Intuit Inc decided to rescind their decision to charge printing / filing fee $9.95  for every tax return using their flagship Turbo Tax 2008 product.  The original decision met with an public outcry, where loyal customer launch a massive public campaign  to pressure Intuit in canceling this obviously ridiculous decision. Comment pages of Amazon, Yahoo Finance, and others quickly became a forum for voice of extremely angry ex-customers.

$9.95 per printed tax return rejected again.

Bob Meighan, Intuit VP responsible for Turbo Tax products issued the following statement on Amazon forums on December 12, 2008:

Turbo Tax has over 17 million loyal, passionate customers who genuinely care about what we do and who take the time to tell us. That’s evidenced by your opinions posted in these discussions. You’ve spoken. We’ve listened. And now we’ve responded to address your concerns.

A number of factors, including this feedback, have prompted us to now enable Turbo Tax customers to prepare and print multiple returns at no additional cost. Plus, as we’ve previously communicated, free e-filing is included with every federal return (up to the IRS limit of 5).

We believe these changes make Turbo Tax the best value for consumers. Including free e-filing with every federal return means a savings of nearly $75 for some of our customers versus last year and a savings of up to $40 compared to our original pricing this year. I believe this now truly reflects our commitment to helping our customers keep more money in their pockets.

I’m no stranger to engaging with the online community, so if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them here.

Bob Meighan
VP, TurboTax

One can understand financial pressures that any company is being subjected to by recent troubles in world’s economy . However, it is very disturbing that a company that had already experienced massive customer backlash in early 2003 by a similar attempt, has not learned its lesson. 

To remind all of us, in  Turbo Tax 2002 Intuit also tried to use a copy protection schema, which was inteded to prevent any user from installation of their tax product on more then one machine (same lame exuses where given to justify that move, too).  As a result, instead of predicted increases in sales, Intuit suffered amazing sales declines, massive costs related to product returns. All of that was  followed by a logical 35% decline in stock price in June 2003.  The shareholders of INTC have not been able to recover experienced losses until late 2006. That’s what we call a “badaboom” disaster.

In 2003 yours trully, with considerable pain, moved to TaxCut to join the “get Intuit” croud. This year H&R Block took notice (one would expect that) about the newest “oops” of their biggest competitor. On the same Amazon forum one lady wrote:

Thank you A. Sewell, W. Hall and Matt Johnson

I am so happy that you are trusting your taxes to H&R Block’s TaxCut this year. As you know, we did not raise our prices to cover the cost of e-file in our software products. They are the same great value as last year. Therefore, if you don’t use e-file, you are not paying for a feature that you do not need.

I will be here to answer any questions about TaxCut.

All the best
Paula from H&R Block

So,  it is good that corporate big wigs of Intuit decided to do the right thing, but what in the name of … made them go with the original decision. Will the latest move be enough for this company to minimize the backlash created by their original decision? Time will tell.

Hopefully, someone will leave me a message with a good “scoop” in a comment section.