For nearly three decades, a cold war has raged through the halls of Congress and in high-end shellfish restaurants perched precariously on Washington, D.C.’s southern coast. The battle lines have shifted between successive administrations, sometimes tilting toward proletariat victory, and sometimes cutting fast toward total surrender to corporate America.
This month, thanks to the whims of the president and hefty sums of cash, Donald Trump has amended an old axiom to guarantee that nothing in life is certain but death, and paying money to file your taxes.
According to a report by the Associated Press this week, the IRS is moving to shut down its free tax filing program known as Direct File, with employees working on the program told to stall work on future iterations. The news comes after Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and the biggest player in tax preparation software, spent years tirelessly fighting any attempt by the government to bring the nightmarish American system of tax collection into line with European nations that have streamlined most citizens’ filing process down to the click of a button.
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Even when the Biden administration broke through in the Inflation Reduction Act to fund a pilot program for Direct File, which expanded to 25 states this tax season, Intuit didn’t stop fighting. Instead, it continued cajoling lawmakers and the White House into forcing millions of Americans to shell out hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars to file with expensive and confusing tax prep software.
A glance at Intuit’s 2025 first-quarter lobbying disclosures gets at this continued, quarter-century saga. The company shelled out $240,000 to lobby members of Congress on tax-related issues. Forty thousand dollars was doled out to Raffaniello & Associates to curry favor on issues like “Tax Administration & tax system integrity” and “Regulation of tax return preparers.” It also lobbied on implementation of Public Law 117-169, which is the statute that created IRS Direct File.
Jake Perry + Partners received $30,000 to lobby on the same issues, including personal outreach to Elon Musk’s lackeys in Congress. According to the firm’s filing, at least part of that money was spent on “Communications with DOGE Caucus members regarding tax simplification, waste, fraud and abuse.”
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, a law firm targeted with legal sanction by the Trump administration for employing special counsel Robert Mueller, received $60,000 for its work on behalf of Intuit. Its services included advocacy to “Enhance tax administration and tax system integrity” and “support tax simplification and voluntary compliance.” WilmerHale is suing the Trump administration over attacks on their firm, while also cozying up to Republicans to make tax filing more expensive. Money talks.
Intuit shelled out $240,000 to lobby members of Congress on tax-related issues in the first quarter of 2025.
This work has paid off. In December, 29 House Republicans wrote to then-President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago, asking him to end Direct File on day one. A report from Public Citizen showed that these lawmakers have received $1.8 million in campaign contributions from opponents of Direct File over their political careers.
The relatively paltry first-quarter lobbying sum pales in comparison to the big kahuna spend that Intuit made last year: a direct payment to Trump’s inaugural committee. As Politico reported in December, Intuit handed Trump $1 million for inaugural festivities that were eventually sent indoors due to bad weather. This was a common bribe-like substance from corporate America intended to show fealty to Washington’s new overlords.
A company spokesperson told Politico that the donation was “part of our decades-long commitment to bipartisan advocacy … Intuit is committed to ensuring our customers’ voices are heard on important issues, and our expanded participation in the democratic process reflects our growth as a company and the variety of policy issues that impact the approximately 100 million diverse consumers and businesses we serve.”
“Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump and Vice President @JDVance on your inauguration,” Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who made $27 million last year, tweeted on January 21st. “We encourage Washington to promote innovation to strengthen small businesses that are the backbone of the economy and to simplify the tax code to help Americans prosper.”
Intuit certainly knew the importance of persuading Trump to ditch the IRS free filing program. In its quarterly financial statement to investors, Intuit listed among its risk factors “increasing competition from the public sector,” specifically IRS Direct File, which “could expand with increased awareness of and government support for the program … federal and state governments are or could become publicly funded direct competitors of the U.S. tax services industry and of Intuit. Government funded services that curtail or eliminate the role of taxpayers in preparing their own taxes could potentially have material and adverse revenue implications on us.”
They should have been scared. Customer satisfaction with Direct File was high, with over 90 percent of users ranking it as excellent or above average in surveys.
In 2019, ProPublica published an extensive investigation into Intuit’s efforts to safeguard a business model it long marketed as consumer-friendly, despite the millions of dollars lifted off of everyday Americans attempting to file their taxes on time. Intuit focused on carrying out two simultaneous objectives to ensure a maximum windfall: “stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington.” In a confidential document obtained by ProPublica, Intuit outlines the maneuvers it undertook from 1997 to 2006 to block any attempt at making tax filing cheaper and easier for consumers. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” the title slide reads.
Since 2002, Intuit and other tax preparation services have been legally required to offer a free private-sector version of what the government should have built and provided all along. But Intuit’s playbook has been to create a booby-trapped version of its expensive software, with embedded code that once hid the free offering from search engines like Google, making it exceedingly difficult for those seeking free filing to discover.
In 2023, Intuit was forced to pay out over $100 million in a multistate class action lawsuit that accused the firm of tricking customers into overpaying for services that the firm is legally required to offer for free. 4.4 million consumers nationwide received checks as the result of the multistate settlement. “By requiring consumers to pay for tax-return services that should have been available for free, Intuit cheated taxpayers out of their hard earned money,” then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry said at the time. “Intuit’s deceptive practices and aggressive advertising campaign were unnecessary and illegal; especially when the IRS offers free tax-return services for eligible consumers.”
On April 15, tax filing day, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), long a sworn foe of for-profit tax filing companies, slammed the Trump administration for its failures to simplify the filing process.
“Despite Treasury Secretary Bessent’s promise to keep Direct File going through the 2025 tax filing season, the long-term future of the program continues to be threatened, in no small part due to Intuit’s lobbying,” Warren wrote. “Intuit has spent nearly $4 million in 2023 and again in 2024 attempting to kill the program. During the 2024 election cycle, Intuit joined other commercial tax preparation companies to make large donations to Republican congressmembers who later worked to eliminate Direct File.”
Yet after tens of millions in lobbying, hundreds of millions in lawsuits, and a cool million for Trump’s inauguration, it seems that Intuit’s ceaseless spending has paid off.
