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Caveat Emptor: TurboTax is a pain

Before I start, I should say I’ve been a user of TurboTax for several years – can’t remember exactly how many, but for more than 5 years for sure. I couldn’t imagine doing my taxes without it in the past, but after this year’s experience, I’m seriously thinking about switching to something else, just so I don’t end up banging my head on the wall out of utter frustration!

I should also mention that I waited since 4/17 to post this entry in order to cool off. I would have been much more critical if I wrote this last week…

I’ve been using the online version of TurboTax since it came out about two years ago. When I started using it this year, I noticed that it had changed a lot – the graphics were slicker, the site looked nicer, etc. That’s where the good points stopped! The rest of the changes were horrible:

  • Gone was the wonderful screen-by-screen contextual help, with audio and video walk-throughs. Instead, now I had some horrible pop-up help that didn’t help much at all and at times referred me to dig through the IRS site for some form or other such thing.
  • Gone was the easy navigation to specific pages. Now, if I wanted to access a specific screen, I had to start from the beginning of the section and go through e-v-e-r-y little page I didn’t care about, making sure I didn’t mess up my previously answered fields… Horrible, just horrible! This was the single biggest time-waster of this year’s tax season!
  • Gone was the simple, easy to use interface. Now I had a slick but clunky interface, where I had to guess how things were organized. I had this weird dichotomy of thought – on the one hand, I wanted to take a sharp pencil and run it across the screen in anguish, doodling in despair, and on the other hand, the buttons looked so nice… Ugh!
  • Did any of you notice the ridiculous wait times to get to chat live with a rep? For me, it was 50 minutes! Do I have 50 minutes to sit in front of my computer, only to wait for some tired and frazzled rep to answer my question perfunctorily? I think not.

I can’t describe the agony of doing my taxes this year. It was a nightmare. I must have wasted over 10 hours because of TurboTax ‘s horrible navigation and clunkiness! Still, I would have been willing to pull the cover over all these glaring shortcomings if only TurboTax would have been able to do its most basic function, which is… to file my taxes correctly! But no, it had to go and mess that up, too!

I chose to file my taxes electronically this year, and to send in a hand-signed form. I was supposed to get notified by TurboTax when my taxes were electronically accepted by the IRS, so I could come back online and print out the form, sign it, and mail it. Sounds simple, right? Well, they never notified me! My wife and I sat there wondering when it would happen, and come tax day (4/17), we still weren’t notified!

That afternoon, I decided to log back into my account to check the status, and I couldn’t! I kept getting this error, telling me TurboTax couldn’t retrieve my submission status. Well, gosh darn it, why did I pay for this piece of software? No matter how many times I tried, even after logging out, emptying my cache, jumping on one foot, throwing salt over my shoulder, whatever, TurboTax couldn’t retrieve my submission status, and it was getting really, really late – I mean, like 10 minutes before 5 pm late!

Finally, I started looking through the TurboTax help files to see how this error could be addressed – because, of course, TurboTax didn’t provide a link to the specific help page addressing this error next to the error message (duh!). After 10 minutes of digging around and mumbling all sorts of unwell thoughts about TurboTax , I stumbled across some number (not toll-free) I could call to check my status over the phone. When I called, I had to listen to a pre-recorded message telling me how I could check my status online… Would I be calling if I could do that?! So anyway, after navigating through a needless phone menu, I was able to get my information, and to find out that my return had been accepted by the IRS several days earlier. Peachy, or so I thought!

I logged back into my TurboTax acount to print out the special one-page form, but of course, I couldn’t print it because the stinking program couldn’t retrieve my status. Aargh! So I went to the IRS site and printed the form, then filled it in by hand – again, I couldn’t help asking myself why I paid for TurboTax if I had to fill out forms by hand (?!) – only to find out… and it gets better, folks… that it was too late. I was supposed to sign and send the form within 24 hours of the electronic acceptance by the IRS!

At this point, I think steam must have been coming out of my ears! I tell you, I was NOT thinking nice, friendly thoughts about TurboTax , and for good reason! They didn’t notify me the IRS had received my taxes! They were able to do it last year, but not this year!

In the end, I ended up having to print my entire tax forms set from TurboTax and send it into the IRS once more, hoping that they’ll accept it in paper format even though I’d sent it in electronically already… I included the special signature form, for good measure. I hope I won’t get in trouble with the IRS. If I do, I have TurboTax to thank for it!

