I cannot see how Turbotax survives the oncoming AI Coding freight train. All the information is out there.

An accountant does our taxes now, but up until a decade or so ago I was always impressed that I could file taxes and all necessary forms, for myself and my small business with dozens of employees, all using the $25 version of TurboTax.

It's been popular to dump on TurboTax for several years now, but I had a great experience using it.

I personally don't trust AI enough to say "here's my data, please do my taxes for me" yet, but you're right, I suppose that is just a matter of time...

Will not shed any tears if Turbotax doesn't make it.

1. Commercial lobby: Intuit/TT, tax preparers, firms that benefit from confusion

2. Political/ideological lobby (less today but still a factor): Grover Norquist railed against return-free filing (using the data they’ve got government sends you a number to pay, if you pay it you are 100% done with taxes no takebacks.)

Commercial lobby is an irritant but the “ideological” one is the most annoying and difficult to surmount.

Norquist & his camp says the government/IRS has fundamental conflict of interest as the collector and enforcer and taxpayers won’t bother to correct government calculation mistakes on their taxes. If there’s a real appeal process doing all the old-school recordkeeping there probably wouldn’t ever be a shortage of taxpayers eager to challenge/contest and file with their own paperwork.

Norquist and friends need taxes to remain a PITA & have high hassle factor for their fundraising and advocacy efforts. If taxes are too easy these people won’t have much political purchase railing against how annoying/$$ it is to pay taxes.

Idk anything substantive about tax policy (ie who should pay what share, best use of $$, etc I’ll leave to the “professionals”/political system) but just as an end user who uses tax prep services it sure seems like there is a concerted effort by people economically & ideologically incentivized to make taxes as annoying as possible

- https://atr.org/senate-conservatives-speak-against-return-fr...

- https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california...

- https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

[delayed]

It's not like the tax code was secret, or like their application isn't a pile of dogshit.

They survived and will survive based on marketing.