I have spent 3 days on the phone with TurboTax support. They have multiple bugs in their mortgage interest deduction wkshts. How do I get them to fix it?

[acave]

Ex.  There is a Home Mort Ded wksht that comes and goes.  It calculates the deductible mort interest limit.  When it is selectable and I can view it, I can see that for any loans you have it makes the assumption they are for different properties and always SUMs them.  You can check the "paid off" boxes, mark the loan acquisition box, etc - all fields that impact this calc - and it ignores them, always summing the loands.
If you have points not reported on 1098 - it always reports them as though they were on 1098 making them fully deductible when they are NOT.
The wksht correct makes the caclulation to divide the pts over the life of the loan, it simply pulls the wrong value when transferring to the wksht
I could go on as there are lots of issue.  Click the help and it states that box 2 is your end of year balance when it is actually your beginning year balance (recently they updated help after I reported this, but only fixed 1 of 2 paragraphs - now it states both cases which contradict each other)
On mortgage int it is short changing tax filers.  On mortgage points it is artifically inflating how much is deductible in the current year.  It is also applying the false mortgage limit to the incorrectly calculated decutible points.
None of this is usable.  the Desktop SW and Online SW make the identical mistakes.

[jtax]

Did the customer support reps escalate/report the bugs?

[acave]

I have called and called and called.  Most of the time, the reps have no clue what to do.  They tell me they are transferring me to the tech team, and I end up with tax advice.  Not helpful.  The one and only time I reached the tech team, they had dev on the other line and we spent 90 minutes working the issue.  It was not a productive session.  The dev was unable to even understand the problem.  Of course, I could demonstrate with Glance to the tech rep.  Apparently he could not share that directly with the dev.  Pretty frustrating.  I have worked directly independent contractors that Intuit hires for bug resolution in the past.  Doesn't sound like they still have the same support model.  

This will cause many that refie'd their mortgage to end up artificially hitting the mortgage deduction limit and get screwed out of their perfectly eligible write off.

[acave]

Also, I can game the system.  I can manipulate the worksheets to give me full credit for the Mortgage Interest.  If the IRS inspected closely, they may reject it, even though correct (I have to remove the beginning and ending balances which are causing the faulty calculation).

In addition, it lets me fully deduct mortgage points that are required to be amortized.  Again, I can submit that, but I'm confident the IRS will catch it and reject it.  The pts are not reported on my 1098.  IF they were, it would indicate they are from a purchase of a home and therefore eligible.  So, the fact they are pulled from my HUD docs means they must be amortized.  However, the bug is entering them into the "reported on 1098" line instead of the line below it on the TurboTax wksht.  I would expect the IRS to notice they are not reported on the 1098 during an automated check and kick back the return.

[jtax]

I will ask the TT employee moderators of this community forum to look into this for you to see that it has been reported.

I haven't looked into your problem, but generally a bug so early in the tax season that effects a lot of people will get noticed and fixed before too long.

[acave]

If you can get their attention, that would be great.

As far as bugs, I hit some massive bug every year with TT.  A couple years ago, I could not get them to fix it and had to resort to H&R Block.  Also not a good experience.

One year it was 1099-INT income and they completely blew it, causing the outcome to be taxing non-taxable income.  Took me weeks to get it addressed.  

There are massive issues with Schedule C that have never been fixed.  Generates an artificially high deduction for home office, by about 5X.  I keep filing it and the IRS has yet to realize the mistake.  Still, this is a substantial bug in TT.  At least it favors the tax payer. 

I could go on, but I think you get the point.  Serious bugs with $many thousand impacts occur every year.  These are not a $couple hundred here and there, but huge errors.

Worse, these are easily checkable/verifiable errors that should be caught by test routines.  Clearly TT doesn't know how to test SW, or maybe doesn't test SW.

[jlbrick]

For some reason, TurboTax has decided not to fix this bug, even though it's been a known issue for over a year.  See discussion here: https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/tax-credits-deductions/discussion/bug-with-refinance-on-a-large-mo...