There is a fundamental flaw that causes some customer's TurboTax to not actually save any data to the save file. It reads as corrupt when you try to open it but if you examine the file itself you'll see that it has almost no size and opening it with a text editor it's almost blank, just a tiny bit of data is there. No one ever notices that the file is blank because it has just enough data to open as corrupt in TT, but the issue is with TT not saving on some customer machines. Once it happens it seems to be permanent.
No trick to opening the file will work because the file itself was saved basically blank. Whenever you try saving your file, check it before closing TT and you'll see it's tiny in size, too small to have any data.
This comes up a few times each year and these threads get revived from the dead again and again. For a handful of people each year there is no fix and the only solution is to move to another software.
I personally couldn't get a refund when this happened to me despite weeks of trying. I tried calling any number I could find - the last 3 years at least, it was not possible to connect with a human on any phone tree. I tried Twitter - someone said they would look into it and then disappeared. I obviously tried here - the only answer is a canned message and advice to call support which doesn't work because there is no support. I ended up having to do a chargeback after 4 weeks of trying and having already filed my taxes with another provider.
