Concerning marketing, Bennett wrote, "We must leverage our strong brand with more focused and more customer compelling marketing to drive increased traffic in our retail offices." Block, he said, also needs to improve service levels to keep more customers. In terms of refund anticipation loans, the letter said Block has the opportunity to recapture market share in the first half of tax season because competitors have reduced access to loan funding, a problem Block does not face.

Marketing in 2010 had an impact, but ultimately not the major one desired in the area of digital tax preparation products. "Our marketing efforts this past tax season led to a 25-percent increase in our website visits, but we did not convert this growth into clients," Bennett wrote. He said the company is redesigning the site to make navigation easier and improve conversion rates.

Without directly responding to Bloch's criticism of the company's retail fees as being too high, Breeden's letter outlined their history and said the net average charge had increased by 71 percent since 2001. Breeden essentially rejected Bloch's point with "Growth in the NAC is a combination of increases in H&R Block's charges, and increasing complexity of returns as a result of tax code changes. There is almost always a good deal of the latter, so price increases are not solely the actions of the Company."

And he addressed turnover, without directly mentioning this summer's departure of CEO Russ Smyth and the company's CFO and chief legal counsel shortly below that. "However, personnel changes occur normally, and perhaps with even greater frequency in companies that are not performing at their best," the chairman commented.