So, there you have it, my entire, horrible, not to be repeated, experience with TurboTax , which this year, was a dreadful, “pull your hair out” piece of software. You be the judge of whether you want to use it to do your taxes. My take: tax time is stressful enough already without having to deal with buggy, hard to use software.

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Reviews

Let's buy some music

TechCrunch has a review of music services currently available, and their side-by-side comparison is pretty good, but they forgot to include eMusic.

My wife and I use eMusic, and we think it’s pretty darn good! I wish they’d included it in their list of reviewed services.

They mentioned AllofMP3 among the services they reviewed, but it is a quasi-legal site – I can’t imagine the artists are getting properly paid for their music at $0.09/song, and I don’t know if they even signed deals with the site. While the price may be tempting, I have a feeling that site will get turned off or made to charge more at some point in the future.

eMusic at least has deals with each of the artists on the site, and they’re completely legitimate. The downloads are fast, the selection is growing, and the music is not hamstrung by silly DRM schemes. Along with the iTunes service, it is what Ligia and I use regularly.

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Thoughts

Bring your own laptop

Stumbled onto this at Boing Boing and had a look at the original site. The idea is very simple. The employer provides the employee with the money to purchase a reasonable laptop, and lets them take care of the support and other issues. Or lets them use their existing laptop, if they so choose. Here’s the link.

I think it’s great! As a matter of fact, I was thinking of doing this with my next job – if the company’s policies weren’t too stuffy. I know first hand the pain of configuring laptops with group policies meant for desktops. Laptops are very different beasts from desktops. For one thing, they move around so much. For another, users often need to install software when they’re away from IT. Why hamstring their performance with a laptop that’s just been neutered by bad group policies?

At my last job, I wasn’t in charge of the business side of IT – instead, I handled academic IT – and I would cringe every time I saw a laptop that the business IT folks had touched – the users were constantly complaining they couldn’t do this or that, they couldn’t even print, they couldn’t connect to wireless networks, etc. The complaints were without end. Why do this to people? There’s no reason for it, other than the immature need to feel in control at all times… So okay, if you’re working with secret/classified materials, it may be a different story, but that’s a small subset of the work population, not everyone.

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Thoughts

Gallery: 30 Years of Apple Gear

Gallery: 30 Years of Apple Gear: “Over the past three decades, the company has cranked out a boatload of breakthrough products, from the first PDA to the iPod — and lots of computers besides. Get lost in a monster gallery of almost everything Apple’s ever made. PLUS: Wired News’ full coverage of Apple’s 30th anniversary.”

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Thoughts

Audience-inclusive advertising

After the new video iPod launched, and the possibility to purchase and download ad-free TV shows came to light, I realized that the advertising industry would have to come up with some clever ways to keep their audience if they were to maintain revenues. The following ideas sprung to mind:

  • A site can be set up and maintained by a consortium of advertising agencies and brand owners or a neutral body, that would either track viewer product preferences through data mining and random surveys, or would actively encourage users to register and provide product preferences. Alternately, existing user data could be compiled from various databases.
  • Advertising during TV shows that certain user groups watch could be more closely targeted to those groups by ad personalization. Users could register for the chance to have an ad dedicated to them. For example, a sample user we’ll call Jane could indicate that she likes the MINI Cooper, and so when an ad for the Cooper runs during a show that she likes to watch, names can be selected at random from the database of users, and if her name comes up, that ad could say: “This goes out to Jane” before it runs, and end with a “Thanks, Jane!” Quite simple, really, but it serves to capture the audience, since people will stay tuned during the ads just to see if their name will come up.
  • This concept can be expanded to include groups of users, perhaps up to 3-5 identifiable users per ad.
  • Through the medium of the website, brand owners can also take a cue from the users about the kind of products they need to advertise, this time in a more direct way, through hard data. Even more, they can more easily survey the users about the kind of new products they want to see.
  • Another way to keep the audience is to offer prizes for watching the ads and picking through clues that are weaved through both the ads and the shows. Entries can then be registered on the show’s site or at this main site for a chance to win something, perhaps even products featured on the show, or something as banal as an actor’s coat, or the actual bottle of perfume used by an actress on the show. These aren’t things that cost much but mean a lot to the audience.
  • People are making a big deal about product placement, but I think that reaches a saturation point very quickly. You can’t plaster products all over the screen and detract from the value of the story or the entertainment. Product placements works when it’s subtle, weaved into the story, and reinforced through the regular ads.
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