It looks like my issue was a case of bad design in the iPad app.  Users have to sit through an animated scene of their past info appearing, geared towards starting the current year.  Once a user waits the 15 seconds or so for the animation to end, a continue button appears.

Tapping continue then goes to a screen to buy a turbo tax product for this year. Scrolling 2 screens down finally reveals a “Your tax returns & documents”, requiring one more tap to access.

A proper design would ask users on a non animated landing page what their intent was, access old documents or start taxes for the current year. And adding a link to past documents to the menu that can be opened via the 3 bars icon. The current design seems to be geared towards tricking users into paying for the current year to then open access to past years, which is sadly not a surprise for a company that lobbies Congress to keep tax filing complicated.

To the application designers and higher ups at Intuit: Do better for a change, especially in a time of a global crisis.

To the customer support rep: thank you for trying to assist, and hope you have a good weekend. I hope that the product team takes this feedback to heart to help make your job easier.