I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself.<p>So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway.<p>This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful.<p>If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
> If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.<p>This isn't actually about AI. it's just classic human psychology.<p>You’ve had a rock-solid workflow for 25 years, so it makes total sense to be cautious and reject features you don't need.<p>Right now, keeping it at "arm's length" and "read-only" feels safe. But that's usually just phase one. Once that initial trust is established, those boundaries naturally start to melt away. Give it a couple of tax seasons, and you’ll probably find yourself wanting it to take on more of the heavy lifting.
I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software.<p>If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like <a href="https://www.freetaxusa.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.freetaxusa.com/</a>.
Why are other outlets quoting the CEO as having said that the layoffs have "nothing to do with AI"? Is TC distinguishing between using AI versus building AI products?<p>> "None of it had to do with AI," Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." "Everything was about how do we become more effective."<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/intuit-ceo-says-companys-17percent-workforce-cut-had-nothing-to-do-with-ai.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/intuit-ceo-says-companys-17p...</a>
The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.
Boy, do I have bad news for you.<p>Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely <i>not</i> deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.
It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean <i>this</i> except for this case law that says it can also mean <i>that</i> when these other circumstances apply, and...<p>These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written.<p>If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know?<p>"This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.
Trying to treat law as code-in-English-form is going to lead you horribly astray, however.<p>The behavior of C code is something that we can, in principle, reduce to semantics in a formal model we know how to describe the behavior of. Now, there's some issues getting there--the specification is more ambiguous than we'd like, and there's definitely certain behaviors that are very challenging to incorporate in a formal model (say, signal handlers). But even something like UB is something that we have good, well-understand models of what exactly it means to hit UB. At the end of the day, whether or not C code is correct, whether or not the compiler is correctly compiling the C code, is a question that has a clearly objective answer.<p>Law doesn't work like that. Laws are written and interpreted with the understanding that there is flexibility in the mater. If you compute the law and get an absurd result, then people are going to shrug and throw out the absurd result; rather different it is to a compiler where the absurdity is accepted as correct. As a result, there's not really an objective answer to whether or not something is legal, to understanding what will happen in a legal case, like there is to code.
> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place<p>> These things are knowable<p>There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined.<p>Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions.<p>Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and appeals courts / state supreme courts can rule quite inconsistently.<p>That’s by definition not just undefined behavior but also non-deterministic results.
I know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time.<p>I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare!<p>The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.
I use to think that. I'm capable of putting numbers in a form correctly. A good tax preparer can point out things like "did you know that your specific commuting pattern entitles you to claim mileage?", or "the law says the way you have your working environment set up at home means you can deduct some of your utility bills", and so on ad infinitum.<p>Basically, unless you get someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, if your tax situation is non-trivial (see my post above this) then you might be leaving money on the table. It's a terrible, idea to evade taxes. It's a fantastic idea to realize when you're paying more than you're legally required to so that you can fix it.
The IRS's fillable forms do a perfectly fine job of copying values around and doing the basic arithmetic that they can automate.
No, that's Intuit lobbying.
That’s a true side fact, but that has nothing to do with how the software behaves once you input your answers.
I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”<p>When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.<p>I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
Ultimately, taxes is just filling out a spreadsheet and doing basic math... but the hard part of taxes is understanding how to fill out that spreadsheet correctly. Doing that requires answering several questions that many tax filers may simply not have the background to understand--I'm always struck whenever answering the question about "do you need to correct your W-2?" is how would I know when the answer is "yes." I can see how AI could be helpful here... at least were not AI plagued with hallucinations.<p>That said, Intuit's actual business model is convincing millions of people that their taxes are so complicated they need to spend $60 on a program that is just copy-pasting numbers from one document to another.
You would correct your W2 when the amount you receive wasn't what was reported - this is exceptionally rare.
Nah, Free Fillable Forms paired with ChatGPT (free, not even plus) is adequate for the vast majority of the tax population now and none of it is hard. I expect that 2027 is the last year for the tax preparation software companies to still exist.
Why? What's wrong with some non determism if Intuit foots any mistakes? I am all for AI auto filling taxes where the filer offering takes the burden.
Intuit has a pretty broad financial software portfolio, not just a tax company.<p>Also, yes the actual arithmetic at the end should be handled by deterministic code. I doubt anyone, including Intuit, thinks otherwise. But there's a ton of uses for LLMs before you get to 2+2 = 4, explaining concepts, document extraction, understanding the full financial picture, etc.<p>Kind of feels like you're criticizing a cartoonish idea of AI's place in their products.
Well, if all there QA people have left... Their "pivot" is straight off a cliff. Best of luck.
1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading.<p>2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making judgement calls. However, for something like quickbooks, I can imagine many uses for AI. For example, categorizing expenses, organizing receipts, noticing odd patterns, etc.
this company Intuit is going to train their internal models on your data and other customers too. In order to train useful models in aggregate, they will ingest your very specific PII and you will do "nothing" about it. The entire set of tax paying citizens (almost) are now going to have their financial-legal lives ingested into models you cannot see, cannot use yourself and do not derive income from, IMHO.<p>ps- small caveat to this personal information doomerism is that very wealthy and capable people will have this happen to them and their companies, and that will possibly set off some kid of hardball.
I've been using TurboTax forever, mostly due to laziness.<p>This year they made you take a survey at the end, asking why you're still using boomer desktop software and haven't switched to their totally-not-worse web version. I think the writing is on the wall.<p>If they kill the desktop version of TurboTax, I'm gone. I despise doing taxes in a browser. I'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
I wonder how many windows 10 users discovered freetaxusa.com works as well as turbotax this year (since Intuit doesn't support Windows 10 any more)
Source: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/intuit-cut-17-global-jobs-streamline-operations-memo-shows-2026-05-20/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/intuit-cut-17...</a> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214516">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214516</a>)
Intuit lobbies to keep our complex tax code for the benefit of their revenue. Intuit is a parasite. If they could go ahead and lay off the rest of their workforce and fold it up that would be great.<p>My favorite Intuit experience was hiring one of their ex engineers to convert my QuickBooks file back to the last version that didn’t require a subscription which they intentionally tried to make impossible.<p>Double entry bookkeeping doesn’t need a subscription and their connectors are constantly broken. Fuck Intuit very much.
I think this isn't terrible, actually.<p>If there aren't humans involved in tax filing, the process of moving from private-entities-are-needed-to-do-your-taxes to the-government-can-figure-out-your-taxes becomes politically easier as we won't be taking jobs away from families.<p>We got somewhat close to this ideal before Trump Round 2, so ideally eight years of a more normal admin will be enough.
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