Actually, it does matter when you filed, because the claim is being made that Colorado is accepting returns on a first-in, first-out basis. The total population of the state is not quite 6 million residents, and, while I cannot find statistics about how many state tax returns are filed here each year, it would be reasonable based on family units to estimate that it is no more than a couple of million total throughout the entire tax season. Looking at federal filing statistics, no more than 10% of all taxpayers file returns as early as February 3rd, so we can extrapolate that no more than about 200,000 have already filed in Colorado by that date, give or take a few thousand. Also based on federal statistics, about 35% of returns are E-filing returns received from self-prepared, so, about 70,000 Coloradans have used tax preparation software to file their returns, of which TurboTax makes up some unknown proportion of that total. If Colorado started accepting returns on February 12th, and accepted (not fully processed) as many as 15,000 returns per day, then they should have at least initially accepted all of the returns filed by 2/3/2024, which TurboTax says they have not. (My estimate of accepting at least 15,000 returns per day is conservative, because, at that rate, it would take the state 133 days to simply accept 2 million individual tax returns, which seems unreasonable, given that would push the process into the summer, well past the filing deadline.) There is a bottleneck of unknown origin in the pipeline, and that is all we know for sure. Colorado says that the return I electronically transmitted through TurboTax on 2/2/2024 has not been filed at all, and that is what I'm concerned about.
