I just received an email from TurboTax yesterday, and it concerns me immensely. It relates to "Information regarding your 2016 tax return", and was sent to my mother, who is no longer with us. I used to do her taxes and I used my email address as the point of contact for information regarding e-filing her returns.
The email asks whether I want to re-review her 2016 return to claim state sales taxes. The links that are provided all start with Intuit.com, but it is very difficult to trace long links that may have nasty code embedded within them.
My concerns are two -
(1) Is this a legitimate email? Or is it a phishing attempt?
(2) If it is legitimate, then why is TurboTax concerned about something that may or may not be on my mother's tax return? Does Turbotax actually look at the internal details of the returns that are transmitted to the IRS and does it "harvest" specific information from those returns? If this is true, then I am very concerned about using TurboTax. Who, at Intuit, is looking at my tax returns to see what they can harvest from them? When did I give Intuit permission to actually inspect the contents of my tax returns, beyond the information that is needed to file it electronically?
Can anyone explain to me why I received this email? I cannot think of a good reason for it.
