FTC Pursues TurboTax Fraud Case Despite Supreme Court Mauling

For three years, the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general have tried to exact financial and other penalties from Intuit, maker of TurboTax. The case stems from the company’s decision—first reported by ProPublica—to not inform millions of paying, low-income TurboTax customers that they could use the app to file their taxes for free.

Now, despite a unanimous decision last year by the U.S. Supreme Court to curtail the FTC's ability to extract penalties in consumer fraud cases, the agency, led by Lina Khan, is pressing ahead with investigations of Intuit and others anyway. Khan’s implied threat to Intuit: If it doesn’t settle the allegations, the agency could make the case go to trial, generating another series of bad headlines for the company, currently valued at $150 billion.