The US tech giant where employees wear IDF uniforms to work

By ¡DO NOT PANIC!

Last month, a data analyst at financial tech giant Intuit showed up to a company Zoom call in full IDF uniform. Intuit’s products include the widely-used tax return program TurboTax.

This article was originally published by Do Not Panic!

The American tech giant behind the most popular tax filing software in the US allows employees to wear their IDF uniforms to work and also permits them to take months off the job to fight Israel’s wars.

Last month, Tom Yacobi, a data analyst at financial tech giant Intuit, whose products include the widely-used tax return program TurboTax, showed up to an all-hands company Zoom call in his full IDF uniform.

Yacobi works in TurboTax’s trust and safety team which handles the most sensitive personally identifiable information of TurboTax customers and users.

The whistleblower who provided me with this screenshot told me that since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, Israeli employees of California-based Intuit have, like Yacobi, been allowed to take as long as three or four months off work, often with minimal notice, to serve as reservists in the IDF.

“Intuit has shown no consideration for how these disruptions affect workflows and operations for employees in the US who have had to put processes on hold and postpone meetings to cater to Israeli employees’ army schedules,” PM (not their real initials) told me. “And of course, there has been no concern for the emotional and mental health impact on US employees who have been put in the awkward position of joining Zoom calls with active soldiers implicated in genocide and war crimes.”

Showing up to work in a military uniform, let alone the uniform of a military which has committed genocide and war crimes, and whose former head is an ICC-indicted war criminal, is not only unprofessional and unethical, but clearly an unabashed display of arrogance and impunity.

PM said one senior manager took three consecutive months off work from October to December 2023 to participate in the genocide of Gaza. PM says Israeli employees continue to take two-week stints off work for IDF reserve duty.

PM has never raised the issue with HR or management for fear of the consequences at such an openly pro-Israel and pro-genocide company.

“What discouraged me the most was the shocking depravity of hearing directly from chief information security officer, Atticus Tysen, that the company had selected the Israel office as a ‘strategic growth site’ during the peak of the Gaza genocide, in December 2023. This was announced at the same time as the company was down-sizing certain American and Canadian offices.”

According to PM, Intuit employees are regularly required to think about Israeli feelings. PM says that on numerous occasions since October 2023, Intuit management have posted on the company-wide Slack messaging app “about the need to show our Israeli colleagues extra kindness and grace because of their distressful circumstances.” Needless to say, Intuit management have never posted similar messages concerning the distress of those who may have been affected by the Israeli genocide of Gaza or Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Lebanon and Iran.

PM adds that “many” of Intuit’s Israeli employees have moved to the US on an L-1 visa in the last few years, with the process for approval much easier than for an H-1B visa. An L-1 visa allows multinationals to transfer employees from their overseas offices to their US offices, and is a straightforward pathway to permanent US residency.

Zionists serve in key leadership positions at Intuit.

Marianna Tessel, an executive vice-president and general manager, is an Israeli-American who served as a captain at Mamram, the computing centre and IT backbone of the Israeli military. In 2023 Tessel posted on LinkedIn about her visit to Intuit’s Israel-based R&D centre which is staffed almost exclusively by former Israeli intelligence officers.

In 2023 the Jerusalem Post reported that Intuit’s Israeli employees were going to lead on integrating generative AI into TurboTax software. Tessel said Intuit’s Israel office creates “some of our fintech software, and much of the AI.”

David Hahn, another executive vice-president and general manager at Intuit, is a friend and confidante of Jewish-Zionist venture capitalist Keith Rabois, who he met when both worked at LinkedIn. Rabois is married to Jacob Helberg, an undersecretary of state in the Trump administration and an influential, if little-known Zionist voice in the US government. Rabois is often referred to, alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as a member of the ‘Paypal Mafia’ for his role in launching Paypal.

Hahn is also close with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, another Jewish-Zionist big tech linchpin. In 2014 Hahn joined Hoffman’s venture capital firm Greylock Partners as an “entrepreneur-in-residence.”

Intuit, whose CEO Sasan Goodarzi is an Iranian exile, has a market cap of $111 billion. As well as TurboTax, the company also owns the accounting software QuickBooks, the credit monitoring service Credit Karma and the automated email software program Mailchimp. The company’s main revenue generator however is TurboTax, and as such it has spent two decades and many millions of dollars lobbying US politicians to stop the IRS building a free online tax return service.

In October 2023 the Republicans, looking for budget items they could cut to pay for Israel’s genocide of Gaza, targeted the funding the Biden administration had set aside for the creation of a government-built online tax return service. At the time the GOP only controlled the House of Representatives, and the proposed free service, known as Direct File, survived. After Trump’s win and the Republican capture of both houses of Congress however, Direct File was eliminated.

This was a significant win for TurboTax as it once again fended off the challenge of a free online tax return program and locked tens of millions of Americans into using TurboTax’s paid-for service.

Just a few months before it was scrapped, Intuit’s Zionist leadership donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. The end of an IRS-run service was an obvious quid pro quo for this bribe.

PM’s experience and the Intuit story is like so many stories in the US today.

A story of corporate complicity in war crimes.

A story of the seemingly intractable connections between American tech companies and the genocidal Israeli military.

A story of bribery and grift.

And one about the influence Zionists have over the political process in the US and the lives of ordinary Americans.