I have done my taxes in H&R as well as Credit Karma, and printed the data for review so I can calculate and confirm why TurboTax is shorting me on refunds. This year is the worst I have ever seen TurboTax software. This simplified idea of tax prep Intuit is using has not made doing taxes any easier
First, gambling losses are being asked on the same screen as gambling income. Just because one cancels the other, TurboTax is removing the gambling income as if it never existed, causing other dependencies to change, mainly on the state tax which is the state the gambling income originated! Nice job intuit.
Next, I am entitled to a tax CREDIT on my state taxes and intuit wants me to pay their ridiculous fee of $39 just to do my state, and they aren't even catching this $50 tax credit? Way to go Turbotax!
And even more is being missed. The State and Local Sales Tax deduction on federal taxes isn't even being presented when letting Turbo Tax do the "walk me through everything" option so I almost left $140 on the table which significantly reduced my refund. I had to manually page my way into a few layers of this botched version of software just to get to the option to choose "let the IRS" calculate using the standard method. Thanks again intuit!
Intuit has hijacked the process resulting in THEIR version of how taxes are to be done and it does not line up with what is good and proper. SO I am furious with how I am being forced to pay for something just to talk to "so called" tax experts who are not even catching these obvious problems. In many cases, actual calculations are not reported to the IRS, only the end result. Since intuit has done things THEIR way, it has caused data to be improperly placed or not at all, which results in incorrect computations. This is the worst tax prep experience I've ever seen and Intuit should be scolded for it. Sorry for anyone who isn't able to understand my frustrations. But wasting hours of my time just to up with incorrect result at the hand of poorly written tax software is what prompted this entire post. Intuit thinks they are the end all of tax preparation done right. The so called pioneers. The role model. The example to be followed. The one to beat? Yet I find all the errors every year and always end up having to correct what applies to me on my own because they take too long to catch errors and implement the respective updates.
These issues are all resulting from Intuit over-thinking the entire tax prep process. We cannot use an altered input process and compare it to actual respective IRS forms, and make a correlation to be able to compare and/or confirm that intuit has done THEIR job properly, to guarantee the largest refund. It's absolutely NOT NECESSARY to manipulate this process with the assumption that everyone is stupid. As a long time user of TurboTax and Quickbooks Business, I have gotten to know alot of tax forms, how and where data should be entered, and when it should be calculated. The fact is, no matter how easy you try to make tax preparation, you cannot change the way the IRS wants it done. Intuit seems to have trouble understanding that you cannot put the CHICKEN before the EGG, when the EGG is what the IRS wants to see first.
