I just purchased a copy of TT Deluxe from Amazon and downloaded it from them. It might have come from Intuit, but all the operations appeared to be from Amazon. It was somewhat discounted
I finally got my TurboTax 2024 downloaded and have worked through most of my 2024 tax. I have observed more bugs, which I am reporting here to keep the record more complete.
First thing for 2024 taxes was to import data from TurboTax 2023. Strangely, while importing T2024 asked if I wanted to itemize deductions or use the standard deduction. (I had itemized for 2023.) I indicated itemize and continued the import. TT2024 opened and again asked me to confirm that I wanted the standard deduction. I again indicated itemize and continued. TT2024 then showed the total of itemized deductions as on my TT2023 pdf, indicating that itemized was much better for me. I continued with TT2024, thinking I had put a strange glitch behind me. Everything seemed OK. Almost. As I neared the end I realized a charitable deduction carryover was missing. My pdf of 2023 taxes showed the carryover, but it had not been imported from the TT2023 working data file. I opened TT2023 to have a look, and an update was offered. Still updating TT2023 to fix bugs in March 2025!? The names of the charities were listed, but the amounts of individual donations were gone. The sum of the donations, as originally entered, was still present. This may explain the bizarre result importing from 2023 into TT2024. Some part of the import reviewed my individual donations, found no value, and insisted I take the standard deduction. A different part of the import brought over the sum of the deductions, and used it when I insisted on itemized deduction for 2024. My itemized deduction carryover was completely lost in the import.
I see QCD (Qualified Charitable Deductions) was a topic discussed by others. That was about deductions from a retirement account, which is different from the itemized deductions problem I found. I wonder how many of the issues discussed here were fixed in the TT2023 update a couple of weeks ago.
Next steps for me will be to reenter the deduction amounts in TT2023, then compare the results calculated by the updated program with the pdf of what I submitted. My hope is that the tax data is good, and the bug was primarily in the user interface and import into TT2024.
Hope my experience helps someone.
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Looks like it is fixed. I just launched TT and it installed an update. My return is back to what it was back in February when I filed.
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The automatic updater has never worked correctly for me in H&R Block. I always have to go to the website, download and manually launch updates. Sigh… This stuff is not rocket science…
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After my experience this year, I wonder how many mistakes are badly worded or incorrect explanations rather than mistakes in calculations or interpretation of tax law. The major problem I saw was incorrect wording of EasyStep and minimal explanation for the Forms section.
The fact that TT was not corrected to resolve this problem in a timely manner is very bad… and not uncommon for Intuit. How many customers were impacted? How many know there was even a problem?
On the Intuit support forums you can see the usual complaints, but you can also find those who actually have a problem with the IRS, such as income figures noted earlier but then not accounted for later as if they were just ignored or forgotten. We stopped using TT many years ago after noticing line entries or forms were being mis-used or ignored in the final calculations, requiring repeat, brute-force, manual edits of the raw federal forms.
I have no idea of the size of their development/QC pool. There are probably many good people working there. TT probably works fine for many customers. However, I have seen too many problems over the years, including how they do not really back you up if audited or issues arise with the return.
I have not looked at TT in recent years, but I recall on the final signature page next to “prepared by” always automatically input “self”.
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Some of the customers won’t know there was a problem until they get audited. That happened to me with Massachusetts state tax because I misunderstood TurboTax’s wording about what was not taxable in the state. The more I have thought about this, the more I think the problem is that TurboTax instructions are misleading. The calculations are right, but it’s hard to understand the instruction, and a tax pro would say the customer made a mistake, when what TurboTax wrote was not clear to the customer.
Can you recommend something better, please?
Sorry, Nello. I apologise for not being more helpful here. We started doing taxes manually until just recently when things got more complicated and just hired someone local. I suppose my intent is just to alert people to possible TT issues based on my experiences.
I hope my comments have not derailed things here.
To be “fair”, I don’t know how any company could keep up with tax law changes and make something that is 100% reliable.
I have seen discussions about how Intuit seems to be trying to move customers to their newer subscription model this year. There was another discussion about their update system possibly having changed this year. I have no data on any of this, however.
Jeff H, I think you are probably correct about TT’s wording in their documentation, but I have also seen multiple cases (in the past) of TT seeming to ignore or discard lines in the final calculations. I had to prove this manually myself some years back. We ran the numbers ourselves, re-reading the IRS instructions for each line and form to make sure we had done it correctly. The first time I caught TT doing this, it was ignoring a deduction for educator expenses.
For a couple years after that we plugged things into TT just to do a sort of “trial run” and then proofed it manually. Of course, this is when our taxes were simpler.
I agree that’s a huge problem. Decades ago, when I was struggling to pay my way through grad school, I worked for H&R Block part-time for one tax season. They gave me a printed notebook of about 150 pages explaining how to do taxes, and I was able to do all the returns I handled. Based on that experience, I did my own returns manually for years, including after became self employed, and an owner of a two-family rental home. I started using what was then MacInTax in the '90s because it saved time. It’s been getting worse ever since, especially not that we have to deal with retirement income of various types from multiple sources.
