Intuit sells TurboTax, an app that does your taxes for you, and lobbies to keep it complicated and difficult to give the government money without its help. After it deceptively marketed its tax-filing services as free of charge, the Federal Trade Commission took it to court and forced it to stop lying. Challenged on this in an interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, CEO Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi was standoffish—a stance followed up by the company demanding that Patel not publish that part of the interview. Naturally, that ended up the most prominently posted part of the interview. It's not quite a trainwreck—just a rentier easily provoked into contemptuous honesty his company doesn't want on the record.
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.
The Verge "declined" to remove that part of the interview, and the contentious discussion around it. You know the line…
