[threezero]

Why would you say the impact on low-income people was unintentional? Do you think that Intuit would release a tax product without an analysis of who it would affect? It feels like you’re giving Intuit the benefit of the doubt here when numerous sources, including Intuit employees, say that Intuit deliberately set out to increase revenue at the expense of lower income taxpayers.

[basseq]

I'm quoting the article:

> “They were always supposed to be customer focused, customer first,” one former staffer said. But the income levels of the groups that were being driven to paid products “was never really considered.”

Where's the numerous sources that said Intuit deliberately set out to increase revenue at the [disproportionate] expense of lower income taxpayers (emphasis mine)?

[freeeee]

This is basic logic.

The "Freefile" product is only supposed to be free for lower income people, so when Intuit misdirected everybody to the (non-free) product which they named "Free", they exclusively harmed lower income people, as the higher income people were never entitled to free filing.

(that entitlement is due to an agreement with the IRS, where the IRS agreed to limit competition in the tax filing industry in return for the development of free file products).

edit: also note that it is absolutely not an accident that Intuit used these names which make it almost impossible to talk about their non-free product which is named Free, and their actually free product which is named Freedom and Freefile.

[basseq]

That's a good point, and a valid one, but not the central thesis of THIS article. (ProPublica has previously written articles on that.[1])

[1] "But, as ProPublica has been reporting, Intuit has steered eligible customers away from the truly free version, aggressively marketing products that are called “free” even though many customers end up paying."