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Turbo Tax Melts Down on Tax Day
Raven17 writes "Turbo Tax by Intuit completely melted down under the load from last minute filers. Some people have been having problems as long as 24 hours already. I surrendered 2 hours before the East Coast deadline and schlepped on down to the Post Office."
It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.
I just don't understand the dorks that wait so long they have no options.
I filed in February too, with TaxCut, but I intentionally switched to it years ago when TurboTax pulled their malware installation BS (the rootkit, if you'll remember, from about 2001 or 2002). I haven't looked back much, TaxCut has been pretty comparable in my opinion.
Yeah, it melted down big time last night. I tried for 4 hours to file, with no luck. I expect Intuit is going to get sued big-time over this. Lots of angry folks on the turbotax message board last night.
I did the same. I think it was back in 2002. Caused a huge black eye for Intuit because they took forever to acknowledge there was a problem.
I've been using TaxCut online since 2003, and it works great.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.turb otax.com
May it be related to moving from Solaris to Linux last summer?
[/me hides]
I delivered my taxes here in Norway a couple of days ago.
First a piece of paper arrived with the government's estimate of my taxes.
Then I sent them an SMS from my phone letting them know their estimate was correct.
And thats that. Simple, efficient.
Will the procrastinators learn their lesson and file at least a day early? Heck no. They even had two extra days this year. If paying the taxes is the issue, that's what an extension is for.
I am a horrible procrastinator myself, but I guess my greed overpowers that. My taxes were done, returned and spent in February. Woot! New PC!
I also learned a few years back that Turbo Tax is no better than most of the other products out there, free or otherwise. I've been using http://www.taxact.com/ for the past three years. I usually do the download, but I tried the web version for my mother-in-law's taxes. Very smooth, quick, painless and best of all, completely free. I did my mother-in-law's taxes Sunday, 4/15. That's the latest I've ever filed a return. Guess I'm getting sloppy like the unwashed masses.
Or, you could do like I do and (a) have 2 kids, (b) own a house (aka a mortgage), and (c) give at least 10% of your income to charity, and then, with itemized deductions, (d) end up with taxes low enough that, due to the REFUNDABLE Child Tax Credit, you GET PAID to be a US Taxpayer. My federal withholding was $0.00 last year, yet I got a $1300 refund this year. Got $1200 last year too... Oh... I filed (electronically) in February too, got my "refund" in March.
I filed monday morning. I'm still waiting for my confirmation. I'm going to have to call the IRS to find out if it was actually transmitted. You have to admit, it's a neat loophole. The government isn't alllowed to entrap you, so they get a corperation to do it for them, and reap the penalty rewards. Hey we gotta pay for GW's spending somehow, right?
I'm not going to be a guinea pig for their e-file fantasies/experments. If I pay a cent in penalties, the IRS will get paper from me for a decade.
Am I really the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to pay intuit $30 to send my return electronically (which actually is cheaper for the IRS to process) rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it in the mailbox on the way to work? What am I missing here?
Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.
In my opinion, feeling good is highly underrated. If the psychological joy of getting money back on taxes outweighs the joy from interest incurred from having that money early for someone, then I don't see a problem. God knows we pay enough in entertainment costs in a year to make ourselves feel good.
The taxpayers may be saving money in salaries, but $16.95 goddamn dollars to file? Forget it, let them open my letter.
If it's going to save the government money, why should I pay for it?
Personally, I did mine back in February.
Same here. My algorithm is "If government owes me money, file taxes ASAP, else if I owe government money, file taxes as close to April 15th as possible".
Actually they aren't. Nobody working for the government gets paid with "YOUR TAX DOLLARS".
They get paid with Federal Reserve Notes well before you remit any of your earnings. And they will get paid whether you remit anything or not. Because there is a printing press that will give it to them regardless.
Your tax Reserve Notes go to the Federal Reserve to prevent devaluation of the currency. And since the "money" is created out of thin air, that's really the only reason you pay taxes.
The more dollars the general population has, the less a dollar is worth. So taxation serves to remove as many dollars out of circulation as possible, thus supporting the fiat currency.
When you pay FEDERAL taxes, you are not directly paying for any employees or programs ... as the money is simply printed and given to the Federal Government on demand, to distribute to whomever they want. So why, if money is printed on demand, does the Federal Reserve need YOUR money? They can create as much as they want. They don't need yours.
The reason is value. The more money YOU have, the less *value* your neighbor's money has and the government's money has.
Federal taxation doesn't pay for anything, it simply removes monetary supply from the hands of the populace. Less supply = more demand = curtailed inflation.
In short, your are not paying for anything with taxes. You are just supporting the perceived value of paper and ink that has no intrinsic value in and of itself.
