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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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
when I die, I want to go in my sleep, like my grandfather.
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.
or harder then spelling?
Fixed it for you.
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.
Their web app is fine. I run OS X and have used their site for years. Didn't even realize they had a download version.