THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Decided to switch to taxact.com this year. I’ve used TurboTax faithfully in the past, and I like its ability to automatically pull the previous year’s information, but it’s just too expensive now. By the time you pay for your state return and e-file, it’s $50 or $60.

I was ready to switch to H&R, but when I saw their customer reviews, it was even worse!

http://www.amazon.com/Block-Home-Premium-Business-Download/product-reviews/B0068TJOSQ/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

And this VP lies through his teeth!

“Paul… One of the reasons why we migrated payroll reporting to the web is because the IRS now requires these forms to be electronically filed.”

“Actually only companies filing more than 250 1099 forms must file electronically.”

How many large companies are using this software as opposed to small ones?

If discount American tax preparers - whether the software companies or the human variety - are anything like the Canadian ones, then there’s no such thing as a “good” one.

As a student, I worked for the Canada Revenue Agency for 5 summers in pre-audit. I had only my manual, two weeks training every spring, and my accumulated experience - no accounting or tax training at all. And yet, routinely (not a majority of the time, but certainly a large minority) I would be catching simple errors that were produced by people who were paid and, ostensibly, educated in this stuff. Often, they were relatively harmless errors - putting a number in the wrong box, although the severity of this error varied wildly - but just as often they were catastrophic errors that would end up costing their client thousands of dollars: religious school tuition misreported as a charitable deduction, unallowed expenses claimed against business income, rental income losses (you aren’t allowed to claim a rental income loss in Canada)…

H&R Block, btw, was by far the worst of the lot.

As I understand it, the bargain tax prep companies typically use their own software for the in-person return prep. In other words, you’re paying someone who does not care about the accuracy of your return as much as you do to enter numbers into the software you could just purchase yourself.

I started using Tax Act online a few years ago because I heard good things about it and it was cheaper than Turbo Tax.  I’m not sure what Turbo Tax costs anymore but Tax Act offers a pretty good discount if you sign up before Dec 31 (sorry this is too late to help anyone this year).  I’ve been happy with the switch but I don’t remember having issues with Turbo Tax, either.

I have been working in this field for more than 15 years.  There is a great variety in quality and experience in the business.  There are some who are really very good and some who have little training, ability, and desire.  Many CPA firms hire people for the basic data entry who have very little training and experience.  I have gotten many new clients coming from CPA firms that had made errors on their returns. 

The software has issues also.  In general I’m sure it is much better than it was 20 years ago.  Taxes in some areas can be very complicated.  There are rules, and exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions, etc.  So it is very difficult for a program to be complete and handle all tax situations.  To deal with this problem, programs such as TurboTax make it possible to overwrite any number.  If abused, this can lead to horrendous errors on the returns.  At least some of the proprietary software used by tax prep firms does not allow this type of error.  But this software is designed only to be used by experienced tax professionals.  It does not attempt to guide the individual through the process but assumes that the tax preparer has experience. 

The best way to get good service is to call ahead and make sure that they have someone with experience in your particular area of concern, whether it is international issues, small business issues, real estate, (with short sales and cancellation of debt being unfortunately common these days), investments, credits, and much much more.

I had used TurboTax many years ago, but have been using taxactonline for 3 or 4 years now. When I got ym wage statement, it only took me about 15 minutes to go online, import last year’s data (names, SS#, address) for the whole family, type in this years income and taxes, and go through the questions. The only complication I have is a home office, including some depreciation of equipment.

I’ve always used the free version as I’ve been able to handle filling in the questionnaires without needing any bells or whistles. They’ll charge me about $15 for a state return, but Pa has a flat rate, no exemptions, so it’s on a post card. I can do that without a computer.

Using Turbo I also found that I had to pay an extra $20 when e-filing state taxes in addition to the cost of the of the state return.

Made the switch to taxact.com a couple nights ago. It’s interesting—taxact doesn’t advertise that they will import turbotax info like H&R does, but, they essentially have the same feature IF you saved a PDF copy of your previous year’s return. I uploaded my PDF’s for federal and state and it automatically pulled in almost all the info. The rest was easy to enter manually.

I found taxact.com more convenient to use than turbotax—less hand-holding and more direct access to forms. Turbotax is great if you’re really unsure about your taxes, but if you’re pretty confident about your situation, then the endless questions get a little tedious.

$18 total for Federal + State Deluxe (itemized deductions), with e-file for both.

@NeilS

Just to prevent misinformation, you are allowed to claim a rental income loss in Canada. What you can’t do is claim CCA (depreciation for tax purposes) in order to create or increase a rental income loss.

H&R Block are terrible though. I had one client who came to me from H&R, they had a business that was losing so much money that they went under, and yet H&R calculated that they owed $40,000 in tax. It took me 15 seconds to find the problem; they had included sales tax collected as income. Amateurish to be sure.

Just filed, and thought of this thread. I’ve used H&R Block’s Taxcut online for several years and have had no problems. My state allows filing online directly through its revenue service, so I’ve never used their service to file anything other than federal.

This year, my return was more complicated than normal, and there was a problem with my wife’s withholding, meaning I had to pay in a significant amount to the state. I ran through all the checks in the software, it “checked” my return, had me put in account numbers for a withdrawal, and then submitted my return yesterday afternoon. About 24 hours later, I got a text saying I needed to check my return’s status. When I logged in, it said that the state where I live accepts only money orders or checks for payment, not bank drafts!

Was this a surprise to them? Are they so incompetent that they couldn’t have built that check into the system earlier? The ONLY reason I use this software is for e-filing, and now that I’ve paid them $40 or $50, they decide to tell me they can’t actually file for me?

So yeah, very unsatisfied FORMER H&R Block user here.

I used taxact.com this year and was very happy with it.  Thanks to those here who recommended it.  I’m certainly not going back to TurboTax.  It had all the convenience of TurboTax, was just as helpful and was marginally less convoluted, and it was free (for federal).