government to send a tax bill.

But you have lobbied against that. That’s what I’m saying. That reporting is clear. You’ve lobbied against… Intuit, it is not you. Intuit has lobbied against that very specifically.

Well, I am Intuit, right? And so it’s okay to put me and Intuit in the same verse. We have very much focused on simplifying taxes. That’s what we lobbied for: simplify the tax code. That’s simply what we’ve lobbied for.

Any outside observer can understand that the request to cut this interview portion would only draw more attention to that section of the interview. It’s really the only thing people will likely take away from the interview now, even though it’s only a small portion of the episode and Saeedi’s responses weren’t terrible. He effectively said that TurboTax is always looking to raise awareness of its free product, and that it won’t lobby to eliminate tax filing entirely because why would it?

The head of communications for a $171 billion company should know that this request was a bad idea, and The Verge published an article specifically about the situation. Sometimes tougher questions feel more contentious than they actually are. But for readers, the interview probably feels more genuine and relatable with that back-and-forth exchange that hasn’t been smoothed over or approved by a public relations team trying to make its CEO look good. It’s too heavy-handed. And running TurboTax as CEO is Saeedi’s entire day-to-day job, he should be able to handle some questions about its practices. 

For a little more context, TurboTax partnered with the IRS years ago to make free tax filing software available to low-income Americans, in a sort of goodwill gesture intended to maintain the current tax filing regime. Intuit, of course, does not want all tax filing to be automated away as TurboTax is one of its most profitable offerings. But it was ostensibly willing to make filing free for low-income Americans so it could continue to charge upper-class and small business customers. 

Unfortunately, any goodwill Intuit may have earned was thrown out when it was discovered the company tried to deceive the American public through a technical sleight of hand. It famously got slapped with a major fine in 2022 after reporting found Intuit was using robots.txt files to prevent Google from indexing links to its truly free product, instead sending low-income consumers through the funnel to a paid offering. After that, the IRS basically threw up its hands and decided to make its own software. 

Intuit has been strongly opposed to the IRS making its own software for free tax filing. The company spent $3.8 million in 2023 lobbying against the IRS’s Direct File software, which was made available for the first time in 2024 in a limited number of states. For now, the software is limited to lower-income Americans who do not have complicated taxes. 

Early on the in year, Intuit sent a scathing statement to OpenSecrets about Direct File:

“Direct File is not free tax preparation, but rather a thinly veiled scheme where billions of taxpayer dollars will be unnecessarily used to pay for something already completely free of charge today — free to the taxpayer and actually free for the government,” Intuit’s spokesperson Tania Mercado told OpenSecrets, emphasizing that the program “could end up wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.”

The software that’s “already completely free of charge today” is, of course, TurboTax. But Intuit is not a charitable organization, there’s a reason it offers free tax filing to some Americans. It’s a cover to continue a regime of charging others for tax preparation when what everyone really wants is free, automated filing. Anyone who’s worked a regular 9-5 job understands that the IRS knows how much you make anyway. Just automate it already.