Right, politicians and officials working on behalf of the tax-filing lobby could introduce lots of changes to the tax code with a view to making this software useless.
The point of open sourcing from a dying ship is that the groups that can modify this software and resell it all start from it as a baseline. Is TurboTax all lean mean code available at a low enough price while still meeting profit expectations if it needs drastic changes?
Intuit can spend all the money they can convince investors to lose relative to last year and expectations, but they'll have a yggdrasil of companies to buy out from a turn-key solution and all their costs fighting OMB will amount to nothing if they screw one buyout up and get an updated software drop for a new round of $5 filers.
The companies Intuit will have to buy out don't have to make any profit per filer, they just have to take filers away from Inuit.
I mean… in some sense, it might be nice is the company doing your tax preparation is not too lean and mean, their whole point is to eat the hit if they screw it up, right? The math is not actually hard.
But, realistically, I guess if a self-service tax prep company messed up your taxes, they’d make sure you end up in arbitration.
The form you sign to authorize efiling says "I declare that I have examined a copy of the income tax return ... and to the best of my knowledge and belief, it is true, correct, and complete." If you think Intuit is going to cover you, you haven't really seen the things they do.
