Review by John D Hillmer

I’ve been using TaxCut (now H&R Block at Home) for well over 5 years, and all and all, it’s OK. One year I ran by taxes with BOTH H&R Block and Turbo Tax, and both came up with the same answer. The issue is not with the program’s math, but the way that it asks us to answer the questions, the amount of examples to help us decide what all to include in a number, or if a certain situation applies to us or not. Again this year, 2009, I waited until the prices came down at least 10 bucks under their usual advertised price. Generally, you should not file until after Feb 1st as the financial companies have through January to get their forms to you. And, it’s not unusual for the tax preparation companies to have online updates well into February, and if those tweaks applied to you, you’d want them before filing.

Each year, the Federal forms go pretty well, but the State of Wisconsin’s forms are lacking in the H&R versions. On several occasions, H&R’s program did not handle situations that applied to me, and they tell me, this form is not supported, and here’s the link to get the paper form and then I have to file paper, not electronically. This year, the WI AMT form was not supported. Sad. It’s not that I really want to pay the AMT tax, but if I have to, at least make it easy for me to do that! The WI AMT form is a hard one to understand, so this would have really been a good one for H&R Block to have automated. Maybe next year.

So why do I keep using H&R Block? They are always 5-10 bucks less, and from what I have seen or heard, the Turbo Tax version is not that much better when it comes to the State forms. I do like the Deduction Pro add-on that H&R Block provides, so that’s a plus.