I've been stuck on submitting my return for a week now, following this thread. I finally decided to call TurboTax today so I could finish. Here's how "great" my experience was:
- Support Person 1: She was actually pretty good. We did a screen share, went through the "Step-by-Step" on my Foreign Tax Credit. We also changed the date from 12/31/2020 to 12/30/2020. That didn't work. Unfortunately, I let her get off the call before I got the rejected email a few minutes later. She said she'd leave some notes in my account for future reference (not that that did any good). This took about 20 minutes.
- Support Person 2: This guy was terrible. He couldn't find my account. He seemed to not be paying attention (I think he was watching TV or something); I had to keep repeating myself and there were many times where he'd be silent for literally minutes until I'd say something like "So did you want me to do something now?". He also originally wanted me to download something called "glence" from http://share.turbotax.intuit.com/ which just redirects to https://turbotax.intuit.com/referral/, a referral bonus page. I kept saying I couldn't understand what "glence" was (I later realized he meant "glance", which is the tech behind TurboTax's share screen feature). In any case, I wasn't about to download some random screen sharing program to share my whole screen - I told him I'd just share it the way the other support person did. He also made me restart my computer, claiming it was necessary after installing TurboTax updates. Anyway, he was very unhelpful and his attitude was bad. In the end, he said to just mail it in (btw, my return is 70 pages!). I think this took about 30 minutes.
- Support Person 3: He was pretty good. He initially also had some problems finding my account, but it worked eventually. We spent almost 2 hours trying various things, looking at different forms, the format of the date (12/31/2020 vs 12/31/20 - the worksheet actually says mm/dd/yy - not that it lets you change that), etc. He originally also said that this was weird and I'd have to mail it in, but I got a bit more aggressive (this is their software - shouldn't there be someone there who can fix it?) and he did a bunch more things on his end with someone else to look into it (I'm not sure what exactly). In the end, he transferred me to a "Tax Expert" who he said would go line-by-line to look at it.
- Tax Expert: This started out promising, but it seemed like she didn't have any context from Support Person 3, so I had to explain again. She also didn't go line-by-line; though she did look through the actual form and said everything looked correct. After about 30 minutes, she also said that I'd likely have to mail it in. I then tried to get aggressive again about how bad of a solution that is. She kept repeating how TurboTax says it's all correct using their "SmartCheck" (as if that's somehow infallible). Eventually, she mentioned that because my return was rejected, any subsequent return now counts as an amendment, which uses form 1040-X instead of 1040; and the IRS isn't accepting those until March 25 (2 weeks from now) and that's the "real" reason it's getting rejected now. Apparently the website version (which she kept trying to get me to upgrade to - the line-by-line apparently can only be done there too) makes this clear and even stops you; but the Desktop version doesn't do any of that. I suggested they should let the technical support people know as that would have saved me a few hours; and her reply was that that's not part of their job and this is all public information that I could have looked up (she was very condescending, and it's not like it's clear TurboTax is filing an amended return when I try again). She insisted that I should just mail it in instead of waiting until March 25 because that can take 2 weeks anyway.
So I suppose I'll wait 2 weeks; but I'm guessing I'll still be in the same boat... That amended return thing makes no sense to me if it was rejected; and clearly other people in this thread are not running into that. I'd really rather not mail it in because it's 70 pages and less secure.
Edit: I looked into that March 25 amended return stuff, and it sounds like that's complete nonsense. You only have to file an amended return if you need to update something after it's been accepted and after the deadline. There is a "superseding return" that can be filed after an accepted return but before the deadline. But if the return is rejected, it's like it was never filed.
