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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.
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.
Morphing Software
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....
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)
Intuit top management got a huge pay raise in 2014. That money's gotta come from somewhere.
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.
and apparently "chicken" isn't valid input? 1/5 This new software sucks.
OMG facts!
Your fake incredulity notwithstanding, most people do not have the cash for that. They have to pay bills.
As I recall the company was called the IRS. Yes that is right the IRS put out software so you could do your taxes.
You know why you don't see it? Lobbying by tax preparation companies.
Yeah, this is a thing companies are doing to consumers now.
It's also a big topic of conversation at the dinners I have to sit through with money-grubbing shitfaced sociopathic CEOs.
It's called retrocharging.
It works on the same model as MMORPG's and DLC except it's more insidious: The company threatens to take away something you already have unless you pay them more money.
Comcast does this. They are now doing "account audits" after which they send you a letter telling you they're going to start charging for features they claim you have always had but haven't been paying for.
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.
The best way to do your taxes is with a ball point pen on tax forms that you've printed on your own printer. Just fill in the same stuff you did last year, recalculating or modifying the numbers where they've changed.
Federal + state takes about an hour, and you're not paying anyone a penny, except for two stamps. You can do self-employment taxes and investment income yourself, and pretty much anything a typical Slashdot reader would ever need.
Don't bother with "free file" unless you work in a state without income tax. That's where they charge you. Forget about H&R Block: Saves you no time whatsoever and they charge you a lot. If you make an honest mistake on your taxes, you can file revised paperwork. The IRS understands that people make mistakes. H&R Block doesn't "find you money." They do the same work you can do in an hour.
If you happen to make well over a hundred thousand dollars a year, congratulations, you're not a typical Slashdot reader. Pay an accountant to do the job. Don't even think about doing your own taxes.
If you have a side-job that doesn't withhold you are legally required to report it as a business. That way Self-Employment taxes get calculated properly, and you get credit with Social Security administration. The only out is if you earned less then $400. Then you're exempt from Schedule SE.
Which means that if you make $500 helping a caterer do big banquets, or even if you work for a cheap-skate who does't like withholding, you've got a Schedule C. You have to have some records of whatever expenses you paid to do the job (this is pretty much the only way you can deduct commuting mileage), you have to put them on the form, the whole nine-goddamn yards.
Schedule D is less common, but not as rare as you'd think. It;s where you report stock sales, so any Slashdotter who lived the dream of a successful start-up has filed quite a few of these. Most of Mitt Romney's income is actually reported on a D, because he pays himself with stock from his company, which he holds for a long time, which allows him to take advantage of the very low long-term Capital Gains rate.
Schedule E is the rare one. It's only for landlords.
Pretty much:
http://www.fool.com/retirement...
I switched to TaxAct last year as the discounts I got from my e-stock brokers were severely curtailed. What happened this year doesn't surprise me in the least.
I have schedules D and E, and the only issue with TaxAct that I had 2013 taxes was the State E-filing option. I ended up filing state using paper.
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.
Wow! If corporations are people too, Intuit appears to be acting like a very stupid one. It is painful to read their responses to the complaints on Amazon.
For example:
"As I've mentioned in many other places, you are NOT required to upgrade to Premier. You can still use forms mode to complete Schedule D and print/mail your return to the IRS. There is no forced upgrade or requirement that you purchase Premier."
I literally was going to order TurboTax tonight. I've been using it for years. Not anymore.
when I die, I want to go in my sleep, like my grandfather.
Taxable interest is a line-item on the 1040. It's not treated as "investment income."
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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.
The governments of most advanced countries provide free on-line income tax preparation for thier taxpayers. Not so in 'Murica it where it is "monetized".
There is quite a powerful American lobby (Intuit mostly) in place to keep things that way. This is perfect example of what happens when outfits such as faux news brainwash americans that no good can come from a government run program of any kind. The other advanced countries do not charge anything as they see it as something in thier best interest.
Not if they keep believing people like you.
It is incredibly fucking complex.
I work for a major tax prep company, and we're upgrading this year. The big bosses finally got sick of paying two guys to come out of retirement every year because nobody else understands a DOS Codebase.
They've been trying to upgrade for about three years, but the program was never ready. Even today we'll have to switch over to the old DOS software for certain returns.
or harder than spelling?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Link
It is much cheaper, has equivalent features, and better technical support than TurboTax. I started using this back when TurboTax added horrible DRM to their offering, and have never looked back.
And put all those accountants and lawyers out of work!
I've been using their tax software for years and haven't looked into their offering this year because I found an alternative that lets you pay what you want to, including nothing, after you have filed. It's at simpletax.ca in case anyone is interested. Now I just need to find an alternative for my company taxes.
Sounds like business as usual 4/15/14 /. post about turbo tax lobbying against simplifying the tax system
The government makes the tax laws and could, in theory, check that everyone has paid correctly. So why do we have to do this yearly ritual? How about the bizarre game of guessing how much to deduct from your salery and how many exemptions it needs to be - just have the correct amount deducted automatically.
