Deductions & credits

This is just absolutely idiotic. Last year, the IRS shut down its service centers (now there's a oxymoron) because Trump wouldn't sign the budget, and there were no contingency plans in place to keep things moving, after years of FORCING us all to switch to e filing because it was "faster" (real yreason, it allowed Turbotax and other vendors to generate huge fees for e filing).  Now a year later, and the IRS is AGAIN shut down, and their tool to get a PIN (which is needed to order transcripts to find out why the IRS is rejecting our returns) is busted, their phones are not being answered (because the IRS never spent the money so its service center employees could work from home), and we're again screwed. Turbo tax is sending out unhelpful messages saying that our returns were rejected because either a PIN we didn't know we had was incorrect (unlikely), or because our prior year's AGI didn't agree with what the IRS has on file (which was needed, because we were all forced years ago onto this sucky e file system).  On top of that, the states will not process our state returns because they see that the IRS is not processing our federal returns.

 

The whole system is incredibly stupid, and Turbo Tax, IRS and states are standing back and doing nothing to help.