Turbo Taxing

My income tax guy made a huge mistake on my taxes last year that cost me an extra thousand dollars I had to pay. I talked it over with Y, who majored in finance and is taking his CPA license courses and doing well. Could we muddle through the taxes if I bought TurboTax, a highly recommended tax program. We came to the conclusion that we could not do worse than my tax guy, so Y downloaded the software and we were in for better or worse.

The graphics make the program seem so easy, but there is no place to explain that last year, an error was made and this year we have to do it a bit differently than last year. We made it through the federal return, going to the reams of documents to find the specific information we needed at each step in the program. It seemed that we did the return correctly, but Lord only knows!

Then it came time to hit the send button on the federal and check the state return for accuracy and completion. Alas, no state form – and panic set in. We tried everything we could think of to find the return, to no avail. Lacking that, we wanted to purchase the state return and complete it as a separate document. Believe it or not, we could not find an option to purchase a single state copy of the program. When worst comes to worst, call tech support, and what a mistake that was. The woman who answered our call was foreign, based on her very thick accent and difficulty communicating with us. When Y explained the problem, she told him she would check, then they began having a challenging conversation, so I asked him for the phone. I repeated the core problem – we did not have our state return, so could we download it and merge the federal information? Her response was that she would check with her supervisor, which led me to believe that she had limited knowledge of the product, much less the actual usage of the software.

After she told me three separate times that she would check with her supervisor, she finally gave me the bad news. We would have to purchase the state return program separately and start all over with completing it. I told her there had to be an option to merge the information, but I’m pretty sure she had no idea what I was talking about. I finally thanked her for her time and hung up.

Then we started trying to find a way to download the state return and I asked Y if he had saved the completed return. When he assured me he had, I asked him to find it. When he located the completed federal return, I saw the word “state” as Y quickly flashed past it and back to the main menu. I asked him to return, but he wanted to call another service representative. I told him that it said “state” as he looked at the saved files, so he reluctantly went back just to shut me up. Voila! There was our completed state return. We figured out that when we bought the federal program, we also bought the state program, which is what we intended, but we had no idea that we actually had done that. We printed both documents for our files, but also printed the state one and sent it by mail because we had already submitted the federal return and were tired and cranky and just wanted to be finished.

I had everything we needed ready to import to the program – and it still took both of us working together 5 hours to complete the return. Yes, it completes both federal and state returns at the same time, but the language and options are restrictive and don’t allow for much help in preparing the returns. The only positive is that once the federal is completed, the state is auto-completed too, which means we only had to wade through this process once. If I were to rate this software experience, I’d give it a 6/10.