Anyone with complicated finances, which would include any business, or who doesn't trust the government would still do it the same as now, but for most people it'd be far simpler.
Because as ProPublica reported, Intuit has spent over $11 million lobbying to prevent the IRS from offering us that service. That's why, every time we discuss electronic filing on Slashdot, we get posts from outside the U.S. saying, "Ha! Ha! Stupid yanks! We file our taxes automatically for free!! How's Obamacare going?" And the worst thing is they're right. We are stupid for letting corporations buy Congress and run the country.
http://www.propublica.org/arti...
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing
by Liz Day
ProPublica, March 26, 2013, 4 a.m
Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.
It's already a reality in Denmark, Sweden and Spain. The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate.
The idea, known as "return-free filing," would be a voluntary alternative to hiring a tax preparer or using commercial tax software. The concept has been around for decades and has been endorsed by both President Ronald Reagan and a campaigning President Obama.
"This is not some pie-in-the-sky that's never been done before," said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "It's doable, feasible, implementable, and at a relatively low cost."
So why hasn't it become a reality?
Well, for one thing, it doesn't help that it's been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software — Intuit, maker of TurboTax. Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist and an influential computer industry group also have fought return-free filing.
Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.
It's already a reality in Denmark, Sweden and Spain. The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate.
The idea, known as "return-free filing," would be a voluntary alternative to hiring a tax preparer or using commercial tax software. The concept has been around for decades and has been endorsed by both President Ronald Reagan and a campaigning President Obama.
"This is not some pie-in-the-sky that's never been done before," said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "It's doable, feasible, implementable, and at a relatively low cost."
So why hasn't it become a reality?
www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-grassroots-campaign-against-free-simple-tax-filing
TurboTax Maker Linked to ‘Grassroots’ Campaign Against Free, Simple Tax Filing
Intuit and its allies are continuing to work against proposals for what’s known as return-free filing.
by Liz Day
ProPublica, April 1
Yes, but it takes a week to find papers and reset passwords for direct import from bank/brokerage accounts. If you have a hardcopy of everything in one place, filing by yourself is dead simple too.
Intuit has a near monopoly with Quicken, and a major draw of TurboTax is having data flow into there trivially from the program that's already tracking your bank statement each month. If they still had viable competitors, they wouldn't be trying these tactics.
There is a support page for TaxAct that mentions there is no Mac version, and instructs you to try the web version instead...
But at the end it says:
"Also, please ensure you are using the latest version of Internet Explorer "
Rather hard since Microsoft discontinued that for the Mac years ago!
At least the system requirements page is accurate, mentioning the three major modern browsers on the Mac...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I haven't used their equivalent of the deluxe version, but the standard one has worked well for me for quite a few years and costs less than Turbo Tax.
With all this uproar it sounds like TurboTax has become the ObamaCare of tax software.
No brain, no pain.
Additionally, they now charge to view old tax returns filed with them
You are mistaken. Even if the IRS COULD track every transaction, they wouldn't know enough.
Given our current set of tax regulations it would be generally impossible for the IRS to figure out your tax liability by watching all your transactions. In many cases there are multiple options for the tax treatment of a transactions which may result in different tax liabilities. There are even non-financial transactions (ones that don't involve money changing hands) that can drive differing tax bills. And you cannot just say you will take the minimum liability every time because some times you WANT to pay more now for the opportunity to pay less later (Like a ROTH IRA). There is no way for the IRS to figure these choices out for you.
This regulation difficulty plus the *fact* that it is totally impossible to track every transaction made by US citizens/tax payer world wide, makes it impossible for the IRS to just calculate your tax burden directly.
Other countries have different ways to levy taxes than the USA. Where they may have the ability to track transactions and their regulations allow them to automatically collect taxes, such an option will not work here without a lot of very disruptive tax law changes. IMHO the tax code here is WAY too complex and needs to be simplified, but until that's done, there will be no "automatic" way to calculate and collect taxes and products like TurboTax will be viable. However, woe is the politician that attempts to overhaul the tax system, their opponents will howl about how unfair their simplification is or how it ignores this pet tax break or two and nothing will get done.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I think what Intuit actually blocked was the IRS providing a software solution similiar to all the other commercially available stuff. This would have effectively killed 90% of those commercial products business.
The US government could very well setup a system like much of the rest of the 1st world uses. That is the government tells you what it thinks your taxes for the year should be, and since those taxes are already being withheld they have the money. You then get to tell them if you think the amount is correct or not, some systems don't even require your input and you only contact them if it's wrong. In the event that they owe you money you provide the documentation via forms and receipts or whatever showing that they owe you money. The USA could very simply do this for a very large chunk of the population. Your W2 and 1099's are all sent to the Fed anyways, they have all they need to calculate the form for most people. Currently whether or not your taxes are simple or complex you have to file all the paperwork, and hope they don't disagree. They should just figure it out and the taxpayer only interacts with the Fed in the event they think the Fed has it wrong.