The keychain is a function of the Macintosh operating system that stores all kinds of confidential information, controlled by a single password, which is your Mac user password. The Mac operating system is asking you to type in your own password to confirm that TurboTax is authorized to do something. Your password is not captured or sent anywhere else by any other program, this is a built-in security feature of the operating system itself. You are being asked to confirm (by typing in your password to prove that you are the authorized user of the computer) that TurboTax is allowed to do something that it wants to do.
I haven’t installed TurboTax yet on my Macintosh, and I don’t have any thoughts as to why there would be a protected Intuit data file on your computer that TurboTax needs your authorization to access. It might simply be a permissions glitch, where TurboTax created a file when you started it that might contain your preferences or other information, and now there has been a permissions glitch so you are being asked to re-authorize your access to that file.
it could also be a program error. The versions of TurboTax that are released in November and December are basically beta test versions. TurboTax sells them to capture market share, but the tax forms and calculations will not be finalized until mid January, and there may be other errors relating to permissions, or user licenses, or online access.
If TurboTax needs to ask for permission more than once on your computer, that is an indication of a program problem of some kind, but it is not a security weakness.
I would be very surprised if you could actually get someone on the phone with deep enough technical knowledge to understand why this is happening, but you could try.
