The Free Edition routed some filers to a version of TurboTax that charged them a fee based on which tax forms they had to file. The case centered on customers who had to pay after starting the filing process using TurboTax’s Free Edition.Īt the time, TurboTax maintained the heavily advertised Free Edition alongside a similarly named Free File product. “Intuit was at all times clear and fair with its customers,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica, adding that it “not only did not hide free filing options from consumers, Intuit helped drive the adoption of free tax prep by helping more people file their taxes free of charge than all other online tax prep providers combined.”įollowing ProPublica’s initial stories, Intuit was first sued in May 2019 in federal court. It stresses that millions of people do file their taxes for free using TurboTax each year. Intuit has vigorously defended its practices, denying any wrongdoing in each case. The law firm pursuing Intuit, Keller Lenkner of Chicago, has generated attention for successfully using the strategy on behalf of delivery workers for DoorDash and Postmates. The tactic is akin to using guerilla warfare rather than having soldiers mass on the battlefield and face each other in lines. The so-called mass-arbitration tactic was pioneered in recent years as the legal terrain became less friendly to class-action lawsuits, the traditional tool used to recover money for consumers through the court system. The most unusual front in the fight is the strategy to bring tens of thousands of individual consumer claims in arbitration, the alternative to the public court system that has historically been considered friendly to business. Besides the huge number of consumer claims that have been filed, federal regulators and state-level prosecutors are also advancing efforts against the deep-pocketed company, which made $2 billion last year.
0 kommentar(er)
