I spent some time googling users' comments on the way TurboTax (erroneously) handles the central issue -- i.e., calculating a student's tax based on the assumption that his/her parents claimed an education credit even where the parents weren't eligible for, and thus didn't take, the credit -- and it seems this same glitch has existed for a few years now. For the life of me I can't understand why they don't just fix it. TT is a solid program overall and it's able to handle issues that seem far more complex than this, so I'm not sure what the underlying problem is. I empathize with the TT personnel who have to deal with this same issue year after year -- they are in a tough spot, and make valiant efforts to reverse engineer a solution (e.g., "just don't enter the 1099-Q" or "just don't enter the 1098-T" or "enter the 1099-Q, but then override the figures in the worksheet in order to get the correct result") when life would be so much easier if TT simply wrote some new code and added a question or two to the interview to determine whether any education credits were ACTUALLY TAKEN. I'll continue using TT, but I'm disappointed that they haven't fixed a problem that's been brought to their attention multiple times.
