Turbotax Does the Right Thing

I’m in shock

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/TurboTax_Basic_2003_box_disc_and_store_receipt.jpg

Once upon a time, filing your yearly income tax was a task you either did yourself — or handed off to a trained professional. Given that most people who aren’t CPA’s and had some complicated situations beyond being a W2 wage slave couldn’t handle the job themselves, accountants enjoyed a windfall.

But that has changed in the 21st century. Several companies offering software packages that will do all that complicated stuff for you have sprung up. And thus, outfits like Taxact, Taxslayer, and Turbotax offer an alternative to the dreaded/overcharging CPA.

For the year 2019, I had to hire an “expert” to do my taxes as you can’t file from prison (where I was). So my brother handed off the job to his accountant who promptly made an amateur hour mistake that cost me several hundred dollars.

When he made the same mistake the following year — and another one — I fired his ass and went to Turbotax to file. It was cheaper though admittedly more hands and demanding of my time and effort.

Turbo tax, the number one outfit in the tax software realm, has a history of upselling customers. At the very outset, their interface is confusing and designed to get taxpayers signed up for more than they really want or require.

And once again, I hit a tab this year and ended up with “expert” tax assistance I didn’t want. My experience told me that their experts aren’t so expert — and that I’d be better off muddling through the mess without their guidance.

But removing the expert charge proved daunting to say the least. I spent too much time with too many different agents trying to get somebody to delete that charge. It was insane. One guy spent literally half an hour with me on the phone responding to questions he had to answer just to get me up the chain one link.

Today is their last day (March 31st) for the 10% discount. I decided to call once more before caving and paying for the expert and to my amazement, found a recently-added tab in the “switch products” section that now allows me to get rid of the expert in two seconds. Which I did in that two seconds.

Could this have been because a) Turbotax is now overwhelmed with requests like mine, b) they are so besieged generally that they’d rather have people file without their experts because they don’t have enough experts to handle the demand, or c) this is a response to me personally because I’m sure the system knows how many times I’ve called in.

The answer is that I don’t care. I finally lost the expert — and the charge. Yay!

Tax time as an adult is as bad as an impending visit to the dentist when you’re a kid. At least for me, it is. And now, I am about to shed the entire headache with a few clicks.

I would complain about how much I pay in taxes. But I’d rather (at least for the moment) concentrate on how much I still earn to pay that pile. The glass is half full.

Keep that in mind if you, like me, are staggered by how much you pay to the government yearly.