Review by JRH

I rated this 4 stars out of 5 because it is a tax program, and no tax program is worth 5 stars (no joy in paying taxes). I had to prepare two fairly complex returns that included stock sales, pension annuity, IRA withdrawals, additional employment income, and all the usual deductions (taxes, mortgage interest, medical, etc.). The federal and state versions worked perfectly. The interface is different than Turbo Tax, but works more efficiently than TT. The key to using this program is running through the interview process and then going to the individual forms to double check everything. I found no errors that were not made by me when entering the data. The program picked up Quicken entries flawlessly. This is important to me, since I make heavy use of Quicken for all of my finances including all of my buying and selling of stocks. It was especially important this year, since like most people who invest, I had some carry over losses from 2008. The program also imported information from last year’s taxes without problem. It also imported tax information from 2008 TT for one of the returns with no problem. This saves typing. In my case, the W-2 imports were not available (the same would have been true in TT) because of my particular employment. Hand entering the W-2 information was trivial. Bottom line. H&R Block’s State plus Federal tax program is easy to use, accurate, and a much better value than the high priced TT. I also like the fact that you could do an unlimited number of tax returns and a generous number of e-filings. Reaching support for H&R Block is not easy (they are busy), but is a pleasant dream compared to contacting Intuit’s TT or Quicken support. I am running the program under Windows Vista 64 without problem.