TurboTax makes it incredibly hard to contact a real person unless you paid for the good stuff, so I'm here instead to get the warning out.
I had almost finished my taxes, on the last few pages to getting my $600 refund, when all of a sudden, the site pulls up some stuff for me to fix before it ok's and finalizes everything. Well, it told me I needed to re-enter my one W-2. I figured maybe it just didn't fully make it over to the State tax section after Federal. After all, it was just the one job, and it already contained some information, but was asking for me to fill in a few of the blanks.
I entered my W-2 again, and suddenly, my refund went from $600 back to OWING more than $2,000!!! The site continued to insist that this was correct, and tried over and over to get me to send in my payment information and finalize the transaction.
I knew something had to be wrong, so I went back to the beginning and looked over my entire night's work. Finally, hidden among my collection of jobs for the year, I saw it-- the site had taken my re-entered W-2 and ADDED IT AS ANOTHER FULL-TIME JOB. Once I removed that extra "job" from the list, my refund went back to normal.
What concerns me here is how such a severe glitch in the software is going to take advantage of other people out there. Sure, I knew something was wrong, and eventually found the answer. But for someone who's using online tax software for the first time, or someone who doesn't know what to expect, they can easily be royally screwed out of hard-earned money and potentially their savings account because of this.
My only goal here is that hopefully, someone from IT/development sees this message here, and is able to sound the alarm that something shady is happening within their software, and it needs to be fixed asap.
For reference, I used the basic self-employment software, which cost me $130 all-in. However, the glitch occurred on my regular job's W-2, and had nothing to do with the self-employment portion of the software. Therefore, I suspect it would occur on any version of the TurboTax online software, and anyone using it should be wary. Double, TRIPLE-check all your inputs, and don't just take the site's approval as correct.
