Today’s episode, well — it’s a ride. I’m talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who’s built Intuit into a juggernaut business software company in part through a series of major acquisitions: TurboTax, MailChimp, CreditKarma, and loads more. There’s a lot of good Decoder material there, and we get into it. But it’s TurboTax, and the company’s tax lobbying efforts to protect it, that really drives a major narrative about Intuit, for better and worse. So you can bet I asked Sasan about all this, and it got a bit contentious. In fact, the company's chief communications officer even demanded we delete a portion of this interview over an exchange with Sasan on TurboTax. Don’t worry — we don’t do that here at The Verge. So expect to hear that section right up top, with the rest of the interview following after. Links: Inside TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free| ProPublica TurboTax deliberately hid free file page from Google Search | ProPublica TurboTax maker Intuit spent millions in record lobbying blitz | OpenSecrets FTC: Intuit’s “free” TurboTax ads misled consumers | The Verge TurboTax isn’t allowed to say it’s ‘free’ anymore | The Verge Intuit owes you money if it made you pay for TurboTax “free” | The Verge IRS extends its Free File tax program for five more years | The Verge IRS Direct File set to expand availability in a dozen new states | IRS Mint is shutting down, and it’s pushing users toward Credit Karma | The Verge Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on Decoder | Decoder Ethics Statement | The Verge Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24037861 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today's episode, it's a ride. I'm talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Ghadarzi, who's built Intuit into a juggernaut business software company through a series of major acquisitions.
You're probably familiar with Quicken and QuickBooks, which are incredibly well-known as personal finance and small business accounting software, but nearly everything else, TurboTax, MailChimp, Credit Karma, loads more, were acquisitions of some kind along the way. That leads to a lot of challenging structure questions that Sasan and I really got into.
Integrating all of those companies and their different approaches to software requires big decisions, and Intuit made a big decision of handling it all by betting on interoperability that I found fascinating. So far, that sounds like normal decoder stuff, right? Here's where it got weird. I couldn't have the CEO of Intuit on the show without asking about tax reform in the United States.
Individual income taxes are more complicated in the US than in almost any other developed economy, and Intuit has been lobbying hard since the 1990s to keep it that way in order to protect TurboTax. The company spent nearly $3.8 million lobbying in 2023 alone. There's extensive reporting about all this. We'll link to it in the show notes. That lobbying has had mixed results.
Truly free online direct filing with the IRS began as a pilot program this year, and it's expanding to be available for more than half of the US population in 2025. But it's not just lobbying.
In 2022, a coalition of all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141 million settlement that required the company to refund low-income Americans who were eligible for free filing, but were redirected to Intuit's paid products. And in 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax's, quote, free marketing was willfully deceptive.
And after the agency won an appeal earlier this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing it. So I asked about taxes, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It's Decoder. We have exchanges like this on the show all the time, and in the moment, I didn't think anything of it.
But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer into it, who called that line of questioning, and my tone, inappropriate, egregious, and disappointing, and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally, he wrote a long email that ended with, quote, at the very least, the end portion of your interview should be deleted.
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