Intuit CEO: Good Companies Can Make Mistakes

Intuit Inc. INTU declared better than expected quarterly results on Thursday post market closing, causing the company’s shares to rally on Friday. The company reported Non-GAAP EPS loss of $0.06, much below analysts’ estimates of a loss of $0.13.

Intuit CEO Brad Smith, was on CNBC recently to talk about measures Intuit is deploying to prevent data theft and how the company got the consumer preference wrong with its TurboTax desktop product.

Security Measures

“Our systems have not been breached and at Intuit we take privacy and security of our customer’s information as job one,” Smith said.”We also [deploy] the most advanced technologies and techniques to protect our customers. Unfortunately with all the major breaches that are happening outside the tax system, people’s identities are being stolen and then they are attacking the U.S. tax system to try to file fraudulent returns, our job is to prevent that from happening.”

Good Companies Can Make Mistakes

“Our company is strong, the results we reported yesterday [Thursday] reinforced that,” Smith said. “Our strategy is working, our cloud based products are growing and our net promoter scores, our customer satisfaction are up across the board. At the same time, good companies can make mistakes and in the case of the product line-up change we made to the TurboTax desktop product, we thought what worked for online customers last year would work for desktop customers this year.”

He continued, “Now, we were wrong, so we apologize that we made the change and we gave the customers the money back. This other issue…was not a company issue, this is an industry-wide issue, where people are trying to attack the U.S. taxpayer system and we are leading the way in preventing that from happening.”