Intuit to Announce Something Big? – My Prediction: Online Professional Tax Prep

Intuit’s corporate communications guy Rich Walker used his Facebook page to tease the accounting community on Sunday night with a post that said:  “Intuit innovates again with a new, web-based application for accounting and tax pros. Details coming soon!”

While I have no confirmation for this, I’m pretty confident that it is related to my July prediction that Intuit was working on a web-based professional tax prep system www.cpata.com/go/2403).

There are a few other providers out there, but only the hosted version of UltraTax CS by Thomson Reuters and the Global fx-enabled version of CCH’s ProSystem fx Tax have notable followings in the mid-sized and larger markets (the Thomson Reuters GoSystem RS/ES system dominates web-based pro prep at the large firm level). If Intuit is doing what I think- about to offer an online professional tax platform- it will be significant, since it will likely be the beginning of a mass movement to hosted tax prep. Or at  least a larger movement by smaller tax providers. I’ll be interested to see my colleagues’ views on this.