TELL me about it. I just went yesterday, to get water turned on in a new duplex I'm moving to temporariy. They would NOT talk to me, unless I had proof of my SS#. They would not take my word..I had to show documentation. My SS card is packed in storage with all my stuff post Katrina...but, fortunately, there was a SS Dept. office just recently opened in a mall closeby, and they gave me a printout which they stamped and the lady signed as a verification doc. This was stupid I thought..I could easily forge something like that if I wanted.
Anyway, neither the water nor the power company would entertain the idea of servicing me without a SS number...I was shocked!!! The last power co. I was with...wanted it if applying online, but, if you went in person and paid a deposit...they'd not need a SS#.
I swear, once I get settled and get some extra $$ back after buying a house..I'm getting a lawyer and working on getting something changed or passed in southern LA to FORBID them from even asking for a SS#.
I've had my identity stolen twice due to SS.....and I usually fight this tooth and nail when it comes up (like with insurance companies), and usually win...but, I'm on a tight time limit..and could not afford to miss billing hours right now...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Every word you wrote is absolutely true. From an economic theory standpoint, it's really quite a critical concept. As a philosophical statement, that was really quite deep and insightful (seriously). However, from a strictly pragmatic point-of-view, that is absolutely worthless.
Money is an abstraction which exists for convenience. It saves us from having to carry chickens to the gas station. Rather than being carrying chickens around, we say, here's an abstraction which we'll all agree to deal in. It's a lot easier and less messy than carrying chickens around. The first step was using tokens to represent chickens. Rather than carrying the chicken, we carried a token that represented a chicken. But it quickly became obvious that, hey, all I really care about is the value represented by the token. I don't care about the chicken (maybe I prefer beef anyway). So let's all just agree to say the token represents an abstract concept of value. Saves the trouble of keeping all those chickens around.
It's true that paying taxes "supports the perceived value" of the currency. So does any use of the currency. When I pay for my gas or Internet in US dollars rather than chickens, I'm supporting the currency. When I get paid in US dollars, I'm supporting the currency. When I browse Slashdot and look at the ends, that translates into resources used, which are paid for in US dollars, which supports the currency.
If you prefer, substitute some other tangible good, such as "cows", "cheese", or even "gold" for "chickens". It's all the same concept.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
You should watch a doc called 'money, banking and the federal reserve'. For every real dollar in the system, the fed loans about 10k to the banks. The american dollar hasn't been backed by gold since nixon killed the gold standard in the 70s. You could say that the american dollar is kept afloat on the global stage because its a petro dollar, people use it to buy oil. This is why iraq (2000) and iran (recently) have switched to euros. Iraq got bitchslapped back into dealing in USD, but if somewhere like saudi arabia started dealing in euros there would be big problems for the us.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Saudis are already using Euros *and* USD for oil. Virtually all of Europe is using Euros only to get their oil. Russia is selling their gas to Europe in EUR as well.
I can't believe that Iran switched 100% to using EUR for oil. China is their biggest customer and they have tons of USD to spend. They probably have tons of EUR as well, but they probably have more USD at this point.
It's been done -- well, something like that, anyway. Decades ago I once had a (seasonal) job as a keypunch operator for Revenue Canada (Canada's IRS equivalent), encoding tax returns. I opened up one and it's full of papers, receipts and forms with a note on the front "I can't figure this out, you do it." Obviously that one got routed to special processing.
OTOH, you can be sure that "special processing" doesn't go out of their way to make sure you've taken every deduction you've got coming to you. If you're paying a mortgage (in the US, I don't recall the rules in Canada) it's almost certainly worthwhile itemizing the mortgage interest instead of taking the standard deduction. (This is not tax advice, IANAL or tax accountant, your mileage may vary, etc.)
-- Alastair
Most of the time, the transmission failed instantly with the dialog box asking you to try again after 4 am. However, sometimes it would completely upload my returns, pause and then fail with some truly bizarre error text. Out of the more than a hundred attempts, this occured maybe five times. The error text was different every time. In these cases I was actually putting a load on their servers. Multiply this across the whole country and you can see how this bug greatly multiplied the load on their servers.
So, although the company is trying to blame the taxpayers for their problem by filing late, I think that Intuit's software is actually to blame for the increased load.
On another subject, why do we have to pay to upload our tax returns? If it saves the IRS money, shouldn't they pay us? Why can't we just use the software and upload directly to the IRS? If the IRS claims that they can't handle the traffic, don't they get the traffic anyway? Your $16.95 per return just pays Intuit to hold on to it for a few milliseconds before retransmitting it to the IRS.