The technical debt in the installable version of the software has piled up. This year's version may be faster than last year's, but it hangs and crashes, and I responded by saving my work frequently. Even worse, I found a serious bug: I claimed my daughter as a dependent while she filed a separate return stating that she was a dependent on someone else's return. The IRS and the state both rejected my return, but several hours of work with a TurboTax support rep on Twitter made it clear that the problem was with TurboTax, not with me, the user. As a result, I had to print my returns, go to the Post Office this morning, and pay $19.30 to send them in, having already paid the $25 eFile fee.
I have used your product since the days of MacInTax and dot-matrix printers, so I am not a novice with TurboTax. However, it's a safe bet that no one in your engineering organization has a complete understanding of the program's code, since the key developers and architects are long gone. Bugs get introduced year after year and don't get fixed because no one there knows how to fix them. All of the attention goes toward dealing with the growing complexity of the US and state tax codes. At some point, the product will collapse of its own weight, and will have to be rewritten from scratch, much like the situation at the IRS itself.
So I'm out a modest amount of money and a lot of time, waiting to see if my physical copy of my return is accepted or whether I will have to go through more work with the IRS. One of the surveys sent to me after my experience with support asked if I would recommend TurboTax to others. You can imagine my answer to that question, though a sense of propriety limited my use of choice words. Needless to say, don't expect me to become an evangelist for this deteriorating product.
