So, this is the first year that I've done a US tax return by myself. I did mine online this year with TurboTax. Overall, it worked but I do have some gripes over it.
User Interface
It was hard to navigate to specific parts of my tax return. They start you off with five tabs, Home, Personal Info, Federal Taxes, State Taxes, etc. Under each tab, there's sub-tabs, but the sub-tabs are far too generic. For example, under Federal Taxes, you get Wages/Income, Deductions & Credits, Others. If I wanted to modify my donations, I would have to go through Deductions & Credits, and scroll through a bunch of questions that I already answered. There's no way to jump directly to donations, and edit that number.
Price Hike
It seems that TurboTax charges a certain rate for people who file before March 28th, and they charge a higher rate for after March 28th. I had my taxes mostly done, but not submitted yet, but when I found out that they were increasing prices, I rushed to get them done before midnight. It feels like price gouging when you jack up prices a few weeks before taxes are due.
Editions
TurboTax has several different editions, Basic, Deluxe, and Premier. Each one costs more than the last. I initially didn't know which edition I needed, so I filled out their questionnaire. Based on their questionnaire results, they recommended that I use the Premier version because I had stocks and mutual funds. After filling out all the forms, I realized I didn't need the Premier version because none of my stock transactions this year triggered a tax event. I could have done my taxes with the Basic version which would have cost a lot less. So, I tried to downgrade my TurboTax to Basic, but there's no way to do it. The only solution is to delete all your data, and start again. That's pretty bad.
Payment
At the end of the whole process, you have to pay in order to get your tax return. I was going to pay by credit card but I ran into problems. They needed me to fill in the address that I use for the credit card, but that address is tied to an international address. Unfortunately, there's no way to enter an international address into the system because it will not validate.
My second gripe with payment was, you can tell them to take the payment out of your tax return. The problem with this is, they charge a $20 fee for this service. This service doesn't seem to be worth $20 in my opinion
Random Thoughts
On a completely separate note, there's something kind of scary about TurboTax. It seems like every employer has an EIN (employer identification number). If you punch that in, TurboTax can query a database, and fill in all your income information. The paranoid in me thinks it's not cool that third parties have a way of querying some database for my employment income information.
In either case, I'm debating whether I'm going to use TurboTax next year. Intuit (the makers of TurboTax) seems kind of evil at this point. In addition, I really prefer the online tax filing systems like UFile which I used for my Canadian taxes. Also, Canadian taxes are so much easier to deal with, I miss doing them. /tear
