Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, spent a record $3.72 million lobbying last year to kill the IRS’s new free tax filing tool. Now, House Republicans are delivering, with a plan to dismantle the program that helps people file their taxes at no cost.
Section 112207 of the House Ways and Means Committee’s portion of the reconciliation bill would eliminate Direct File, the IRS’s new in-house system that lets eligible taxpayers in 25 states file their taxes online for free. Instead, the bill would establish a “public-private partnership between the IRS and private sector tax preparation services,” effectively outsourcing the program to the private companies that have been lobbying against it.
Intuit’s lobbying continued surging into 2025, with a record more than $1.2 million spent in the first three months, its largest quarterly spending ever. The lobbyists’ filings only disclose their lobbying activities in broad terms, but several Intuit lobbyists targeted “Implementation of P.L. 117-169,” the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that funded the Direct File system. The company also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
