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by alew1 1962 days ago
I've always been under the IRS Free File income threshold (I've worked as a high school teacher and am now in grad school), but last year after reading this article was the first time I actually filed for free. That was after 5 years of paying for deluxe TurboTax.

I had heard the government required TurboTax to have a free edition. But back in 2019 (and before), if you Googled "TurboTax free" you'd be taken to a decoy free edition; the real one was called their "freedom edition," and was hidden from Google's listings. If your tax situation is 'too complicated,' the free edition tries to upsell you to the "deluxe edition," even if the "freedom edition" could have handled the situation just fine.

Thankfully now you can find the actual free version on Google, but it's still very confusing that the "free edition" is less free than the (still somewhat hidden) IRS Free File ("freedom") version. And the faux Free Edition is still being heavily advertised.
3 comments
divbzero 1962 days ago
Good for you. I’ve made an effort to avoid TurboTax for similar reasons, just can’t stand the thought of giving money to a company that lobbies to keep our taxes complicated. Spreadsheet, PDF, and snail mail have worked fine for me so far but I would eagerly welcome a saner tax system.

For anyone else looking to stop paying Intuit, the IRS provides an intro and links to their official Free File options. [1]

[1]: https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...

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vidarh 1962 days ago
Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj did a segment on this, and also set up a site to link to the real free programs of various companies. It's here:

https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/

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rwmurrayVT 1961 days ago
It would be nice if that was the top of the search results or had a near limitless budget to be at the top when searching "turbo tax".
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segfaultbuserr 1962 days ago
> if you Googled "TurboTax free" you'd be taken to a decoy free edition; the real one was called their "freedom edition,"

TurboTax sounds like Free Software Foundation's evil twin... "When we speak of freedom, it's a matter of price, not liberty. You should think of freedom as in free beer, not free speech!"

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