I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself.
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've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software.
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 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.
It's been good for so long I hope it doesn't get popular and go to shit. Free federal return and $15 state return if needed. If Intuit died tomorrow the world would be a better place.
Not for me! I would have to hire an accountant or CPA. Then I would have to spend a lot of time and energy meeting with them and taking their phone calls.
TurboTax occupies a middle ground and it saves me enormous amounts of time.
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.
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.
Same for domestic partners. They push you into their desktop version for some reason, but the desktop version is a buggy pile of trash. I wasn't able to use it at all even on a windows machine. To their credit, they did refund the software without too much of a hassle (I expected a giant fight).
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.
Their website is pretty garbage IMO. Every single click is a spinner image for 1 second while the layout adjusts and fetches data. I’m not certain if this is a react or vue or whatever FE JavaScript thing but it’s extremely prevalent across the web and pretty much completely defeats the purpose of having a SPA design.
TT was/is old-style "slick", like at the time it put my bank to shame in terms of UI. It probably wasn't using a 'popular framework' and if it was, it wasn't a naive implementation. It also was/is optimized for desktop, while many financial corps now only care about mobile. So as of last April, it was still good enough for me.
Was it fast? No. Just fast enough. That's why I doubt the desktop app is really any different. They must have a bunch of API endpoints, and the 'slowness' is all on the backend.
I WAS a happy TurboTax customer for over 33 years, until this year when I used HR Block TaxCut to file my 2025 returns. Intuit insisted that only Windows 11 would be supported, for no technical reason whatsoever. I assume they got a payoff from Microsoft for doing this.
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.
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.)
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.)
Calls to tech support are by accounting defintion. So that makes it easy to draw the line somewhere, and cut off groups of negative-value customers. Its 2026 and times are tough baby.
It's getting tough for shitters with some old ass legacy PC who depend on online services. Hopefully they were smart enough to understand they were living on borrowed time.
edit, also there are government subsided smartphones if you need one.
A bunch of the unsupported PCs aren't even that old.
I bought a Ryzen 5 1600X in 2017, which is noticeably higher performance than the basic tier of processors supported by windows 11, but it's not on the supported list, and you have to bypass the installer to get windows 11 running.
My PCs are modern. I (used to) run TurboTax in a VM. I've got three VMs with different older versions of Windows, that contain about 20 years of Tax data. It's more secure to keep my tax data in VMs that I don't use for anything else. I do have a Windows 11 partition on my PC, but I haven't booted it in over a year, and I have no need to.
I don't think I'll ever need to make a Windows 11 VM.
Cool, a super technical dude like you can just spin a secure Win11 VM to run TurboTax then. You probably have a bash script or something. What are you complaining about.
I mean, sure; you can come up with some kind of justification to call just about anything "a technical reason".
But there's no genuinely technical reason—one you don't have to twist yourself into pretzels over—that fairly ordinary software, working fine on Win11, would not work on Win10.
Easy question because you need to evaluate every dependency for Win10 compatibility, Win10 bugs that MS fixed in Win11, running unsupported Win10 CI somehow, QA testing team for Windows 10 (programmers won't do this)... and on and on.
All for an dead operating system. I guess this works in your basement mind where people work for free or something.
Finally being able to stop paying Intuit $150 every year as a reward for their lobbying against tax code simplification and free e-file is one of the most exciting possibilities for AI imo
I used Claude Code to prepare my personal income tax return this year, and so far the IRS hasn’t come after me.
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.
A lot of people in the UK file their taxes (~12 million, roughly 35% of employed adults, not taking into account those unemployed with assets and pensions), but the self assessment is straightforward and very easy to use.
In my country income taxes are automatically deducted. If you've got a single job and don't own large amounts of properties there's a decent chance your tax bill is exactly €0 and that there's no requirement for you to file.
In the UK tax on interest earned on plain savings accounts isn't deducted at source - so if you have a rainy day pot chances are you're required to register for self assessment and pay tax on it (particularly now that interest rates are higher and it's relatively easy to go above the tax free threshold, which has been frozen for a long time).
If you have investments outside of an ISA (tax free investment wrapper) then same story - you need to report disposals and dividends for tax purposes.
That's before we get into side hustles/self employment and investment properties, etc.
> In the UK tax on interest earned on plain savings accounts isn't deducted at source
Yes, but as you point out you should really be using the ISA wrapper or a pension of some sort for most investments. I suspect most of those doing self assessment will either (a) be in the upper 25% of earners or (b) self-employed (~4.5m people).
It is annoying how the government has chosen to make tax slightly more annoying with "making tax digital" for self-employed people with quarterly reporting.
No, you don't have to. If you are employed through a company, stay below £100K income and don't have other income then (generally) you don't need to do a tax return - it's all handled automatically through pay as you earn payroll. However, as shown, a lot of people are self employed, want to claim deductions, have some side income etc. However, for those that do need to, it is really straightforward.
