In case you have not read this story, Intuit is heavily lobbying the US federal and state governments to prevent them from allowing tax payers to get -at the end of the year- a pro-forma tax form auto filled with known-by-the-government tax information.
All for free (as it should be) and as it already is in other, with more accountable governments, countries.
Tax authorities at both federal and state levels already have direct and electronic access to the tax forms issued by our employers, banks, schools, brokers, mortgage companies, and so on. So why do we need to use products such as TurboTax? The simple answer is just so that Intuit can make billions of dollars a year, every year.
The idea of government issued tax forms is that, at the end of the tax year, the federal and state governments would provide us with a link to our own personal tax forms filled with the financial information the government already knows and has access to. We would just edit some information -or just accept it as is- and then submit our returns for free, with no hassle and no payment to any third party processors (such as TurboTax or H&R Block).
Certainly Intuit would lose a chunk of change but we would gain the freedom of not having to worry about audits that much since we would use the governments' forms already pre-populated for us. In addition, this would be optional: we use it or not as a choice. And it would be a totally free choice, with no penalties.
How can we trust our government when companies such as Intuit sabotage the political process to appease their own, very private, benefits? Intuit is stealing money from us and there is nothing we can do about that, as the government is complacent to this type of 'transfer'. The government is supposed to serve us and not special interests.
In this case, the federal and state governments are actually a liability to all us when they yield to companies such as Intuit.
Whoever said that governments do not create jobs are total losers.
All TurboTax jobs were/are created by our own politicians. Our politicians misuse the government agencies they oversee to achieve personal gains (basically to help them win elections).
The current state is a win-win for the politicians and Intuit but we are all holding the bag to pay for it. Some think that this is an example of free enterprise. Free exactly for whom, I ask?
No comments:
Post a Comment