Intuit Charges More For Previously Offered TurboTax Features, Users Livid

An anonymous reader writes: For years, the Deluxe edition of TurboTax was enough for investors and the self-employed to do their taxes. With this year's edition, Intuit removed Schedules C, D, and E, covering self-employment, investment income and asset depreciation. Those features now require an extra charge of $40. The company is getting murdered on Amazon reviews for it, with 900 users giving the software a 1-star rating.

Comments

Just hire a CPA

[Ark42]

If you're self-employed, have investment income, or asset depreciation, you probably already do your taxes with a real CPA. If you aren't, you probably should.

Re:Just hire a CPA

[gatfirls]

...or if 40$ hurts that bad maybe reconsider your self employment and/or investments.

Re:Just hire a CPA

[AuMatar]

If they had just said "Hey we're raising prices" rather than hiding the price increase by removing features and making you pay extra for them, they'd probably have come out ok- a bit of a hit from the higher prices, but not too much. The dishonesty of this is what's killing them.

Re:Just hire a CPA

[Charliemopps]

...or if 40$ hurts that bad maybe reconsider your self employment and/or investments.

The point is, they aren't offering anything for that $40. It's the same thing as last year, but twice the price. And there are a dozen other products out there that don't charge that much. In fact, many are free and simply charge for state filing.

Re:Just hire a CPA

[lgw]

My "real CPA" does just type all my info into his (better) program, then file my taxes and charge me $500. Easily worth it: he can drag me through the whole process in 1 hour, including exceptions. "Oh, Fidelity screwed up your basis for these positions, as they have with all my clients, here let me add the form where I amend that so you don't get charged twice". No stress, 5 minutes, fixed. He adds a ton of value to what he tax program does by understanding context.

Re: Just hire a CPA

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

And it might well be; but it was Untuit, among others, who helped save. Us from the crushing fascism of having the IRS provide us with the estimate of what whe owe(which they obviously calculate anyway in order to look for discrepancies.) Hire your own independent person if your position suits it; but it is absurd, (and directly a side effect of lobbying by people who ought to be lined up and shot, in the gut, and allowed to die slowly) how little the IRS can simplify even the most prosaic of tax returns without a private middleman taking their pound of flesh.

Re:Just hire a CPA

[NicBenjamin]

Have you ever heard of ethics?

It's kind of important in the tax prep field. I do not file returns I know are wrong. Period. I've filed returns that I'm pretty sure we're seriously bending the rules, but if a client hands me a piece of paper that legally required to be on a tax return he'll just have to live with me putting it on the damn tax return.

This exact scenario actually happened to me. Guy got out of prison, worked a couple days as a groundskeeper, and got a better job. So he had just under $400 on a 1099-MISC. Since it was on a 1099-MISC it was definitely reported to the IRS.

If I hadn't reported it, it probably wouldn't have resulted an audit. But that's because they don't bother with audits when they know they're right. What they do is program their computer to send you a letter (starting with a CP-2000) saying they think the return is wrong. Since he can't show them he didn't get paid for those two days a few months later he'd get a CP-22 informing him it was time to pay up. Now they wouldn't send the cops after him, but his next year's tax return would be reduced by whatever number was on the CP-22 plus interest.

Which would mean that, from his point of view, he paid me to do a simple thing right, and not only did I do that one thing wrong I got him in trouble with the law again.

Re:Just hire a CPA

[Darinbob]

If you get even one number wrong or leave off something, you get an ominous letter from the IRS and you have to correct your form. So if the feds already know all this information, they should just send us a completed tax form for us to either agree with or amend it with deductions. Most of the stuff on the form has already been reported to the IRS; exceptions would be self employment, foreign income, tips, etc.

Schedule D?!

[twitnutttt]

Maybe I can understand the self-employment schedules as an upcharge, but Schedule D?!
That's something the average American household should (hopefully) be needing for their investment savings.
Owning a few mutual fund shares should hardly be an esoteric tax topic!

Plus, ya know, ahhh Bitcoin. (Just kidding)

Re:Schedule D?!

[epyT-R]

Just because you're self employed doesn't mean you're rich.

Re:Schedule D?!

[ShanghaiBill]

Just because you're self employed doesn't mean you're rich.

I have found that paying a CPA to do my taxes is a waste of money. Most CPAs just take your information, and pay some data entry clerk to type it into TurboTax. You might as well just put it in yourself. You have a bigger motivation than your CPA to find deductions, and you will learn from the experience how to better structure your business to avoid taxes in the future.

Re:Schedule D?!

[sexconker]

$350 for what? Convenience?
It's simply enough to fill in the forms yourself. Programs like TurboTax handled all of this for the brain dead masses just fine, and used to cost an order of magnitude less than the CPA. And no, the market won't bear the change. Hint: This is why this story exists. People are bitching and leaving TurboTax in massive numbers. My own mother dropped it because of this in favor of some other software that does the exact same shit but charges less money.

Re:Schedule D?!

[ShanghaiBill]

Now, if I had a lot of capital assets to deal with, maybe that would have made things harder, but I didn't.

TurboTax handles capital asset depreciation perfectly. You only enter each asset once, and it will track it from year to year. Sometimes things get complicated, like when they changed the depreciation rules after the 2008 recession to encourage more capital spending. Lots of accountants screwed that up, but TurboTax did not.

It is a good idea to consult with a CPA when you first set up your chart of accounts, but after that you really need to learn to do your own basic accounting and tax planning. If you run your own business, these are core competencies. You may not understand accounting as much as a CPA, but you understand your business much better.

hobby business

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not worth hiring a cpa for a few grand but you still have to report it

Re:Not just self-employed..

[epyT-R]

Your fake incredulity notwithstanding, most people do not have the cash for that. They have to pay bills.

Douchebag company anyway

[darronb]

They 'expire' the online features of their Quicken, etc software every few years, to force an upgrade. They have no need to do anything on their end with the online connectivity... it's all connecting directly to banks. It's crippling their software to force upgrades that add very little value (and usually add more bugs than improvements).

They also at least at one point had 'problems' connecting to network printers that they had to go out of their way to detect, just to force upgrades to higher level software.... because, you know... people with network printers must be businesses.

F--- them. There are very few people I actually despise, and the executives there certainly made the list.

Re:Not just self-employed..

[gatfirls]

Pretty much:

http://www.fool.com/retirement...

Re:Open Source Tax Preparation Software

[pavon]

Tax preparation software is not a good candidate for open source software. You need domain experts (accountants and lawyers) to be involved to validate the interpretation of the Tax Code; open source projects have a difficult time attracting these sort of contributors. The law changes every year and if you don't keep on top of the changes becomes worse than useless; it becomes a liability. You have solid deadlines; you can't just release when it is ready.

Re:Dirty Little Secret

[mrbester]

Sorry, I live in a country where if they want to tax me they make the effort to work out what I have to pay instead of expecting me to do their work for them.

Re:Use TaxAct instead

[bhlowe]

Agree. TaxAct kicks ass. Should of hired them to implement the Health Exchange website.

Re:Schedule C is not Only for Business

[LynnwoodRooster]

Schedule E is the rare one. It's only for landlords.

Have a few friends living in your house with you, and they pay some rent towards mortgage? You're the landlord, you need a schedule E. Likewise if you have a sole-individual lease and sublease out a room or two to friends/roomies...

Re:So are taxes easier

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is a +1 Informative mod, why isn't there a -1 Wrong option? :|