Until you have to deal with bed and breakfast rules for RSUs. Good luck getting free software to understand that. There are a couple of open source attempts but they are skeleton at best.
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.
In the US every Republican takes the Grover Norquist pledge to always make taxes as salient and as unpleasant as possible. The idea being that it will make voters more anti tax
I wish this were true but they get paid by taxes. Besides, there are few things more unpleasant than having your hard earned money taken away from you, regardless of how it happens. I don't think it takes fancy paperwork to make people oppose it.
Once you get habituated to it, it really is easy. When I was younger I was appalled by how much I was losing to taxes. Now I don't even glance at the line items. All that matters is that the end numbers. Hell, if I didn't need to enroll my kid in school which requires a receipt for property taxes, I wouldn't even know that literally 80% of my local taxes to schooling. My property taxes are pretty invisible to me. I don't file, my bank does. It really puts into frame why when a city gets old, they start cutting taxes and squeezing schools.
If taxes were filed automatically, honestly, I'd pay no attention at all to them, but having to sit once a year an actually look at the amount I paid, does get me to think about taxes and what they go towards, at least a little.
I’d wager the money from lobbies and companies like Intuit more than make up for it.
Also, republics are “anti-tax” in word and pro-tax in practice, as is the American way. When it comes to particularly republicans, anti-tax is code for removing social safety nets. They want taxes if it pays them, or pays the right contractors, or funds the military etc but when those tax dollars could go to social welfare they suddenly think it’s time to trim the fat.
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.
> 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.
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'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years.
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.
"happy", I don't understand how any user can be happy using these tools. Begrudging, maybe. These tools don't even need to exist. The government already knows all it needs to know and just needs your signature and a check. The only reason TurboTax exists is because of lobbying.
I used the IRS free fillable forms this year and it was much easier than I expected, including contractor, investment income, and foreign income declarations.
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)
FreeTaxUSA is pretty close. I live in a no tax state so it is completely free. I think state tax is $15.
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.
> 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)
Most people have W-2/1099 and some real estate deductions. Not hard to beat that in complexity.
Try AMT, controlled foreign corporations, nested K-1s, and 1040X prior year amendments with $100k-$1 million+ pending refunds.
> you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes.
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 suspect a lot of it is to ensure people who are paid in cash have a strong moment where it can be argued that they took significant agency to hide that from the IRS.
“I just clicked yes on the web form.” might not feel as compelling to a jury filling out paper forms and conveniently forgetting my cash-based income. (I suspect the same reason is why you have to carry your luggage a few hundred feet over a line and recheck it when connecting on an international to domestic flight coming into the US: so there is a clear moment when you personally carried your luggage over a line, so if there’s material that wasn’t allowed to come over that line, you’re attached to it when it happened.)
Wow, I've never thought of that before, but that is actually pretty compelling.
It doesn't mean our current way (and the massive private industry scam) is the only and best way, but at least it is some explanation rather than it seeming totally insane.
I've actually had this discussion quite a few times (for someone in a field not at all related to taxes)
Where it gets "complicated" (aka no longer a "one click sign and verify") is when you start adding things that are "nonstandard" - "standard" meaning single w2, standardized deduction, etc. According to Intuit[0] as well as other research[1], only ~40% of US taxpayers follow this format.
This is compared to the 87.7% of surveyed tax administrations[2] (which does include the US) that have the infrastructure to pre-populate basic wage and salary data. The difference is that in countries like Denmark or Sweden, that simple data represents near-100% of what is needed for the vast majority of citizens.
So for example, even if the US might know exactly how much you made on a 1099 (which is freelance, independent contractor, etc), they wouldn't know your expenses.
Oftentimes though, even if you do have these more complicated returns your W2 (which is the "simple" part) can at least be auto-filled. It's just the rest of the stuff the government doesn't necessarily know about.
(note: I'm by no means a tax expert and may be misinterpreting this data)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
That would be nice. I fear the modern system, with Citizens United, SuperPACs etc. seems to have been the final nail in the coffin of that concept though. Especially with the FPTP system preventing third parties. Someone in one of the two parties will win, they're both in the thrall of lobbyists, and even if there was one not taking that money (I think that's becoming more and more rare) the money firehose makes a substantial difference in elections. Hard to see how "we" can do a lot about this. I hate it, but I don't see it changing. And it seems like astroturfing will be easier in future elections than ever before - Now a few million dollars from a billionaire or even from foreign adversaries will be able to generate 'overwhelming groundswells' of completely synthetic public opinion on platforms like TikTok. To me, the result will be an acceleration of the tilt toward buying elections vs. convincing people of your ideas organically.
Unfortunately I tend to agree with you. But, at least we're actually talking about the real problem instead of pointing the finger at Inuit and their lobbyists.
I had a mixed experience with it. I think it has enormous potential but it needs to be more deeply integrated with their system (while staying read only by default, as you said).
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.