TaxAct

Last updated
TaxAct Holdings, Inc.
Formerly2nd Story Software
(1998-2013)
Company type Private
Industry Software
Founded1998;26 years ago (1998) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, United States
Founders
  • Lance Dunn
  • Cammie Greif
  • Jerry McConnell
  • Alan Sperfslage
Area served
United States, Canada
Key people
Curtis Campbell (President)
Owner Cinven
Number of employees
300 (2021)
Website taxact.com

TaxAct Holdings, Inc. is an American tax preparation software company based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The company offers its own software package "TaxAct" to individual tax registers, companies and professional affiliates. The company was founded in 1998.

Contents

History

TaxAct Holdings, Inc. was founded in 1998 as 2nd Story Software by Lance Dunn, Jerry McConnell, Cammie Greif, and Alan Sperfslage. [1] [2]

In 2000, a cloud-based version of TaxAct software was released. [2] In 2004, TA Associates, a private equity firm based in Boston, acquired two-thirds of the company for $89 million.

In October 2010, H&R Block said it would pay $287.5 million in cash to acquire the parent firm of TaxAct. [3] In May 2011 the U.S. Department of Justice attempted to stop the acquisition in an antitrust lawsuit. [4] [5] In November 2011, a federal judge sided with the Justice Department, and both companies mutually terminated the contract. [6] [7]

In January 2012, 2nd Story Software was sold to Seattle-based Blucora (formerly Infospace, Inc.) for more than $287 million. [8] [9] [10] In 2013, the name was officially changed to TaxAct Holdings, Inc. Subsequently, in October of the same year, TaxAct acquired Balance Financial, the company that specializes in personal finance tools and services. [11]

In 2018, former Intuit executive Curtis Campbell was appointed as the President of the company. [12]

TaxAct is a member of the Free File Alliance, a free federal tax preparation and electronic filing program for eligible individual taxpayers developed through a partnership between the IRS and a group of private sector tax software companies. [13]

In November 2022, private equity firm Cinven agreed to acquire TaxAct for about $720 million. Cinven announced it would combine TaxAct's business with Drake Software, which it acquired the previous year, under a single holding company. [14]

Product overview

TaxAct offers tax preparation software for individuals, small businesses, and tax professionals. They offer both online and download products, and have a mobile app available for iOS and Android.

There are several online plans: Free, Deluxe, Premier, Self- Employed, Business, and Pro. TaxAct offers a free federal version for basic returns.

In March 2018 TaxAct Online Freelancer Edition was awarded the title of "The best tax software for independent contractors" by Business Insider. [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roche</span> Swiss multinational healthcare company

F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, commonly known as Roche, is a Swiss multinational holding healthcare company that operates worldwide under two divisions: Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics. Its holding company, Roche Holding AG, has shares listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. The company headquarters are located in Basel. Roche is the fifth-largest pharmaceutical company in the world by revenue and the leading provider of cancer treatments globally. In 2023, the company’s seat in Forbes Global 2000 was 76.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H&R Block</span> American tax preparation company

H&R Block, Inc., or H&R Block, is an American tax preparation company operating in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The company was founded in 1955 by brothers Henry W. Bloch and Richard Bloch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jackson Hewitt</span>

Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. is the second largest tax-preparation service in the United States; responsible for preparing over 2 million federal, state, and local income-tax returns each year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intuit</span> American financial software company

Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application TurboTax, personal finance app Mint, the small business accounting program QuickBooks, the credit monitoring service Credit Karma, and email marketing platform Mailchimp. As of 2019, more than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its activities within the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TurboTax</span> US tax preparation software

TurboTax is a software package for preparation of American and Canadian income tax returns, produced by Intuit. TurboTax is a market leader in its product segment, competing with H&R Block Tax Software and TaxAct. TurboTax was developed by Michael A. Chipman of Chipsoft in 1984 and was sold to Intuit in 1993.

SunGard was an American multinational company based in Wayne, Pennsylvania, which provided software and services to education, financial services, and public sector organizations. It was formed in 1983, as a spin-off of the computer services division of Sun Oil Company. The name of the company originally was an acronym which stood for Sun Guaranteed Access to Recovered Data, a reference to the disaster recovery business it helped pioneer. SunGard was ranked at 480th in the U.S. Fortune 500 list in the year 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Motorola Solutions</span> American data communications and telecommunications equipment provider

Motorola Solutions, Inc. is an American video equipment, telecommunications equipment, software, systems and services provider that succeeded Motorola, Inc., following the spinoff of the mobile phone division into Motorola Mobility in 2011. The company is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

Cinven Limited is a global private equity firm founded in 1977, with offices in nine international locations in Guernsey, London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan, Luxembourg, Madrid, and Hong Kong that acquires Europe and United States based corporations, and emerging market firms that fit with their core businesses, and necessitate a minimum equity investment of €100 million or more. As of 2023, it has €39 billion in assets under management.

The Free File Alliance is a group of tax preparation companies which operate a public-private partnership with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide free electronic tax filing services under the IRS Free File program to United States taxpayers meeting certain guidelines. The IRS stipulates filers must have an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $73,000 or less for tax year 2022 to qualify, but participating companies can set their own requirements and restrictions. The IRS Free File program is a compromise between the IRS and for-profit tax software companies that enables lower and middle-income filers to file their taxes for free while ensuring the IRS does not develop its own free-to-use tax software that would compete with private, for-profit tax software companies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">InfoSpace</span> American company

Infospace, Inc. was an American company that offered private label search engine, online directory, and provider of metadata feeds. The company's flagship metasearch site was Dogpile and its other notable consumer brands were WebCrawler and MetaCrawler. After a 2012 rename to Blucora, the InfoSpace business unit was sold to data management company OpenMail.

