By Akash Sriram and Jaspreet Singh
(Reuters) -Intuit said on Monday it has made its tax preparation tool, TurboTax, available within its personal finance portal and accounting software to tap a wider pool of users this tax season.
The integration into Credit Karma and QuickBooks Online is part of the company’s plan to help expand the use of what is already the U.S. market leader in tax management software.
“If you’ve got 43 million people consuming Credit Karma and they’re not using our taxes right now, it’s a great opportunity to serve them,” said Mark Notarainni, executive in-charge of Intuit’s Consumer Group.
Of the 136 million users of the Credit Karma finance portal at the end of July 2023, more than 40 million did not use TurboTax, the company said.
Intuit said it could make the tax-filing process easier and faster for smaller businesses, which form a large chunk of users for its QuickBooks Online accounting portal.
“Intuit can expect to triple its total addressable market opportunity to $252 billion by integrating its ecosystem of small- and mid-size business and consumer-focused products onto a single platform,” said Shaun Raja, senior research analyst at Parnassus Investments, which owns shares in Intuit.
Intuit, shares of which were up 1.3% at $596.59, pegs its total addressable market at 171 million tax filers. It does not break down the number of TurboTax users.
TurboTax’s dominance has drawn scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers. Bloomberg News reported last week that senators, including Elizabeth Warren, said tax credits given to Intuit may have been better spent to build a free government alternative to TurboTax.
Intuit, in opposition to an IRS-run tax preparation system, has said free tax-preparation solutions including TurboTax are available to all American taxpayers and that a government-run solution will not offer any improvement over currently available options.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)