Thursday, February 10, 2005

Kiplinger Taxcut Bugs

I have used Kiplinger Taxcut software to do my taxes for oh, maybe ten years now? And never had a problem.

I am used to getting about a $2,000 tax refund.

This year I filled out all the forms for 2004 and noticed that my refund was around $189. Hmm, that's not good.

Then when I got to the tuition deduction, the software only asked about my schooling. It didn't ask about my two kids. That was funny!

When I was all done, and clicked on the Final Error Check button, the errors found told me that my kids were not my kids, and furthermore they were not American citizens!

I had imported the information from last year's Taxcut into this year's version. In all previous years this worked smoothly and my kids were always recognized as my kids. Not this time!

Even after I updated the software to the February 2005 release, Taxcut didn't think my kids were my kids.

I had to go into the Dependent Worksheet and tell the software that not only were they my kids, one is my son and the other is my daughter. I had to do this several times before I was able to persuade Taxcut that they really are my babies.

I also had to tell Taxcut multiple times that they are American citizens. Taxcut didn't want to believe me but after I selected American Citizen about five times it stopped warning me that they aren't.

So then my refund was around $2700 where it should be.

But this experience left me feeling uncertain about Taxcut. If they could fuck up something as basic as my children and their dependent relationship to me, their mother, what else did Taxcut fuck up? Are they carrying my W-2 values through to all forms correctly? Are they dropping something else that I input?

I'm thinking about switching to some other tax software next year.

1 Comments:

Blogger Tina Rock said...

My life has gotten so financially complicated that now I use an accountant - one that my sister recommended. (Nick Garruto) He's quite good. For this current 2006 tax year, I used Taxcut just to see what it said my taxes will come out to. I plan to compare its results with Nick's in a couple of weeks. One thing I noticed about Taxcut for this year: It said my income was one number, which was about 10 orders of magnitude lower than the number I input.

This makes me think they are still having problems with bugs. Not cool!

10:33 AM  

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