Tax preparation is the process of preparing tax returns, often income tax returns, often for a person other than the taxpayer, and generally for compensation. Tax preparation may be done by the taxpayer with or without the help of tax preparation software and online services. Tax preparation may also be done by a licensed professional such as an attorney, certified public accountant or enrolled agent, or by an unlicensed tax preparation business. Because United States income tax laws are considered to be complicated, many taxpayers seek outside assistance with taxes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Broadcom</span> American semiconductor company

Broadcom Inc. is an American multinational designer, developer, manufacturer, and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wireless, storage, and industrial markets. As of 2023, some 79 percent of Broadcom's revenue came from its semiconductor-based products and 21 percent from its infrastructure software products and services.

John T. Hewitt is an American entrepreneur, the co-founder of Jackson Hewitt, sole founder of Liberty Tax Service and now CEO of ATAX. As of late 2006 Hewitt served as CEO, chairman of the board and president of the latter. Together these companies account for more than 10,000 tax preparation offices in the United States and Canada. In addition, John Hewitt was a pioneer in the development and use of specialized tax-preparation software, which is now the industry's standard practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomson Reuters</span> Canadian multinational information conglomerate

Thomson Reuters Corporation is a Canadian multinational information conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and maintains its headquarters at 19 Duncan Street there.

Credit Karma is an American multinational personal finance company founded in 2007. It has been a brand of Intuit since December 2020. It is best known as a free credit and financial management platform, but its features also include monitoring of unclaimed property databases and a tool to identify and dispute credit report errors. The company operates in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

H&R Block Tax Software, formerly called H&R Block at Home, is a set of software packages for American income tax preparation offered by H&R Block. They are a main competitor of TurboTax and TaxAct. As of 2014, both the online and software versions of the product go by the flagship name, H&R Block. It was previously called "TaxCut". and from 2008 to 2013 named "H&R Block at Home".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Block, Inc.</span> American financial services company

Block, Inc. is a U.S. listed company founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009. It is a financial technology conglomerate. The company reportedly serves 56 million users and 4 million businesses, and processes payments worth US$228 billion annually as of 2023.

The IRS Free File Program is a service that allows U.S. taxpayers to prepare and e-file their federal income tax returns for free. Through the program, commercial tax software companies that are part of the Free File Alliance offer free tax preparation software to tax filers with annual adjusted gross income (AGI) below $73,000 for Tax Year 2022. The AGI is adjusted and typically increases slightly for each tax-filing season. The service is available through the IRS's website at www.irs.gov/freefile. Free fillable forms also are available to all taxpayers as part of the Free File Program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wave Financial</span> Canadian provider of financial software and services for small businesses.

Wave is a company that provides financial services and software for small businesses. Wave is headquartered in the East Bayfront neighborhood in Toronto, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CRST International</span> American freight company

CRST The Transportation Solution, Inc. is an American freight company based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

References

  1. ↑ "2nd Story's Tax Software: A Class ACT". PC Magazine : 42. March 9, 1999. ISSN   0888-8507.
  2. 1 2 Sarah Binder (April 3, 2014). "Cedar Rapids' TaxACT went from David to Goliath". The Gazette (Cedar Rapids) . Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  3. ↑ Tom Taulli (October 14, 2010). "H&R Block Gets Serious About Digital with Purchase of TaxACT". AOL . Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  4. ↑ "U.S. Seeks Halt To H&R Block Deal for Rival". The New York Times . May 23, 2011. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  5. ↑ Justice Department Files Antitrust Lawsuit to Stop H&R Block Inc. from Buying TaxAct; Deal Would Substantially Reduce Competition in Sale of Digital Do-It-Yourself Tax Preparation Products and Result in Higher Prices and a Reduction in Innovation and Quality, Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, Press Release, May 23, 2011
  6. ↑ Eileen Aj Connelly (November 15, 2011). "H&R Block drops TaxACT buy after antitrust ruling". The Seattle Times . Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  7. ↑ United States v. H&R Block, Inc., 2SS Holdings, Inc., and TA IX L.P., Memorandum Opinion (November 10, 2011)
  8. ↑ "InfoSpace Buys Online Tax Solutions Company TaxACT For $287.5M In Cash". TechCrunch . January 9, 2012. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  9. ↑ Dave DeWitte (January 9, 2012). "InfoSpace taking new direction with TaxAct acquisition". The Gazette (Cedar Rapids) . Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  10. ↑ "InfoSpace to buy TaxACT for $287.5 million". The Seattle Times . January 9, 2012. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  11. ↑ John Cook (October 4, 2013). "TaxAct bolsters personal finance tools with Balance Financial buy". GeekWire . Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  12. ↑ Transcribers, Motley Fool (2018-10-31). "Blucora Inc (BCOR) Q3 2018 Earnings Conference Call Transcript -". The Motley Fool. Retrieved 2018-12-25.
  13. ↑ Members of Free File Alliance (2011)
  14. ↑ Lawler, Ryan (1 November 2022). "Cinven acquires TaxAct for $720M" . Axios .
  15. ↑ Kyle Schurman (March 26, 2018). "The best tax software you can buy: TurboTax, H&R Block, and TaxAct". Business Insider . Retrieved 3 April 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.