Turbotax registration problem

TidBITS Talk
21

I found and think I fixed the form 5695 bug that has been stopping people from filing. TurboTax rejected electronic filing, and if you tried filing on paper the IRS rejected your filing. After downloading and installing the latest TurboTax update this morning, I tested and found the bug was still there. This time I went back and looked at Form 5695 in FORMS and after looking at the red bug mark beside the form, read through to check the content of the form. I had installed a Heat Pump in 2022, and benefited from a rebate program run by Massachusetts energy companies in 2023. However I had no such benefits in 2025. When I looked along the form, I saw a series of YES/NO boxes, all but two of which were checked NO. I changed the two YES marks to NOs, so everything said NO, and went back to try again. Right away, I noted FORM 5695 no longer had the red mark, and the entries that TurboTax has said needed to be removed were gone. I went back and tried once again to file electronically. I was amazed to see the filing go through successfully.

I can’t guarantee this will work for everyone. I may only work if you did not received any rebates or other benefits from energy benefits during the 2025 tax year. But it’s worth trying. I don’t recall ever entering anything about energy rebates in my 2025 return, so it may have been an accidental entry by TurboTax. If you’ve been bit by the but, I hope it works for you.

Update: no sooner had I finished this than TurboTax reported the IRS had accepted my return.

3 Likes
22

I too had to buy a more recent machine than my desktop Mac to run TT (Apple refurb M4 MBA). As above, Rosetta had to be downloaded during the TT installation process.

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Question: if you filed on paper, how did you find out your return was rejected before a few months had passed? I, as mentioned earlier, file on paper every year. Pre-pandemic, the processing time for my return was usually 1-4 months according to the info on the IRS account transcripts I order annually. More recently, it has taken the IRS 3-18 months (!).

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I don’t know, but there were people reporting that happening on the Intuit support line. Maybe the IRS was running the paper returns through a quick check to pick up known bugs. There’s still some mystery about what was going on.

1 Like
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I must say that my experience this year has seriously damaged my trust in TurboTax. I have been trying to follow up the reactions others had in dealing with the Form 5695 and I am getting odd reactions in Intuit’s tax home. When I enter the Intuit site, it does not know I succeeded in filing my taxes and tries to take me to an effort to file I abandoned about February 18. When I try to find help, I can only find one or two entries on Form 5695. I have seen other threads on 5695, so I know they are somewhere in Intuit’s support, but it won’t let me get there. I know that some people claim to have solved the Form 5695 bug and been able to file their taxes, as I have done. But I can’t get there from here. All I can say that for certain is that some people have claimed success, but others have not been able to file, and that there appear to be multiple conditions that can cause failure and probably multiple ways to succeed.

And to top it all off, I just received an email from a “do not reply” Intuit address informing me “A new passkey was added to your Intuit Account” in iCloud**.** I did not intend to create one, and I have no idea how I can use it or get rid of it. When I clicked on the “If you didn’t make this request, contact us.” message, I got a “400 Bad Request Request Header Or Cookie Too Large” which does not help at all. (I don’t have any devices that can reliably handle fingerprints, face or screen lock.) Anybody have any idea of how to deal with that?

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It might be a fraudulent email from a spoofed domain. I’d be cautious about following up on it without reviewing the headers of the email to be sure they look legitimate.

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Thanks for the suggestion. Searching the headers found 37 copies of intuit.com . The email also arrived within minutes of when I had clicked on something on the Intuit site that might have triggered creation of a passkey. What made me suspicious was the bad link in an important place (where a suspicious user would go to check something suspicious) and the failure to ask me to select a passkey (which in my case probably came from not knowing much about passkeys). The latter made me look up how passkeys work, which somewhat relieved my concerns about them. Nonetheless, I was not pleased with this year’s TurboTax performance.