Deductions & credits

I know what you mean...  Here's the feedback I left at the end of using TurboTax this year:

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I've usually scored you guys 9-10 in the past, but this year, not so much...  I'm filing 2 days before the end of my filing extensions (Oct 13th) and I fought long and hard last night with two annoying and costly bugs:

1.   I had donations to a charity totaling nearly $10k and just that one charity kept getting zeroed out (i.e. the multiple >$3k donations would drop to zero as I was working on other charities).  I click to edit them, click through the same buttons I previous clicked, and when done editing each of the 3 donations, they'd go back to their original value, and after fixing all three, my tax owed would be ~$3000 lower...  I go work on other charitable donations, and they'd go back to zero again.  This happened at LEAST 3 times (maybe 4 or 5, I forget), but even once is unacceptable.  If I hadn't caught it, I'd have been paying ~$3000 more in taxes.

1. When I got to the part of the Federal section where it shows you how your taxes this year compared to last year, it showed my mortgage interest deduction this year was WAY lower than last year.  I went back and reviewed that section, clicked through everything again, and no change.  In the step-by-step stuff, it showed my mortgage interest entered correctly and all the questions were answers correctly.    After switching to forms view (when I've rarely ever done in the ~30 years I've been using TurboTax) to see if I can make sense of what was happening, I found a little worksheet that was asking the same questions as the step-by-step section, but the boxes that were checked were different than I answered in the interview.  I corrected the worksheet info (hesitantly, since I've never had to do that before, and didn't want to mess anything up, rereading if multiple times, to make sure I understood it accurately and was making a valid change), and my tax due dropped $3000+...  I searched around the internet and found people talking about this info back in February and maybe even some having had this issue on the previous year's return.  Scary...

All that said, given that I get updates to turbo tax many times when I started the program over the last few months, I can't believe it's 6 months AFTER the filing deadline and I've not had an updated that fixed this issue that's been talked about for months before the normal filing deadline.  Surely after millions of people have filed their returns, you'd have corrected bugs like these, right?  I could even understand if maybe a patch wouldn't correct it as soon as you updated, restarted, and opened the program again, but if you fixed bugs like this over the months, surely the final check for errors would catch and notify/fix issues like this, right?  It didn't.

As I mentioned, I've been using TurboTax for a long time, since at least 1994 when I was still in the Air Force and my daughter had just been born.  I've used it every year since, recommended it to countless others as easy to use and accurate.  This year, that was NOT my experience.  There have been some minor issues on more complicated things in the past, like how for a number of years, you just had to know you had to go manually adjust the cost basis or RSU and ESPP shares to account for the growth in value of the shares at grant date being captured as income already on your W2s.  Eventually, you guys added interview questions to prompt people to go fix that, but this was a bit more of a nuanced issue, and not something I held against TurboTax.  It wasn't really an error or bug, it was more "if you don't know about how stock plans and taxes work, you might not go do the little bit of extra work you need to do," or at least that's how I gave a little grace on the issue, but the issues this year were just plain glaring errors/bugs that if I can't caught and fixed would have had me owing $6-7k in Federal tax this year, instead of just $214.  That's a BIG couple of potentially costly errors.

If anyone asks for my advice on using TurboTax, I'm going to tell them, this whole story.  I'll tell them it has been great in the past and easy to use, but there were some big errors this year, so be careful and double-check things, but it's probably still a reasonable safe bet, and then I'm personally going to give it a try next year, but if I run into ANYTHING like this again next (when I plan to file by the normal deadline), it will be the LAST TIME I ever use or recommend TurboTax, so hopefully you have any bugs like this worked out by mid-February and they better be worked out before April 15th, 2025.  The whole purpose for using TurboTax is to get your taxes done quickly and easily as possible, and that when complete, they're ACCURATE!.  If I can't rely on TurboTax for accurate returns, then it will have no value to me anymore.  PLEASE to a better job next year and restore my faith in your product.  Thank you.

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