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Formerly | 2nd Story Software (1998-2013) |
---|---|
Company type | Private |
Industry | Software |
Founded | 1998Cedar Rapids, Iowa, United States | in
Founders |
|
Area served | United States, Canada |
Key people | Curtis Campbell (President) |
Owner | Cinven |
Number of employees | 300 (2021) |
Website | taxact |
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.
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]
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]
CA Technologies, Inc., formerly Computer Associates International, Inc., and CA, Inc., was an American multinational enterprise software developer and publisher that existed from 1976 to 2018. CA grew to rank as one of the largest independent software corporations in the world, and at one point was the second largest. The company created systems software that ran in IBM mainframe, distributed computing, virtual machine, and cloud computing environments.
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.
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.
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, the small business accounting program QuickBooks, the credit monitoring and personal accounting 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.
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948), was a landmark United States Supreme Court antitrust case that decided the fate of film studios owning their own theatres and holding exclusivity rights on which theatres would show their movies. It would also change the way Hollywood movies were produced, distributed, and exhibited. It also opened the door for more foreign and independent films to be shown in U.S. theaters. The Supreme Court affirmed the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York's ruling that the existing distribution scheme was in violation of United States antitrust law, which prohibits certain exclusive dealing arrangements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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