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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.
I remember back in the days of QuickTax -- Windows users could buy QuickTax for a decent price and do their taxes. However, if you had a Mac, you needed to buy Deluxe, as that was the only version provided for the platform -- at a higher price than the Windows Deluxe version, both of which were twice the price of the regular version.
What were the extras you got? IIRC, it was the self-employment, investment income and asset depreciation packages, along with some retirement planning tools.
The other gotcha: the schedules were never updated until AFTER the early filing deadline, which meant I always had to file an update once I'd re-calculated for actual retirement values/contributions.
Well, it's been around 15 years now since I ditched Intuit for a web-based alternative that just works (I get tax refunds now within two weeks of filing), and I see absolutely no reason to go back, or recommend anyone else uses an Intuit product. This is just another nail in the Intuit coffin.
But I hear they're one of the best places to work....
According to one article you can call them to complain and get a free upgrade to the version you need or send a scan of your receipt to H&R Block and get a free version of Tax Cut that has all the forms. Personally, I prefer the former so Intuit knows they have an unhappy customer serious enough to call them on these shenanigans.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
There is too much temptation for politicians to muck with tax rules for various reasons. It's unrealistic they would keep it simple for simplicity's sake. They want bragging rights for new programs or tax breaks, and the negotiating to get such changes passed often creates convoluted compromises.
An interesting idea was that the IRS could simply do your taxes for you and send you a receipt along with stated assumptions to be verified, but tax prep co. lobbyists blew that idea out of the water.
The equivalent works fairly well in other countries, saving people tax prep costs. Let's face it, other countries do socialism better than us. They often do socialism better than we do capitalism even, largely because the United States is not very United.
Table-ized A.I.
Considering that this is one of those things that are virtually perfect for computer automation, how do you know that "real CPAs" won't actually be computers in ten to twenty years?
Ezekiel 23:20
No hand holding required. (That is unless you are the one who is insecure) This is just something that the citizens of other countries expect from thier governments
and Americans have been conditioned to be "Exceptional individualists" to the point that they are getting robbed blind by opertunistic business entities.
Typical American. Took it completely out of context as usual. Can't tou see that companies such as Intuit are RENT SEEKERS. Geez.
It's all cost-benefit. It would take me at least a full working day to prepare everything on my own (I'm self-employed, with investments and several income streams from a couple of different countries), and my CPA charges less to do my taxes than I can make by spending the same amount of time working. I dunno, if your situation is very simple then doing it all yourself probably makes more sense, but as soon as it starts to get more complicated it's likely easier and more economically feasible to hire someone. (Not a CPA, by the way; no horse in this race.)
I have found that paying a CPA to do my taxes is a waste of money.
Get yourself a better CPA. Mine is a tax expert. First few years I used him I did my taxes in TurboTax to compare, he always found enough magic such that he paid for himself in taxes I saved. Not to mention I just had to shovel data to him, instead of spending a few hours in TT myself. :(
Gotta find a new guy though, last year he told me he was getting married and moving out of state