How Intuit® prepares for tax law changes

Given the potential for The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 to become law this tax season, I’ve heard from many tax professionals, as well as members of the Intuit Tax Council, who are feeling the pressure of a compressed tax season. They are wondering how Intuit® ProConnect™ Tax, Lacerte® Tax, and ProSeries® Tax might change if legislation does pass–and how fast the changes will take place.

I sat down with Gregg Gamble, tax development delivery manager for Intuit professional tax products, to learn more about how Intuit prepares for, and makes changes to, its professional tax software when there are major tax law changes.

Leslie Skelly: Tell me a little about your background and experience in tax and accounting.

Gregg Gamble: This is tax year 28 for me with Intuit. I worked at Lacerte before it was purchased by Intuit, and prior to that, practiced as a CPA at multiple large accounting firms—it was the Big 6 back then. I’ve developed parts of the 1040 form in our products, owned overall development of the California Individual forms, and now manage a large team of developers who code 1040 forms.

Leslie: How does Intuit prepare for late-breaking tax law changes such as the pending Tax Relief Act?

Gregg: Great question. Our goal is to minimize the impact of late-breaking legislation to our customers and their clients, so here is what we do:

• We have several groups within Intuit who work together to analyze what we know about the pending legislation, and then assess what we understand will change.
• We then write as much of our software code as possible to be able to quickly react and incorporate the new tax laws.
• Once the legislation is officially signed into law, we review the final legislation and forms to ensure everything is correct.
• We work to secure agency approvals and confirm that they are ready to process returns under the new law.
• We then make the updated, approved forms live, and where possible, we help our customers identify impacted returns they’ve already filed.   

Intuit is a partner with our customers, so we work to make the experience as easy as possible. Our customers are tax professionals, so we also strive to allow for flexibility where possible to let them apply their tax acumen and exercise professional judgment.  

Leslie: I’ve heard that when you add up the years of expertise of the Intuit employees who build forms in our tax products, there are more than 1,000 years of experience working in the tax field. Is that true?

Gregg: Our tax expertise runs very deep! Our average tenure is 15+ years, and given the size of our teams working on coding the tax calculations, it’s way beyond 1,000 years.

Many of our developers are CPAs and EAs who have active licenses and run their own tax practices. This is a great advantage for us because we have many employees who are also our customers, which brings our obsession of creating a great experience and knowledge of what our customers need to the highest of levels.

They don’t have to get to know the customer … they are the customer, and understand the pressures of tax season and implications of late-breaking legislation.

Leslie: What might our customers find interesting about the way we build our tax formsets?

Gregg: We spend a tremendous amount of time developing the tax forms by analyzing and testing less common tax scenarios and use cases to ensure accuracy on less common tax situations. It’s critical for accuracy and completeness. We don’t want to miss anything.

Leslie: Thanks Gregg!