A novel low-complexity iterative receiver for coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is proposed in this letter. The iterative receiver uses the parallel interference cancellation (PIC)-maximum ratio combining (MRC) detector for MIMO-OFDM detection, which is a popular alternative to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) detector due to its lower computational complexity. However, we have found that the conventional PIC-MRC detector tends to underestimate the magnitude of its output log likelihood ratios (LLRs). Based on this discovery, we propose to multiply these LLRs by a constant factor, which is optimized according to the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart of the soft-in soft-out (SISO) detector. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of the PIC-MRC-based receiver with little additional cost in computational complexity, allowing it to closely approach the performance of receiver using the much more complex MMSE detector.