Review by JJCEO

I just did my taxes for 2014 yesterday but I purchased the software 6 weeks ago at a local store on sale. I have used Turbo Tax for over 20 years but now I am done with them. Unlike many reviewers that post in December or January I don’t review software that I haven’t used. I used this software and in the end I wish that I had purchased something else. My review is based on actual experience and not just a review to garner votes by posting early.

I had numerous problems and it took me twice as long to do my taxes as it should have. It kept asking the same questions over and over and I filled out the boxes and when that section was completed none of the dollar figures or answered questions showed up as correct. The most glaring was when it asked me if I had prepaid estimated taxes and I answered yes. It then asked me what amounts and I filled in the quarterly payments. When done it did not include those payments in the refund calculation and I had to manually override the data and fix it. This one mistake alone would have cost me $1200. If I had not been watching the refund amount at the top of the screen I might have missed this error.

I used the walk me through format as I normally do and this year it was just garbage. It would ask me if a set of circumstances would apply to my return and I would answer no and then it would proceed to ask me 20 to 30 questions to which I have already answered that they did not apply. When I answered yes to a section and answered every question and filled in numbers, when appropriate, it would not use the data or the numbers and I had to go back and fill out the data and numbers again. Very time consuming and frustrating.

Ultimately I had no trust in the way this software worked and I rechecked every number and calculation before I filed. Like I said before, one error alone would have cost me $1200. When I was completed it did a scan and it found a mistake, or so it claimed. It told me a number for my 2013 taxes was not entered correctly and I checked it and it was correct. I even looked at the actual printout of my 2013 taxes to verify the number. To make matters worse it truncated the code for the local tax authorities for the county that I live in making it almost impossible to determine what it was even questioning. It stated the taxes paid to INC were wrong when the code is IN C-41. I had to manually go back to the forms and fix the error that really was not a problem and it had no bearing on my 2014 return. A simple waste of time for what it called a data collection form.

Doing taxes is not really fun and wasting twice as much time as required makes it really a hassle. Turbo tax has lost a customer that has been loyal for over 20 year back to the days of Turbo Tax coming to you on floppy disks.

On top of that, go look at the recent 5 star reviews. Many of them are first time reviewers posting 2 words to one sentence reviews. They use no punctuation and no capital letters. They are fake reviews. How can you trust a company that does that because they are in trouble?