@Mike9241 wrote:
Turbotax is not professional software. if is merely designed to handle the most common situations. many taxpayers that would be subject to the limitation use pros. even some pro software is limited in what can be handled. the more sophisticated the programming the more it costs to write the code and that cost is passed on to users.
Sorry, but this just doesn't hold water. TurboTax could simply say "foreign income not supported", but it does not. Using the FEIE and/or FTC is the most common situation when one has foreign income. If they are going to sell a product that claims to support returns reporting foreign income, then it cannot be a partial, buggy implementation. One could argue that it needn't provide the same standard of service as it does for domestic income, but it must at least function correctly. In 2020 it did not.
TT certainly could afford to make it work correctly:
Intuit brought in $7.7 billion, up from $6.8 billion in FY 2019, the growth mainly fueled by TurboTax Online and TurboTax products.
$7.7 billion! With a B! I promise you they could fix all of this for 1/10th of what just one of their executives got paid in 2020 alone.
Instead, TurboTax's handling of foreign income puts unnecessary burden on the user by not bothering to do basic calculations, fails to direct the user to relevant information, and, worst of all, what it does do is buggy.
Here are the bugs I suffered preparing my 2019 return:
- Incorrect summation of foreign income (see above.)
- Incorrect entry on 2555 line 19, failing to follow instructions that are printed on the form, "Don’t include income from line 14, column (d)"
- Failed to identify the FTC as clearly much more advantageous than FEIE+FTC.
Refund with former, additional tax owed with latter. It's a simple calculation, there's zero reason not to run it and provide the user with the information. - Claimed the FEIE using the (subjective, non-deterministic) bona fide residence test instead of the (objective, deterministic) physical presence test, when the latter was much stronger.
No option to use the latter was given. There were no questions in the workflow to assess qualification. No guidance to relevant information was given. Probably because there is almost nothing about it on their site. And what is there is incomplete and inaccurate.
