I owe Federal and State money on my Taxes for 2024. But even though I'm paying money out, TurboTax Desktop won't allow me to e-fie until I give it a card number to charge me a $40 "Refund Processing Fee". Why do I need to pay a refund processing fee when I don't have a refund in the first place? I even clicked on "Pay With Federal Refund" and it told me that won't work because I don't have a refund coming. If it's smart enough to know that I don't have a refund coming, then why isn't it smart enough to know that they won't need to send any money to my bank, and therefor won't need a refund processing fee???
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Nevermind. I figured it out. Despite the fact that the UI says that it will charge me a $40 refund processing fee, by the time I get through the payment screen and are reviewing the charge, the refund processing fee is gone, and all that it shows is the State e-file fee.
This is really deceptive messaging. It makes it look like you can't proceed until you pay a $40 fee to send a refund to your bank, when you don't have a refund in the first place. Makes it sound like you have no choice but to pay $40, even though it won't count for anything. I know that it probably looks this way because the designers and engineers created the UI/UX with the assumption that people would have a refund, and so the message would be valid for most users. But that's not always the case. Even though I pay 10s of thousands of dollars out of my paychecks each year to Federal and State taxes, the government always comes back asking for more - and I have no deductions except the Standard Deduction. But, as for the UI/UX, being a software engineer and designer myself, I have to say the wording on that screen should be improved. The wording is very deceptive. I ended up trying to call TurboTax and couldn't get through, and finally just decided to push the button to see what would happen.
Note to any TurboTax software engineers who read this message and are non-native English speakers. In English, "deceptive" doesn't always mean a malicious attempt to harm someone by withholding valuable information from them. In English, "deceptive" can also mean "confusing", "unclear", "non-sensical". In this case, "deceptive" doesn't mean that TurboTax is maliciously trying to harm or defraud the user, it just means the messaging was unclear and would be better if it said something like: "Review payment information for additional processing fees". Something like that.
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