I liked the idea of having the IRS build its own tax software. Not only would it save us money, but they would be responsible for any mistakes in the software.
I would be extremely pleased if the US adopted the system used in some European countries. Taxpayers receive a bill from the tax authority. If you agree with the amount, you simply pay. If not, you file a tax return.
Unfortunately, there is a cluster of technical, budgetary, and political reasons that stop this from ever happening in the US.
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Planet Money did an episode on the ReadyReturn initiative in California that would do this. Powerful lobbying forces killed it.
ProPublica has covered this sort of thing as well. It’s very depressing.
Having been self-employed most of my adult life, I can understand some of the objections to return-free tax filing. It will not be easy to create a financial reporting system that effectively tracks income and expenses for everyone. Credit card companies and retailers try to track what you pay via credit cards and bank accounts, and what they list is often either useless (“Shopping” for almost everything you buy on Amazon) or wildly inaccurate (for a while payments from our small local pharmacy were listed as mobile phone payments). Getting that cleaned up enough to be usable will take time and money that most businesses don’t want to spend, and will worry people who don’t like the government poking around in their private affairs.
One way to deal with that issue would be to drastically simplify rules for what’s taxable and what’s deductible. How much detail do they really need about my office expenses or the maintenance for our rental property. And how much time should we have spend documenting our payments to other small businesses like the plumber or the guy who plows the snow?
I like the overall idea, but I worry about how it can be implemented, and how much paranoia it would provoke among some parts of the population.
While I agree with all that, in the US only about 10% of working adults are self-employed. Of the other 90%, only about 10% itemize deductions. So 81% of taxpayers could conceivably have a tax return prepared for them from W-2s and 1099s, which the IRS already gets. Of course there will still be edge cases, but even if the number falls to 50% (to make a number up) of taxpayers that can have their tax return completely prepared, and another 25% that can have it 99% prepared, those are still major simplifications to tax preparation (which is why, of course, tax preparers, from Intuit to individual CPAs, lobby hard against it).
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Having seen the myriad ways government agencies screw up even the most basic things, and how they always manage to deflect responsibility onto others, I respectfully disagree with every one of these statements.
I like what (I’ve been told) Israel does. I your employer correctly files and collects withholding, you (the employee) don’t need to do anything. If the employer didn’t withhold enough (but did it all correctly according to the rules), you don’t have to pay extra.
So if you don’t want to file, you don’t have to. But you may want to anyway, in case circumstances (e.g. deductions and credits) might result in you being due a refund.
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What we really need is to drastically simplify tax law, which the politicians and lobbyists have made incredibly complex.
Government has no monopoly on bureaucratic mismanagement. When I was in my first industrial job at Honeywell’s computer division, I asked my section head how many level of management between me and the company chairman. He didn’t know, so he asked some higher-up and after some a few months got back the answer of a dozen. I also asked a high school friend who was chasing deadbeats for the Small Business Administration in Newark how many levels were between him and the President of the US. He immediately answered six. I don’t know who well the SBA was managed, but I describe Honeywell as the company where the Pointy Haired Boss learned all he knew about management. 
Absolutely true, but this has nothing to do with the quality of tax preparation software.
Also true, but when a corporation screws up to the point that it affects customers, those customers take their business to the competition. Either the mistakes get fixed or the company ends up losing the market.
No such thing with the government. People are paid for their work no matter how good or bad the result is. There is no reward for being efficient and no punishment for being bad. And when there is a massive failure, nobody is held responsible. There may be a token lay-off here and there, but the people actually responsible are not affected - and they are often promoted to even higher positions of power.
So, no, I don’t think a government-financed/government-developed tax preparation package would save any money, I don’t think it would be any better than commercial products, and they will not take responsibility for its defects.
BTW, are you aware that the IRS’s own publications are not considered authoritative and won’t carry any weight if presented in tax court? The IRS’s own Issue Resolution Manual says (section 4.7.10.7):
Similarly, even though you are not liable for mistakes by a professional tax advisor (the advisor is liable for mistakes), that rule doesn’t apply to IRS employers. If you contact them and they give you bad advice, you are still responsible, including any interest and penalties resulting from the mistake, and many court cases have upheld this. See also Relying on Advice From the IRS.
If IRS publications and phone-support staff are not considered authoritative, why would you think that any software product they publish would be any different?
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I’d say tax preparation software would be simpler and less error-prone if it didn’t have to be so bloated due to the opaque and labyrinthian tax code. And that’s part of the problem: a streamlined tax system would reduce the number of people who feel unable to handle their taxes without some kind of paid assistance.
Doing tax returns back in the 70s was much easier than it was today. I spent a couple hours reading a manual for H&R Block employees walked into the office, and ran an adding machine to do the math. I could understand the logic behind the tax rules, and the most complex return I handled involved income averaging. Now it just keeps getting worse.
seems to me I recall some econ guru years ago tongue in cheedk said - a simple postcard
“How much did you make last year … how much left … send it in …”
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