@SDSoCal Thank you for posting this frustration of not being able to efile extensions within the Desktop versions of the tax software, which has been a frustration for me as well for many years using their Desktop versions!!
I understand that a free extension can be completed by going online. However, that is the point of our frustration, as we want to file a free extension from within the software that we purchased and not have to go through the extra steps of going online and re-entering information and it not being tied to our desktop version so that we can easily see that we did indeed efile an extension and received a confirmation when we go into our software or when we save our tax documents to pdf. I do save a copy of the extension and confirmation from the online free extension site, but it would be convenient to have it right in our purchased software for no extra cost!
The other frustration is that the desktop version lets us efile 5 family federal tax returns. However, if we need to extend all 5, then we need to go online to do it, BUT we can only efile one tax extension per online account. Therefore, to do the 5 extensions, we have to set up 5 different online accounts with different emails. For record keeping purposes, this is very cumbersome to keep track of which extensions are efiled with which online account, especially if I want the email confirmations to all come to me for tracking and recordkeeping purposes.
@SDSoCal I couldn't agree with your comment more regarding: "The 'can't e-file from desktop' problem is obviously fixable; if Intuit can e-file returns from desktops AND they can e-file extensions (for free) online; you can't tell me it's impossible to combine those two tasks and e-file extensions for free from desktops."
Also time consuming from not being able to efile from within the software is having to take the time to research, "why can't I efile my extension from TurboTax desktop?" only to be disappointed to find out that there is no way possible, and we have to either go through the hassle and cost of paper filing the extensions, or continue researching to find out that there is a link to efile online and re-enter information.
Even in reading this thread and knowing exactly your point of your original post, it was frustrating that the answers provided ignored the point of the issue and answered that we have to paper file or go online, instead of a TurboTax rep bringing this issue up to the developers years ago, since this is a FAQ every tax year, and then this would have been a nonissue in the first place!!
TurboTax just wants to make things tedious so that many taxpayers end up going online and feel they have to purchase more products just to get a simple task done, because they don't have time otherwise to figure out how to quickly efile an extension for free.
