As painful as it was, I downloaded and paid the $75.00 plus tax for the H&R Block Premier desktop app for Mac which is supposed to include the State (more on that later). Apart from me spending about 4 hours re-creating my return in the H&R Block app, the H&R Block app was fully able to accept the income/loss data from Schedules K-1/Form 1065 etc.
I just filed my return with both the IRS and Ohio. Coming from TurboTax, a few notes about the process:
- H&R Block seems to have a better capability to download documents from financial institutions than TurboTax (H&R Block found a 1099-INT that I had not noticed inside one of the comprehensive forms they sent me).
- Like TurboTax, the first part of H&R Block is all about Federal before smoothly transitioning to State. HOWEVER, H&R Block stumbled at the break point. It asked me to PAY $39.95+tax for the state. I was too annoyed to fight it, so I paid it. But then it kept telling me that I had to pay for it... the license never activated. So I did "Chat help" with a HUMAN agent and they ended up sending me a download link and told me how to activate it. Once I did that, worked fine. They charged $19.95 + tax for e-filing the state which is I think comparable to TurboTax.
- After filing, I went back to the Chat agent. They agreed I had paid for state that should have been active and they have initiated a refund.
After the refund, the total (with tax) for federal and state software and e-filing will be $101.36.
Clearly a cost savings over TurboTax Premier which they billed me back in November for $112.09 (which I believe was without the state e-file).
So now I will have to request a refund from Intuit for their defective product that wasted three weeks of my time and several hours of extra work and aggravation.
