Sen. Warren pushes TurboTax for answers about its efforts to block free tax filing

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

As millions of Americans file their income taxes online today, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is demanding answers from the company that makes the product.

Warren wrote to Goodarzi, saying that the company had used lobbying and influence peddling to prevent Americans from filing their taxes online.

The FTC filed suit against Intuit for deceptive marketing, an action Warren calls welcome and long overdue.

Many of Warren's complaints center on the Free File program, an IRS partnership with a nonprofit coalition of tax prep companies founded in 2003 to provide free tax services to low-income filers. Under the terms of the partnership, 2021, filers with an adjusted gross income of $73,000 or less are eligible for the services, which are listed on the IRS website.

ProPublica reports showed that H&R Block had misled Free File-eligible filers into paying to file their taxes. According to ProPublica, the companies made the free versions of their software difficult to find. The Free File program was left by Intuit.

The Free File program has been a failure and has been scamming taxpayers into paying for services that should be free, according to the letter from Sen. Warren to Goodarzi.

A request for comment from the company was not responded to.

Warren points to a March 31st report from OpenSecrets, which found that former government officials, including members of Congress, were employed by Intuit in its lobbying efforts. According to the data, the corporate political action committee gave donations to both Democrats and Republicans. The company spent millions of dollars on lobbying.

Theevolving door problem in enforcement is a problem that Warren notes in his letter. The company hired Jon Leibowitz, the former FTC chair, to defend itself from an FTC complaint, which raises conflict of interests concerns, according to a recent court filing. Leibowitz was found to be one of dozens of former FTC officials with potential revolving door conflicts.