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I'll explain my submission (I submitted the other article 6 days ago too): the tax reform bill, which would have enshrined tax prep companies to be the approved
by danso 8y ago
I'll explain my submission (I submitted the other article 6 days ago too): the tax reform bill, which would have enshrined tax prep companies to be the approved providers of free file tax software, had wide bipartisan support and was considered a likely shoo-in to be signed into law (it didn't even require a roll call vote in the House).
But people, including advocates and reporters, discovered the directives in robots.txt and <meta> tags, which have been out-in-plain-sight for at least a decade [0], and that has apparently led former employees to speak out and/or leak internal documents that will very likely lead to an investigation. Tax prep companies have spent millions per year in lobbying, and now a major, easy legislative victory may be spoiled because of robots.txt. It's pretty rare that we see grass-roots complaints actually stymie a popular bipartisan bill supported by industry lobbyists, nevermind because of a webdev technical issue.
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20080512004753/http://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt http://web.archive.org/web/20080512004753/http://turbotax.in...