I'm posting this message in the hopes that the purveyors of TurboTax will improve their product and services, and that customers of TurboTax will glean some useful information in case they are in a similar situation.
I had a very frustrating experience using the software (online TurboTax 2021 Premiere) as well as trying to get help with customer support. I am in a situation where I donated many household items to charity last year. Entering these items (over 1,000!) was extremely painful and took about 20 hours of time in the TurboTax UI. As I entered more and more items, the system became slower and slower. I began timing how long each entry took, and initially, the times were around 25 seconds per item, but eventually became around 100 seconds per item.
That was painful, but worth it, at least nothing bad happened. Right? Wrong. When I went to e-file my return, the system came back with a cryptic message to the tune of "Transmission failed. Try again or call customer service". I tried again. And again. And again. No luck. Finally, I called customer service. The first representative told me there was nothing I could do, and that I'd have to mail in my return. I wasn't really satisfied with the answer but I figured it would solve the issue.
The next issue I encountered was with mailing. I had only saved a PDF of my Federal return, not my state return. Furthermore, my Federal return was 946 pages long. Printing it out and mailing it would be a nightmare! I went back to the TurboTax online site to print out my State taxes, but since I had switched to File-my-mail mode, TurboTax assumed I had filed my return, and did not allow me to edit or e-File my previous returns. So I called customer service again.
This time, the Customer Service rep showed me a workaround to get into the edit mode for 2021 taxes. The trick is to "Add a New State". That rehydrates the tax return so it can be worked on again.
I again tried to e-File with the help of the CSR. We tried many setups, including filing in Firefox, in Chrome, on the phone using Wifi, and on the phone using cellular service. Nothing worked. There were many questions about my computer, operating system, and Wifi. In my opinion, none of those were issues, since I have a very modern computer and great wifi. We spent 2.5 hours on the phone, and the rep would not admit that it was an issue with TurboTax nor open any kind of technical ticket to investigate the issue. Before we got off the phone, her final recommendation was to use an ethernet cable to plug directly into my router. I didn't have one that was compatible with my laptop, so I got off the phone, figuring I'd buy one and try again, even though I was pretty sure that wasn't going to help.
After I got off the phone, I realized that I had a desktop computer that was ethernet capable. I hooked it up to the router using an ethernet cable I had lying around, and lo and behold, I got the same error.
I went to bed figuring I'd delete all my charity items, and then consolidate them into fewer "summary" items, and risk an audit.
When I woke up, I received a message saying my Federal and State tax returns were accepted. Huh? Apparently, my transmission was accepted, but TurboTax was too dumb to know that it worked.
I'm guessing that what happened was that the filing was put on some sort of message queue and that TurboTax times out if the message isn't delivered within a certain timeframe, but the message lives on anyway. A simple message like "Your transmission has been filed. We'll send you a notification when we learn more" would have saved me and Intuit a lot of pain.
The bottom line is TurboTax and Intuit Customer Support need improvement. I'd be a loyal customer if I had some comfort that TurboTax was reliable.
