Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
Bad web-design is a choice.
The Child Tax Credit is a seriously good piece of policy, in which America’s poorest families are eligible for $2–3k/year in subsidies, a move projected to cut American child poverty in half.
There’s one problem: the IRS has no idea how to reach America’s poorest families.
Many of the people eligible for CTC don’t file tax returns and even if they did, they’d have no contact with the IRS, because the tax-prep monopoly killed all attempts to create a “free file” system where the IRS sends you a prefilled return with the info they already have.
When I say “sabotaged,” I’m not speaking hyperbolically. The tax-prep industry, led by Intuit, led the fight for 20 years, with their cultlike leader Brad Smith at the forefront of a bribery and intimidation campaign.
Intuit worked with its co-monopolists to develop a private sector “free file” program that was supposed to offer free tax-prep services to the poorest Americans, but it was a con.
The company developed a sophisticated dark-patterns storefront to trick Americans into paying for the service they promised to provide for…
