Software Review: TurboTax 2006

My husband and I bought a version of TurboTax a couple of years ago so we could quickly, easily and cheaply file our taxes. At the time, we weren't yet married, so we needed to file independently. We lived in a college town where tax preparers were hard to come by. And since we're both pretty techie, we decided to give TurboTax a try.

We both had our doubts about how well this would work. It seemed like there were so many combinations and answers to each question based on each individual that it could never work. Consequently, that logic was pretty sound.

One of the features we were interested in was the e-filing. Immediately after you finish your taxes, you can send them in electronically. That function can also be a bad thing, though, if something goes wrong. Then you've not only completed the forms incorrectly, but you've already officially filed your taxes. If that happens, you have to go back through the entire process to see what went wrong, then re-submit, and pray to the holy tax gods that nothing went wrong.

Something definitely went wrong in our case. My husband had taken a freelance web design job earlier in the year. He entered in the freelance job and that it was a one-time deal paid for in cash. A bug in the software nearly cost him $12,000 in estimated taxes because it assumed that the additional income was coming in each month throughout the year. When this very big glitch happened, my first reaction was to panic (and I'm the easygoing one)! However, even though the TurboTax software had caused the error, it was very helpful in re-filing after the mistake. It was a quick fix.

Other than that mistake, the ease of use was pretty good, but we're both pretty techie so I can't say for sure that it would be as intuitive to others...besides, it deals with tax forms, an anomaly with which nothing is intuitive.

Even though TurboTax worked out pretty well in the end for us, we decided that we'd actually have a real person file our taxes the next year. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out so well, either. Our tax preparer at H&R Block also screwed up our taxes, but the reason it happened then was that she was too lazy to look up city taxes since we had lived in more than one city and county in Ohio that year. Her mistake only cost us $400 instead of $12,000, but it irritated me much more. She had been rude to us the whole time, complaining about how it would've been so much easier if we'd lived in one place and both worked within the same school district. I don't have much patience for people complaining about their jobs when I am directly paying them to do their jobs.

All in all, I think we will try our luck with TurboTax again. It is an inexpensive and quick way to get past the hassle of tax season.