All Posts

Well I suppose I would trust a tax attorney to take the heat for me if he or she screwed up my taxes.  But yeah the same security issues exist in those professions.   I have no idea what specific tools the pros use for their tax businesses.  But at home I simply refuse to use any "cloud" service that doesn't at least claim to give me control over data-at-rest encryption in their cloud.  That means no Google Drive (or hardly anything else Google sells or gives away), no Microsoft OneDrive, no browser-based password vaults, etc.   I use KeePass for account passwords, CrashPlan with a local encryption key for file backups, etc.  It's all on me if I forget my complex passphrases for these apps.  There's no second or third party that I trust to "escrow" those secrets with.   SSL/TLS transport encryption is based on a Certificate Authority architecture that's also got huge flaws -- why do web browsers around the world implicitly trust CAs from countries that most of us have never visited and in some cases wouldn't be allow to enter?   We can only fix so much but it starts with fixing what we can.  That's why I push back so hard (mentally at least) against online tax preparation.  Our whole U.S. income taxation system is way too complicated and really only benefits the professions you mentioned.  We shouldn't be dragged into making our personal data even more vulnerable to theft and exploitation by a tax system that most of us abhor and only go along with at the point of a government gun.

@rudygac you may not have S mode or have turned it off. here's how to check To check if your Windows device is in S mode, go to Settings > System > About and look for "S mode" next to the Edition. Steps to Check if You're in S Mode Open Settings: Click on the Start menu (Windows symbol) on your taskbar and select Settings. Navigate to System: In the Settings window, click on System in the left sidebar. Go to About: Scroll down and select About from the options on the right side. Check Windows Specifications: Under the Windows specifications section, look for the Edition line. If it says Windows 11 in S mode (or similar), then your device is currently in S mode.       if you are not in s mode and your system meets the minimum requirements, your best bet is to contact support. you can allow then to see what you are seeing (screen share) which makes troubleshooting a lot easier. 

Thanks.  Here's my example using your same Schedule 1-A example, where I simply put the line number followed by the TurboTax amount in Schedule 1-A as I get in my (relatively new) 2025 TurboTax Home & Business.   31 $151,000 32 $150,000 33 $1,000 34 $60 35 $5,940 36 $5,940 37 $11,880 Note that $11,880 is $120 less than the full enhanced senior deduction, or 12% of the $1000 difference between $151,000 and $150,000.  Now, I haven't read the actual tax code so maybe it's true that the loss of deduction for MAGI exceeding $150,000 is 6% per person or 12% of the joint total above the MAGI.  However, AI and googled website responses suggest that the loss from being $1000 over the $150,000 per my example is only 6% of the $1000, or $60, meaning this line 37 should be $12,940.   Now, maybe such internet answers are wrong.  I'll show one example of my question and its answer from Gemini's AI engine. Question:  "For a MAGI of $151,000 for a married filing jointly couple where both are seniors, what is the enhanced senior deduction?" Answer (I've cut out some of the detailed explanations for brevity): "For your specific situation, the deduction is $11,940."   So for my example, the question is whether the correct answer is the $11,880 as shown by TurboTax (12% loss of total amount over $150,000) or the $11,940 shown by Gemini (6% loss of total amount over $150,000).   And, of course, I can use other MAGI's above $150,000 and I'll still get the same 12% loss over $150k via TurboTax and 6% loss over $150k via an AI engine like Gemini.  Are you stating that you believe that 12% is the correct figure?   

Since 2024 e-Filing season has ended (that includes TurboTax Online). your pathways are limited. I suggest you contact TurboTax Support to petition for a download of 2024 TurboTax Desktop with State . My understanding is you can get it if you paid the filing fee under TurboTax Online.   @abhijaypatne 

@JohnQT wrote: TRUST NO ONE.  👁 I suppose that includes CPAs, accountants, and other professionals who prepare tax returns for clients using professional tax return preparation software that uploads data to the cloud.

The new senior deduction is not added on to the Standard Deduction.   On a joint return the phaseout is calculated separately for each person, so the 6% phases out for each person. This deduction is intended to provide tax relief for seniors and is in addition to the existing standard deduction or your itemized deductions.  It is calculated on 1040 Schedule 1-A.   Here is a spreadsheet I made.  

Regardless of Intuit's published data retention policies, there's really no way for regular retail customers to confirm what detail of info they're retaining, where they are retaining it, and for what length of time they're retaining it.   Also, even if Intuit customer support claims they have no access to previously transmitted returns, we should assume that their their legal department has unlimited access to any returns that their system administrators are able to locate (see the fine print quoted above).   In any case we can rightfully assume that online tax preparation exposes our tax return information to a much greater attack surface, i.e. an Internet-facing publicly accessible web site storing tax return information for at least as long as it takes a customer to prepare and transmit it.  But using a desktop product to transmit a completed return is likely something more akin to a temporary SSH session that only lasts as long as necessary to transmit to Intuit's forwarding servers.  (And hopefully Intuit's server architecture has their online preparation web server and storage completely separated from a set of store & forward servers that transmit completed returns to the relevant tax authorities -- but we can't be sure of that either...)   So the IT security guy in me (and yeah I've been involved with establishing legal holds on data with  evidentiary significance) says that the risks associated with online tax preparation should be avoided if at all possible.  TRUST NO ONE.  👁

@baldietax wrote: @M-MTax I've not seen any reference to specific timeframes, in the global privacy policy it refers to data retention requirements..... How about what data they retain? If it's simply basic PII (name, address, email, phone number(s), et al), is it that big of a deal? 

@M-MTax I've not seen any reference to specific timeframes, in the global privacy policy it refers to data retention requirements etc but I don't know where that's further documented.  I guess CA have extra rights to get whatever data they have.  But even if you can, maybe it's in some sort of e-file format anyway.   https://www.intuit.com/privacy/statement/ Data retention Unless you specifically ask us to delete your personal information, we retain your personal information as long as it is necessary to comply with our data retention requirements and provide you with services and the benefits of the Intuit Platform and successfully run our business. Even if you submit a deletion request, we may be required to maintain your personal information for as long as necessary to: comply with our legal or regulatory compliance needs (e.g., maintaining records of transactions you have made with us); to exercise, establish or defend legal claims; and/or to protect against fraudulent or abusive activity on our service. This means we may keep different information for different periods. If your account is canceled because you haven’t used it for a long time, we may delete this information immediately. There may be occasions where we are unable to fully delete, anonymize, or de-identify your personal information due to technical, legal, regulatory compliance, or other operational reasons. Where this is the case, we will take reasonable measures to securely isolate your personal information from any further processing until such time as we are able to delete, anonymize, or de-identify it.

@cpassman1959 once your oldest Roth account has been open for 5 calendar years, there is no reason to worry about the "5 year rule".      So ANY of those Roth accounts were opened prior to 1/1/21 and since you are over 59.5 years old, NOTHING would ever be taxed.  Nada.   Otherwise, all your original coversion dollars (as there are no direct contribution dollars) are considered to be distributed prior to any of the earnings).  None of the conversion dollars are subject to tax.     WHat is the sum of all your conversions? $150,000?  then the first $150,000 of distributions are not taxable and once the oldest ROth account has been open for at least 5 years, none of the earnings could be taxed.