I always wanted to ask the executives how they reconciled the "Integrity Without Compromise" corporate value with the lobbying against return-free filing. But I'm almost sure the answer I'd have gotten is the same one that most of the people working on TurboTax gave me...that taxpayers need an advocate to ensure that they're not overpaying the government. If the government prepared people's returns, even if people had the option to amend them, most wouldn't go through the hassle, so the government would have an incentive to not optimize returns so that people were paying the least they were legally allowed to.
It's possible that this was just the party line that they were all told to parrot, but if felt like they had more integrity than that, so I'm choosing to believe that they've all internalized that logic and truly believe it. For my part, when I worked at Intuit, I chose to rationalize it by telling myself that I worked on an unrelated product and that I was not involved in that "shadiness." Still, whenever we'd release rosy TurboTax numbers to investors and the stock would pop, I felt a little guilty profiting from that.
It's possible that this was just the party line that they were all told to parrot, but if felt like they had more integrity than that, so I'm choosing to believe that they've all internalized that logic and truly believe it. For my part, when I worked at Intuit, I chose to rationalize it by telling myself that I worked on an unrelated product and that I was not involved in that "shadiness." Still, whenever we'd release rosy TurboTax numbers to investors and the stock would pop, I felt a little guilty profiting from that.