Via America’s Lawyer: A federal judge rejects Intuit’s $40 million class action settlement proposition. The company behind TurboTax has been fleecing customers by overcharging for its annual tax software. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Mike Papantonio:             And finally tonight, some good news. A federal judge has rejected a settlement offer from Intuit after the company was sued for misleading consumers about the cost of filing their taxes. Farron Cousins joins me again to explain the settlement. You know, Farron, what I love about this, I first of all, I love this judge. This, this guy has always shown so much courage and now he’s doing it again. I mean, he’s saying, look, this is not acceptable. A, you’re not giving the people enough money who lost a lot of money and B, you’re making it almost impossible for those people to get paid because they, because of what they have to go through, they have to opt out. Okay. All of these steps you’ve put in front of this, these folks to opt out is, is, is just not fair.

Farron Cousins:                  Right. And you had, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of people using Intuit every year for, from I think it was 2015 to 2020, and they didn’t know that they were able to file their taxes for free. And instead ended up paying, typically about a hundred dollars for this service provided by Intuit. That again, the government says this is free. Intuit made a big deal of telling the government, listen, we’re going to give low income people and military members, the ability to file their taxes for free and government says, that’s great. We appreciate it. And then Intuit duped them, essentially, into paying a hundred dollars a piece and the settlement was going to be $20 or something like that.

Mike Papantonio:             This judge Breyer in Northern district California has always shown so much courage to protect consumers in a fair way. That’s all he’s doing, he’s just saying, let’s play fair. I love this guy. I love the kind of decisions he reaches on behalf of the consumer. Farron, thank you for joining me. Okay.

Farron Cousins:             Thank you.