Intuit Reported $6 Billion in Profits – and Paid Nothing
Three weeks after H&R Block revealed that it paid no federal income taxes on its 2025 U.S. profits, Intuit, another tax-prep giant, released financial statements making H&R Block’s $100 million in tax avoidance look modest. Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, recorded nearly $6 billion in U.S. income. Rather than paying any federal income taxes on those massive profits, they received a refund check back from the IRS.
This is after Intuit and the tax-prep lobbyists convinced lawmakers to get rid of the IRS Direct File program that allowed people to file their taxes directly online for free with the IRS, in part by making disingenuous claims about how their services helped Black people and women.
Intuit profits from elimination of free file but of course they don’t do a better job on individual tax returns than the IRS did. Still they have a talent for avoiding their own corporate taxes. How else could they manage a zero tax bill on $6 billion of income?
OBBBA Handed Intuit Over $1 Billion in Tax Breaks
President Trump’s 2025 tax law helped Intuit avoid a bunch of taxes, that much is clear. The company received over $1 billion in tax breaks from an OBBBA provision that retroactively allowed companies to expense research costs. The point of research breaks has always been to encourage more research. Instead, Trump handed out billions in tax breaks to companies for research that had already been done. It didn’t need to be future research or research that was beneficial to the public: any research the company had done in the past few years was good enough for a tax break.
But President Trump also helped the company in another way by ending the IRS Direct File program. The program was immensely popular for obvious reasons. When you go to a national park, you don’t have to hire a private company and give them all your private information to pay the fee to enter the park. When you pay a parking ticket, you don’t have to hire a private company and give them your private information to make sure your car isn’t impounded. When seniors apply for their Social Security or Medicare benefits, they don’t need to hire a private company to take all their private information to receive those benefits.
Yet for some reason, lawmakers decided that people should need to hire a private company to take all their most personal financial information to file their taxes.
Intuit Profits Grew After Trump Administration Ended Direct File
Intuit is probably the largest tax-prep company in the U.S., but they are not the only one, and the tax-prep industry lobbied hard against the IRS Direct File program. It won by making claims such as, “Direct File is too expensive for the government to maintain. We can do it more cheaply.” Those claims were always spurious given the fact that Intuit alone received more in research breaks in one year than the entire cost of the Direct File program.
It’s impossible to say how much the end of Direct File benefited Intuit, but it was certainly a coup for the company. In total, their profits grew 25 percent in the U.S. last year according to their financial disclosures.
Intuit is not the only large, profitable company paying no federal taxes. Intuit is not the only company making massive profits off what we are all required to do by law every year. In fact, it probably isn’t even near the worst of the worst.
But the fact that a company can make billions in a single year and pay not a cent of federal income taxes, the fact that we as taxpayers have to go through private services and give up our private information to file our taxes, the fact that an entire industry and their lobbyists fight to keep this system alive and our lawmakers all agree, should leave all Americans incensed.
