Intuit Asks The Verge To Delete Part Of Interview With Its CEO; The Verge Declined

There are examples of the Streisand Effect… and then there are examples of the Streisand Effect. And, frankly, what Intuit just decided to do to itself must surely be one of the most explosive and idiotic examples of the Streisand Effect I’ve ever come across.

Readers here will be familiar with our posts about Intuit. The company that is behind everything from the TurboTax software platform to Credit Karma and more has also built itself a nefarious reputation due to both its active lobbying to keep the tax-filing system in America as complicated as possible (so it can make more money) as well as some of the more cynical and dastardly anti-consumer behaviors to hide its own free tax filing options as I’ve seen (so it could make more money). The company preyed on everyone from the typical lower-income member of the public to American military veterans. It was all so bad that the FTC sued the company, generating a settlement in which Intuit was ordered to pay out $141 million back to its victims.

The Verge’s Decoder podcast covers all kinds of topics in the digital space. The podcast regularly has guests on for interviews. Most recently, Decoder had on Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi. And the interview appears to have proceeded normally. Host Nilay Patel and Goodarzi covered a variety of topics about the interrelated nature of Intuit’s different business units, the strategy behind building a cohesive company offering around them, and how the CEO and company navigated making those decisions. And, as you might expect, the topic of Intuit’s lobbying against tax reform in America came up as well. This is straight from Patel’s writeup accompanying the podcast release.

I couldn’t have the CEO of Intuit on without asking about tax reform in the United States. Individual income taxes are more complicated in the US than in almost any other developed economy, and Intuit has been lobbying hard since the late 1990s to keep it that way to protect TurboTax, spending nearly $3.8 million in lobbying in 2023 alone. There’s been extensive reporting about it. This lobbying has had mixed results: truly free online direct filing with the IRS began as a pilot program this year and is expanding to be available for more than half the US population in 2025.

It’s also not just lobbying: in 2022, a coalition of attorneys general from all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141 million settlement that required Intuit to refund low-income Americans who were eligible for free filing but were redirected to paid products. In 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax’s “free” marketing was willfully deceptive, and after the agency won an appeal early this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing it.

I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.

At no point were there any complaints in the interview about the topic. Whether any topics were said to be off limits for the interview is unsaid in the writeup, but Goodarzi’s participation in answering the question is a tacit approval of the topic at the absolute least. So, as Patel says, the interview concluded and he didn’t think anything of it.

Until Intuit’s Communications people came calling, that is.

But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone “inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”

We don’t do that here at The Verge. As many of our listeners and readers know, we have a very explicit and very strict ethics policy. The most important thing to note is that we never allow anyone to preview or approve interview questions, and we certainly do not allow anyone to review or alter the work that we publish. I told this to Rick, and he came back and asked that we “delete that which takes away from the conversation,” which he defined as “raised voices” or us “speaking over each other,” so that “listeners understand your question and the answer Sasan gave.”

As the headline states, Patel declined to do any kind of deleting of any portion of the interview. But it’s actually much worse than that for Intuit. In true Streisand Effect fashion, The Verge not only ran the interview in its entirety, but it put just the portion Intuit wanted deleted at the forefront of the podcast and highlighting why it was doing so, asking listeners and readers to comment on whether they thought anything was inappropriate about the questions lobbed at Goodarzi. Go and listen for yourself. If you find any of it problematic, from the perspective of either Patel or Goodarzi, the problem is you, not the interview. It’s a pretty typical back and forth interview, and doesn’t even seem particularly contentious. As Patel notes:

I have to be honest with you — that’s one of the weirdest requests I’ve ever gotten. So here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to run that whole part of the interview first, unedited, so you can tell me. It’s about five minutes long, and you can decide for yourself. Then we’ll come out of it, and we’ll run the rest of the interview, which, like I said, is an otherwise fascinating episode of Decoder.

How in the world, in this year of our lord 2024, can there be someone in charge of communications for a company the size of Intuit who doesn’t understand that this was all inevitable the moment they tried to strongarm a journalist out of its journalism? Do they really not teach the Streisand Effect in colleges? Or teach journalism ethics to Communications majors?

Heineman had a brief stint in Minor League Baseball as a pitcher. And this is the Streisand Effect equivalent of throwing a meatball down the middle of the plate for The Verge to knock out of the park. Now the very thing that Heineman wanted to be deleted is getting more press coverage and exposure than it ever would have had Intuit not tried to bully a media outlet out of faithfully producing an interview that occurred.