[1] http://capitolweekly.net/turbo-tax-maker-intuit-again-is-mir... (link from the article)
[2] http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-g...
[1] http://capitolweekly.net/turbo-tax-maker-intuit-again-is-mir... (link from the article)
[2] http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-g...
Depending upon how complicated your taxes are, it can also be easy to do them by hand. I only recently started using turbotax because I was tired of doing it by hand. My taxes are fairly simple though.
Here's an illustration. Say you sell a security that shows $X,Y00,000 proceeds of which $X,000,000 is cost basis and $Y00,000 is capital gain. It's really important to make sure only the $Y00,000 gets included in any taxable number. The 'math' in question is that this amount should be taxable and this amount shouldn't be, and the checking is that it was correctly expressed to Turbotax.
Turbotax will not make mistakes regarding the business logic of the forms. It will correctly "add the value from line 19d on schedule XYZ" every time. But Turbotax can't know that you entered the data correctly in the first place. It has no underlying concept of "this $Y00,000 shouldn't be taxed" or that you should have used schedule UVW instead of XYZ. It's just a fancy flowchart shuffling some spreadsheet cells. This is why you want to double-check Turbotax's operations using the form views that it provides. The form views are Turbotax's step-through debugger. If you think Turbotax is getting something wrong, it's much more likely that you misunderstood a question and entered something that wasn't what it was asking for.
Perceived bugs in Turbotax are right about in the same space as "blame the compiler" bugs in programming. They can exist, and poor messaging can create false positives, but 99% of the time, it's the user providing some kind of bad input instead.
For my IL return it would not allow me to e-file b/c I didn't have the PIN which is assigned the first year you file. However the system's workflow entered an infinite loop and I had to just abandon and click "print return" order to continue.
> Turbotax will not make mistakes regarding the business logic of the forms.
I do not think this is true. It will let you enter arbitrary values in fields on the form that you should not have edited. It does not re-check and delete unnecessary entries from the forms either, though in some cases these problems trip up the debugger and it forces you to delete the return and start over.
If the forms had truly thorough input validation it would be a very confidence-inspiring product to use.
This year, I just said "fuck it" and went to H&R Block, because I'm just done with doing it myself. Someone else who does this all day can do it faster, yell at the computer less, and I'll get the same results.
All of this should be automated by now, but no...
I've used TurboTax this year and it's frighteningly stable.
Anecdata isn't terribly helpful.
I think for a professional tax preparer it would be great but the wizard left me scratching my head wondering if I'd filled it out correctly.
Worth checking out if you're looking for something else next year.
http://slickdeals.net/f/7774581-taxact-ultimate-bundle-delux...