TurboTax's fine balancing act

Having recently had to pay a large sum of money to the Canadian government because the software we used to file our 2007 tax returns didn't correctly account for RRSP withdrawals (and/or my employer didn't withhold as much as I requested them to), I'm actually somewhat sympathetic here:

If you're an executive at Intuit, which makes a substantial chunk of change filing people's tax returns, you probably don't want to anger the future head of the Treasury — which, of course, contains the Internal Revenue Service, the ultimate consumer of your output. On the other hand, you don't want to imply that your product is capable of screwing up peoples' tax returns.

Witness the verbal gymnastics of Dan Maurer, Intuit SVP, as he tries to absolve both Tim Geithner and his firm from the mistakes on Geithner's return . . .