Here in Portugal, tax comes pre calculated from the government on a free web application. It works very well! I just need to do very small adjustments every year before deliver the taxes.

To have the tax code easily dealt with and returns filed by IRS's own software will be a happy day. At that point maybe most of Intuit's employees can find other jobs.

This is so bad, it's funny. But I'd expect no less from Intuit.

So sad! I used it for at least a decade, maybe like 2006-2018 or so. Their Mac desktop software was excellent then, and no Electron tomfoolery or other nonsense. And you could just keep every year's TT app installed in case you wanted to open an old return to amend it or something.

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.

Disclaimer that years ago, I was impressed at how slick the TurboTax website was.

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.

I made the switch to FreeTaxUSA from H&R Block online this year. It was very easy and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You can upload your previous year's PDF from your other software to import the data.

I was forced to use their shitty desktop version inside a Windows VM because I don't have any Windows or Mac machines, and the web version doesn't support married filing federal jointly and state separately.

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.

Some of those layoffs were certainly people supporting dead versions of Windows, and high-touch low-sophistication users with old broken-down computers. At some point, they/you were getting dropped as a customer and, checking the news, now is the time to do that.

(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.)

They did the same with Windows 7 going to 10. (I used to use a containment VM for their products, since they aren't particularly clean installs. I used the same one year after year and was too lazy to update it.) I seem to remember that that check was easy to patch out. (As are several other checks of interest.)

> for no technical reason whatsoever

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

We have an app for that. Would you like me to write a new one?

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.

We don't have one. Are you talking about Direct File? The Trump admin killed it, though it was successfully nerfed from the start anyway by the Intuit and H&R Block lobbyists -- you couldn't even itemize deductions, or have 1099 income.

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)

most are limited to a simple 1040

I just file late every year and there are never any upgrades.