New Child Tax Credit Program Sabotaged By Corporate Interests

When I say "sabotaged," I'm not speaking hyperbolically. 

By Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic

The Child Tax Credit is a seriously good piece of policy, in which America's poorest families are eligible for $2-3k/year in subsidies, a move projected to cut American child poverty in half.

There's one problem: the IRS has no idea how to reach America's poorest families.

Many of the people eligible for CTC don't file tax returns and even if they did, they'd have no contact with the IRS, because the tax-prep monopoly killed all attempts to create a "free file" system where the IRS sends you a prefilled return with the info they already have.

When I say "sabotaged," I'm not speaking hyperbolically. The tax-prep industry, led by Intuit, led the fight for 20 years, with their cult-like leader Brad Smith at the forefront of a bribery and intimidation campaign.

Intuit worked with its co-monopolists to develop a private sector "free file" program that was supposed to offer free tax-prep services to the poorest Americans, but it was a con.

The company developed a sophisticated dark-patterns storefront to trick Americans into paying for the service they promised to provide for free. Free file was supposed to cover half of Americans, but only 3% figured out how to use it.

Free file predated upon poor people, but it especially targeted people with disabilities, students and retirees.

Eventually, thanks to Propublica's dogged reporting, the IRS ended its noncompete agreement with Intuit.

But the IRS has been starved for decades by anti-tax extremists and is seemingly dependent on predatory monopolists - think of how, in the wake of the Equifax breach, the IRS awarded its $7.5m, no-bid anti-fraud contract...to Equifax.

The IRS said it *had* to give its security contract to the company that had just demonstrated an unimaginably terrible capacity for screwing up security because no other company was able to provide anti-fraud services, and the IRS didn't have that capacity itself.

Just as with Intuit, the IRS eventually had to break with Equifax because its behavior became absolutely untenable - in the case of Equifax, the company started serving malware from its fraud-prevention site (no, really).

But despite its dishonor, Equifax remains cozy with the IRS - as does Intuit, never mind the fact that the FTC is investigating it for its fraudulent, predatory behavior.

Intuit is the company the IRS tapped to build the CTC enrolment website.

It is a *very* bad website.

The site's failings are detailed in a Michelle Singletary story for the Washington Post.

Start with that URL: "freefilefillableforms.com" is not a subdomain of irs.gov. It's not even a .gov site. Even before the page loads, it sounds like a phishing site.

But once you load it, hoo-*boy* does it look like a phishing site. There's *nothing* to indicate that you're on an official IRS website.

The site doesn't work on mobile devices. Guess what kind of device a person poor enough to qualify for the CTC is most likely to own?

The site is English only; there's *no* Spanish version. Guess what linguistic group is disproportionately represented among people poor enough to qualify for the CTC?

The site doesn't work with screen-readers, excluding people with visual disabilities.

The site welcomes you with a giant, unreadable wall of garbage-legalese warnings and a giant CAUTION box.

Intuit is perfectly capable of making usable websites - but more importantly, they are *criminally* capable of making *unusable* websites. They are infamous for it.

If Intuit wanted to make a CTC enrolment website that ensured that the parents of children living in poverty could find and use it, they could. Moreover, when Intuit builds websites that deprives people of the service they're entitled to, it's deliberate.

To prove how good Intuit is at being bad, Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project worked with designers to build an alternative CTC site. It took two days. It's welcoming, it's bilingual, and it was built by a crowdfunded think-tank.

It works on mobile, too (of course). As Bruenig writes, "it's not designed to look like a phishing website, is simple and inviting, and replaces the complicated set of eligibility rules with question prompts."

Alas, all it can do is funnel users into Intuit's terrible site.

I have done web-design for large government clients. I understand that there are constraints that can reduce the quality of the final product. But Intuit isn't your average IRS contractor - they're a company that was caught bribing, intimidating and poaching IRS employees.

Specifically, they bribed, intimidated and poached IRS employees to turn a blind eye to the company's deliberately terrible web design, which was in service to denying poor people access to financial services they were entitled to.

Bond's Law applies here: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." This isn't incompetence, it's deadly competence - a skillful act of sabotage that will doom millions of children to continued poverty.

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Lead image by Françoise Foliot