Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

The issue with TurboTax that the author ran into:

>I’d entered my ISO info in two different forms in TurboTax – once after searching TurboTax Help for ISO and AMT, and again when TurboTax asked me about ISOs near the end. I’d originally assumed it was just validating or overwriting the numbers I’d already put in, but it was actually creating duplicates! (C’mon, how does software like TurboTax not validate against duplicate entry???)

That's pretty astonishing and I guess their testing missed it too or assumed the usual ISO field and searching help about ISO were different ... but that maybe should have raised questions for them. You would think just a couple extra sets of human eyes would catch that one.

That's actually very routine with TurboTax. This year when I filed through them they had duplicated a mortgage and also some charitable donations because I did the form and then they asked me again anyway as I clicked back through their interface.

That makes me wonder now. I had duplicates on mine on TurboTax once too ... but I assumed it was me ... maybe it wasn't.

That's unfortunately basically the norm with TurboTax. If you haven't done a specific thing before in TurboTax you should always double check the actual forms, too. You really can't trust it.

Honestly it seems to have different new bugs every year. This year, it completely ignored income from a 1099-DIV imported from Vanguard. It shows the 1099-DIV as imported, and it shows the correct numbers on it, but just failed to add any of those numbers to the totals for dividends and distributions!

Apparently the work-around is to manually edit the form and enter 0.00 on any line the import left blank. After doing that, the software accounts for everything properly.

I found a forum post of TurboTax users discussing this exact issue with Vanguard 1099-DIVs back in January, and it still isn't fixed yet in April. Seems like this could affect a lot of people who just won't notice, because it isn't obvious unless you manually double-check the tax math.

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