How to report a bug?

[kylekoenekamp]

I believe that a logic flaw in TurboTax's education credit interview is causing users to be incorrectly assigned only the Lifetime Learning Credit (LLC) instead of the American Opportunity Credit (AOC), resulting in a significantly smaller and less favorable tax credit.

Financial Impact

• AOC: Up to $2,500, with 40% refundable (up to $1,000 back even with no tax liability)
• LLC: Up to $2,000, entirely non-refundable

I am worried that users affected by this bug are leaving real money on the table.

The Broken Assumption

TurboTax seems to treat two distinct facts as equivalent:

"This is not your first year of college" is being used as a proxy for "You have previously claimed the AOC or Hope Credit"

These are not the same. A student can be in their second, third, or fourth year of college and have never claimed the AOC because they didn't know it existed, weren't informed by the software, or filed incorrectly in a prior year.

Steps to Reproduce The Issue

1. Begin the education deduction credit section
2. Select "No" when asked if this is your first year of college
3. When asked how many times you've claimed the Hope Credit or American Opportunity Credit, leave the defaults at 0
4. Continue through the questions
5. Observed result: User is placed on the LLC
6. Expected result: A user with 0 prior AOC claims should still qualify for the AOC regardless of what year of school they are in — the software should not assume prior claims based on school year alone.

Contributing UX Problem

The question about prior Hope/AOC claims provides no in-context explanation of what those credits are. There is no tooltip, no "learn more" link, and no inline definition unless you manually use the help chat to the right. A user who has never encountered these terms has no way to answer accurately, they will default to 0 out of uncertainty not even realizing this.

Additionally, TurboTax has access to prior year return data for returning users right? The software could cross-reference that data to pre-populate or at least verify this answer rather than relying on user recall of tax terminology they may not understand.

Suggested Fixes

1. Add tooltips explaining the AOC and Hope Credit at the point of the question
2. For returning TurboTax users, cross-reference prior returns to pre-populate the number of prior claims
3. If prior return data is unavailable, add a prompt such as: "Not sure? We can help you check your prior return"
   
   Thank for your time and attention on this potential issue.