TurboTax Home & Business is asking for Keychain Access

[simonsaba]

I'm using TurboTax Home & Business 2022 on a Macintosh with MacOS 12.6.1 (Monterey). I purchased and downloaded TurboTax Home & Business Macintosh version from Amazon. I activated the program with the product key that Amazon provided. I registered the product and was able to import last year’s tax return. 
As I was working, I clicked File in the menubar to save my work. TurboTax asked me for keychain access with the following message:  

TurboTax 2022 wants to use your confidential information stored in “Intuit ID (a string of letters and numbers)” in your keychain.
To allow this, enter the “login” keychain password.

Clicking Deny at this point dismisses the message but it comes back every time I click FIle in the menubar.

Why does TurboTax need access to my Keychain? 

What will the program do with my Keychain password?
Why did previous versions not ask for my Keychain password?
Will my Keychain password be stored in some ancillary file that TurboTax creates in the User/Library/ location?
Because I activated TurboTax with a program key I obtained from Amazon when I purchased the product, why would the program need an application password?

I understand that these are a lot of questions, but I take security of my system very seriously especially when using a web connected application.

[Anonymous_]

Contact Support tomorrow.

What is the TurboTax phone number? (intuit.com)

[simonsaba]

Tried four calls to support. None of the support agents had the slightest idea what I was talking about. Two were disconnected. One disconnect was at 8:00 when suport closed. Useless. That's why I posted this to the Community. I'm considering asking Amazon for a refund and switching to another product. It's disappointing that the agents are called experts but when asking them about specifics of the program's operation, they have no idea.

[Opus 17]

The keychain is a function of the Macintosh operating system that stores all kinds of confidential information, controlled by a single password, which is your Mac user password.  The Mac operating system is asking you to type in your own password to confirm that TurboTax is authorized to do something.  Your password is not captured or sent anywhere else by any other program, this is a built-in security feature of the operating system itself. You are being asked to confirm (by typing in your password to prove that you are the authorized user of the computer) that TurboTax is allowed to do something that it wants to do.

I haven’t installed TurboTax yet on my Macintosh, and I don’t have any thoughts as to why there would be a protected Intuit data file on your computer that TurboTax needs your authorization to access.  It might simply be a permissions glitch, where TurboTax created a file when you started it that might contain your preferences or other information, and now there has been a permissions glitch so you are being asked to re-authorize your access to that file.

it could also be a program error. The versions of TurboTax that are released in November and December are basically beta test versions. TurboTax sells them to capture market share, but the tax forms and calculations will not be finalized until mid January, and there may be other errors relating to permissions, or user licenses, or online access.

If TurboTax needs to ask for permission more than once on your computer, that is an indication of a program problem of some kind, but it is not a security weakness.

I would be very surprised if you could actually get someone on the phone with deep enough technical knowledge to understand why this is happening, but you could try.

[RealRobert]

Same problem with TurboTax Premium downloaded from Amazon. I entered both my iCloud Keychain PW and also tried my Intuit PW, neither were accepted. Also tried restarting the Mac. Running OS Ventura. Hoping this is a program bug that will fix itself.

[heilfamily]

I'm also having this issue with TurboTax 2020 Deluxe State and Federal for the Mac downloaded today from Amazon running Ventura 13.0.1.  I used my login password (although the dialog box generated is far from clean which password it's really asking for!) and the dialog just "shakes", but does nothing.   What gives?  Is anyone at Intuit even looking at this.  This seems like a MAJOR issue.  I've used TurboTax for 30 years and I've never run into a glitch like this before.  

[RealRobert]

Here's what I know (and don't).

First, my dialog box did the shakes also. It is asking for the iCloud Keychain PW, not your login to Quicken, TurboTax etc. I called TurboTax and surprise of surprises, was hardly on hold and got tech support. The Rep told me he was NOT experienced with Macs, but would do what he could. He wanted to send a link that would allow him to get on my computer, and I said, sorry, that isn't happening so let's do what we can.

He thought that because I imported last year's return from TurboTax the Mac system was asking permission to share the document. So if that's the case, I said I'll just start a new return from scratch... that didn't help.

We tried a few things like deleting and re-downloading/installing the program. No fix. To be fair, if I had let the tech into my computer he might have figured out the issue, but I wasn't willing.

Finally he gave me a link to download the program directly from TurboTax, for no charge since I had verified to him my receipt and authentication so he knew I had purchased from Amazon. I did download the program from their website, and after a bit did get it running, but I'm not really sure what fixed it, because even the new version asked for the PW.

I did find out that I had to check the "Always Allow" box, otherwise it didn't accept the PW. So, bottom line I don't really know if it was the new download, or the always allow option because while I think I had tried that before I'm not sure. Maybe it was that simple?

Not sure this will help, but it's the best I can do.

[heilfamily]

I think I have the problem resolved...at least on my machine.  I was using my AppleID password to attempt to sign in on the keychain dialog box.  In actuality, the password to use is the one you use to sign into the Mac itself.  Once I did that and selected "Always Allow" everything seems to be working fine.

[RealRobert]

Based on our experiences, I'm guessing that "Allow Always" is the fix to get things working. And yes, the PW for iCloud Keychain is whatever you use to log into your computer. I think I recall that long ago and far away, this was a different and unique PW, which turned into the log in computer PW when Apple went to two factor authentication allowing your specific devices to serve as the second factor.

If  "Always Allow" is really the solution, then I would classify this as a 'bug' in TurboTax, especially since there's no clue when it fails as to what's causing the problem. And... this has never been required in previous versions of TurboTax, but this could be caused by changes in Apple's OS and not caused by TurboTax.