I have been using TurboTax for many years and always found it to be easy to use, but the last couple of years things have changed - for the worse. Last year I discovered that all of my income from Fidelity Investments wasn't reported. I used the automatic download of tax documents that TurboTax has built into it, which has always been completely accurate in the past. Fortunately, I was reviewing my tax return and saw the missing income. I had to file an amended tax return to resolve the issue. Then, this year I discovered that Intuit has completely changed the user interface of TurboTax. I could no longer see individual tax forms as I have been able to do in the past. Furthermore, TT says that I owed $4,000 more in taxes than I thought I did. This is pretty easy to estimate because I take the standard deduction and I had all of the raw income figures. I suspected the problem was because my Qualified Charitable Distributions weren't accounted for (these are donations made directly to charity from my IRA and count towards my Required Minimum Distribution - a wonderful option for retirees that don't itemize like me). I tried searching the TT database for how to do this, but could not find a solution, so I called TT help number. I was on the phone for FORTY FIVE MINUTES before I got an answer that worked; the agent on the phone basically had no idea what QCDs are or how to enter them. The answer was to manually enter the 1099-R form from Fidelity that reports the IRA distributions. There you have the option to designate what portion of the distribution is to charity.
I also asked why I couldn't see the individual forms before I transmit them to the IRS and was told all that I could see was a summary of the tax return data, and that I would have to pay the fee and transmit the return to the IRS before I could see them! This is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!! After my experience the year before I didn't trust TT to accurately complete my return. I actually started using Tax Slayer, but gave up, crossed my fingers, and filed a return that I could not review.
