Social Responsibility

40 years of powering prosperity: Highlights from Intuit’s 2023 Corporate Responsibility and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Report

At Intuit, we believe everyone should have the opportunity to prosper, and for 40 years we've been working to make that a reality. Today, I’m proud to announce the release of our 2023 Corporate Responsibility and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Report.

Written by Lara Hood Balazs
Published Sep 27, 2023
6 min read

At Intuit, we believe everyone should have the opportunity to prosper, and for 40 years we’ve been working to make that a reality. Today, I’m proud to announce the release of our 2023 Corporate Responsibility and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report.

Corporate responsibility (CR) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are core to who we are and intrinsic parts of our business strategy. CR and DEI are part of our company strategy and we declare goals for both in order to hold ourselves accountable for our actions. The report details progress against these goals, including key areas where we’re leveraging our unique expertise, resources, and scale to have a positive global impact. I’m excited to share that we made strong progress toward all our long-term goals and encourage you to visit the full report for a more in-depth look into how we’re powering prosperity around the world.

Corporate Responsibility

Our CR strategy is focused on three core areas to support underserved communities: job creation to provide economic opportunities, job readiness to better prepare individuals for their financial futures, and having a positive impact on climate, including setting new science-based net-zero emission targets.

In addition, fundamental to our mission of powering prosperity around the world are our Code of Conduct and Ethics; our principles for responsible AI, anti-bribery, and anti-corruption; our commitment to building world-class cybersecurity and data protection capabilities; and our commitment to delivering responsible, transparent, and customer-backed products.

Job Creation and Readiness

Our innovative programs have helped 2.5M students be better prepared for jobs by the end of FY23, exceeding our goal of 2.2M. To truly power prosperity, it’s not enough to just create jobs—we must also prepare people to succeed in the job market of tomorrow. We’ve been partnering with 21 underserved school districts across eight countries since 2021 to achieve our long term goal of preparing at least 5 million individuals for jobs by 2025. We continue launching new programs to better support students and teachers, including our food truck program, Summer Career Exploration Program with San Diego Unified School District, and a TurboTax Scholarship Program that awarded $200,000 to 80 students ($2,500 each) to help US students pay for college tuition or pay off existing student loan debt.

We maintained more than 18K jobs in underserved communities in FY23, exceeding $195M in economic impact. We’ve increased the scale and impact of our Prosperity Hub job creation strategy to include roles in virtual job centers in underserved ZIP codes. Intuit partners with each Prosperity Hub community to create jobs through virtual and physical call centers, offer programs through local school districts, and provide funding to support local small business support centers. The program has created $646M in economic impact since it began in FY17.

Climate and Responsible Business Practices

On climate, we took a bold step forward by committing to reach net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across our operations and supply chain by FY40. With our long-term net-zero target, our aim is to decarbonize our business operations footprint 10 years ahead of when climate scientists predict we must reach planet-wide net-zero emissions. We’ve also made progress on our Climate Positive program to drive an additional 2M metric tons (MT) reduction of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions by 2030 in the communities we serve. As of the end of FY23, we’ve reduced almost 500,000 total MT of CO2e emissions—well on our way to hitting our Climate Positive goal.

Powering prosperity through responsible AI. Practicing integrity without compromise has always been a core company value. Now, as we enter a new era of AI and other emerging technologies, it’s more important than ever to ensure responsible business practices. Our responsible AI principles guide how we develop, operate, and scale our AI-driven expert platform: powering prosperity, enhancing human talent, fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy and security. More information can be found on our Responsible AI Page.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Our commitment to DEI is built around putting people first — our employees, our customers, and our communities. DEI is foundational to our company, supporting our firm belief that we can be a more innovative company for all when we ourselves are diverse. We strive to create an environment where diverse perspectives are heard and where employees can do the best work of their lives.

Our representation goals focus on our efforts to attract and develop the broadest pool of top diverse talent to ensure individuals from all backgrounds have an equal opportunity to be employed and succeed at Intuit. We continuously measure and monitor our progress to ensure we stay focused on attracting, retaining, and developing a diverse workforce. While these goals focus on our long-term vision of a workforce that reflects the diversity of our customers, they’re aspirational and we don’t set quotas or make employment decisions based on an individual’s identity.

We ended FY23 with 39.7% representation for women in leadership positions, director-level and above. And while we continued to make progress, we fell just short of our FY23 goal of increasing representation of women in our technical roles to 35% due to fewer technical job openings driven by lower-than-expected attrition in our technology function. Nevertheless, we’re still well above our industry peers for representation of women in technical roles, and we’re committed to achieving our long-term goals.

Reaching 16.3%, we surpassed our FY23 goal of increasing US underrepresented racial groups by 0.3 percentage points. This follows an FY21 increase to 12.7%, and an FY22 increase to 15%, which surpassed our annual goal by 0.5 percentage points.

As part of our DEI strategy, we’re also focused on powering prosperity for diverse and small businesses through supplier diversity. 25% of our US suppliers are also our valued customers, reflecting the diverse landscape of our customer base.

We invested $393M in diverse and small businesses in FY23 through direct and indirect spend, an increase of 3% from FY22.

And we created a new opportunity for our employees to invest. Intuit employees spent $1.1M on diverse and small businesses using an enhanced Amazon Business Guided Buying Solution that increases the visibility of diverse and small businesses that are also Intuit-preferred sellers.

These highlights are just a sampling of the great work taking place across the company. I’m honored to be part of an amazing organization with 40 years of powering prosperity around the world and I couldn’t be more proud of our accomplishments over the past year. Our work isn’t done, but by investing in people — both inside Intuit and beyond our walls — and working together, we believe we can all prosper for the next 40 years and beyond.

To read the full report, download Intuit’s 2023 Corporate Responsibility and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report or visit the Intuit Corporate Responsibility website.

Lara Balazs is Intuit’s Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of Intuit’s Strategic Partner Group. As Intuit’s Chief Marketing Officer, Lara is responsible for driving company growth and building the company’s brands and reputation in support of its mission to power prosperity around the world. As the General Manager of the Strategic Partner Group, Lara leads Intuit’s pro-tax group and Corporate Responsibility efforts, which focus on diversity and inclusion, job creation, job readiness, and making a positive impact on the climate.

Prior to joining Intuit in 2018, Lara developed a proven track record of building world-class businesses and brands at companies including Amazon, Visa, and Nike. As Vice President, Worldwide Prime and Amazon North America Consumer Marketing, Lara was responsible for driving growth of the Prime membership program globally as well as the North America consumer business. Before Amazon, she held a variety of executive roles at Visa including Senior Vice President, Visa North America Marketing where she was responsible for all aspects of marketing for Visa’s largest revenue-driving region. During her time at Intuit, Lara has been named as one of Forbes’ World’s Most Influential CMOs, and she was recognized with AdWeek’s CMO Vanguard Award. She serves on Frontdoor’s Board of Directors. Lara received a BA in pre-law from the University of Washington and ‌an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University.