Flashes of Panic

I’ve never filled out a paper federal return. Tax software was getting good right about the time I started paying my own taxes. Pennsylvania’s paper return was frighteningly easy (five minutes’ work, in general) but once I moved back to Massachusetts one year of their paper forms was enough; now I buy state add-ons for tax software. There are enough quirks in my return that I can’t use the web-based services, some of which are actually free. (And yet I also know that my return is simple compared to those of other people I know; there is still a market for actual live accountants doing tax forms.)

There are two big players in tax software: Intuit’s TurboTax (formerly MacInTax), and TaxCut, which is now published by H&R Block. I’ve tended to buy whichever one costs least and hasn’t ticked me off recently. This year I went with TaxCut; now they’ve ticked me off enough that next year I clearly need to return to TurboTax.

TaxCut fell down on tuition. Since I’m “fully funded,” my tuition is not eligible to be counted as a deduction. TaxCut, however, just asked what tuition I’d paid. I filled in the number from the 1098-T the University sent me, and the software entered a nice $600 deduction from my tax. Hey, wait: what about the matching scholarships and grants? I had to do some research, then go back and zero out that number. (Ouch.)

TaxCut also made it difficult to go straight to the forms and fill in data. I have a few tricky entries where I simply get a letter that says, “Enter $nnn.mm on Schedule Z, line 5746.” I can’t do that easily in TaxCut; it’s simple in TurboTax.

The competition is pretty fierce in this field, because I got “free” software CDs from both companies. (“Here’s our software, if you want to use it, come pay us online.”) The TaxCut CD included a link to buy TaxCut Premium (which includes one state add-on, and is therefore what I need,) for $29.95, but when I then arrived at the linked website, the price was $34.95. Nothing to make you extremely suspicious about a company like a sneaky price raise. I should’ve taken that warning and returned to Intuit (a pretty annoying company in their own right,) particularly given the installation customer service nightmare TaxCut put me through a few years ago, but I didn’t. Let the rest of you be warned: don’t make the mistakes I did. Intuit is the lesser of two evils. Can’t someone make tax software that doesn’t suck?

It should go without saying that I print and mail paper forms. E-filing saves the government money—so why are they asking me to pay extra for it?

There’s nothing to make you opposed to nearly every policy of the federal government like finishing your tax forms. An unintended consequence of my freelance writing is that I wind up sending a large check to the feds every year; I’ve never had a refund. I like it that way, to some degree; assuming the sum I pay is fair, I’d rather hold on to more of it longer than give the feds too much and have to ask for it back. I know some people arrange their deductions such that they get a refund every year; I’d rather earn a few bucks in interest on that cash first.

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