H&R Block offers half-off deal to customers of its rivals

H&R Block, echoing a campaign at Sprint, is offering a half-off deal to customers of its rivals.

Kansas City-based Block made the offer to tax filers who relied on other tax preparers to help them with their taxes last year. Simply take the receipt from paying your tax preparer last year to an H&R Block office and get this year’s taxes done for half the amount, Block’s offer says.

The half-off deal is limited to those who paid at least $150 last year for state and federal, individual or business, returns. Those who paid another preparer less than $150 would be charged $75 at Block, the announcement said.

Block’s deal comes on the heals of a similar half-off promotion by Overland Park-based Sprint.

Late last year, the wireless company began offering to cut in half the rate plans of At&T and Verizon customers who switch to Sprint. Its offer has been credited with improving Sprint’s ability to attract new customers, and Sprint continued the offer into 2015.

H&R Block spokesman Gene King said the company’s deal has been part of its tax season marketing plan from the start. Block’s half-off deal expires March 15.

The company already had issued a free tax software offer to customers of its rival Intuit after that company had problems with its popular TurboTax product. Changes that Intuit made to TurboTax this season had required many customers to upgrade to more expensive software to get the same features they had last tax season.

Intuit has since apologized to customers, scraped those changes for next year’s software, offered free upgrades this year and offered a $25 cash payment to those who already had paid for an upgrade this year.

This story was originally published February 17, 2015 at 3:08 PM with the headline "H&R Block offers half-off deal to customers of its rivals."