TurboTax hell!

[eclectic_boy]

Yesterday was going to be my work-all-day-on-taxes-get-them-done-in-one-big-push day. Instead it was my bang-my-head-on-the-keyboard-in-one-big-frustrated-mess day.

I had bought TurboTax, on CD, back in January, and installed it at the time, and run its autoupdate function once or twice before when I poked at the program since then. So I didn't expect anything to go wrong with the further autoupdate that it wanted me to do yesterday. It downloaded several updates and started running them, but one got stuck: "Searching Hard Drive" appeared while the update called 'maceng' was running.... and it stayed there forever. I finally stopped the installer, which corrupted TurboTax so I reinstalled and went to their website for help. There I learned that I could download a standalone autoupdate program.... which got stuck Searching in its very first step. Much poking around various boards led me to a techy fix posted on TurboTax's help site (replacing a file in the TurboTax package).... which didn't help.

The TT help page said that I could email them, phone them (with a hold time of over 30 minutes) or do a chat help session (with a hold time of under 10 minutes). I did the latterest, and the hold time was actually 30 seconds. But the person I got was methodical/robotic, and made me do every step that I'd already done, which took over an hour and brought no success. Finally she said I should try downloading the standalone autoupdater on another machine. Before I went over to Lisa's to do that (thank you, L!) I asked her what I should do if that didn't work, and she said "call the tech support phone number" - which I suspect was partly to make sure she didn't run the risk of having to work on my problem again! As feared, there was no improvement with the autoupdater downloaded at Lisa's (and how *could* there have been; it's the same file!)

So I tried calling. And to hedge my bet, I also opened a chat-help session. I was on hold in both channels simultaneously, and this time it was the phone that was speedy - I only had to wait 10 minutes, during which time the chat window had gone from saying I was number 8 in the queue to number 7. The person on the phone was very calm and professional - she looked at the record of my problem from the chat session, said that a second-tier engineer had been consulted and that the problem wasn't one they had a solution for yet. So she got my address and is fedexing me the updated program so I'll be able to use it without needing to autoupdate. It took five minutes of talking with her and my problem is (hopefully) solved, or at least workarounded.
More googling has told me that it's likely an incompatibility between their installed and OS X 10.4.9, which was only released a month ago. If there were some way to revert to 10.4.8 I could solve the problem, but I don't know anything about that.

Comments

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

I went with the online chat tech help, because it wouldn't download my free included State version (kept saying Not Available). I described the problem, and then the service bot ended up going through an obvious script of questions that made me restate everything I said. I swear I said I was running Deluxe on a Mac like 5 times. In the end, they just gave me a download link for an MA installer.

I had no wait with the online chat at around 3 pm. Maybe I was taking your spot.

Then, later, a totally useless error message "could not retrieve" caused me to spend time with Wells Fargo customer service trying to set up my account access only to discover it was because I had no 1099-DIV to download.

Thankfully, mine is done. I wonder, since my copy of Deluxe came with a "disc to share", if I could send you that installer? I'm running 10.4.9, and did not have the problem you describe.

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

Thankfully, mine is done. I wonder, since my copy of Deluxe came with a "disc to share", if I could send you that installer? I'm running 10.4.9, and did not have the problem you describe.

Well, it couldn't get here sooner than the Fedexed replacement discs, so hopefully I won't need to take you up on your offer.... but thanks!

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

I meant the installer. As in, shoving the file through the intertubes :o).

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Meh. I've been using TurboTax Online for the past couple of years, and have not had difficulties, other than having to use Safari rather than Firefox to be able to save the PDF versions of my forms (and I think that's partly due to an incompatibility with the PDF viewer plug-in I use). I had been considering switching to the standalone program at some point, but I think I'll just stick with what works for next year.

[(Anonymous)]

The online version worked for me, although it first said "no guarantees about anything" when it determined I was running Linux. Also slightly perturbing that it didn't say "you need Acrobat 5" until the very end (and I didn't seem to end up needing it anyway.)

It seemed to have some sort of super-fancy Javascript, which ran really slowly, but apart from that, it seems to have been fine.

Were I to guess, I'd guess that the version on disk was mostly trying to ensure that you hadn't pirated the program; but that's entirely my guess. This is one case where I think an online version makes especially much sense -- you run it once a year, and the software may totally change from year to year, and the GUI demands aren't that great. JavaScript word processors, on the other hand, don't fit my head.

[stowaway-geek.livejournal.com]

Oops, that was me.

Hopefully the new version will work; and since it's probably not running JavaScript stuff over the web (and your OS is supported), you won't have the slowness I experienced. (Now I'm wondering if others, not running Linux, found the online version slow...)

[ccommack]

Hmmm. I still have no reason to drop my boycott of TurboTax (which started when they released a version in 2002 that wrote its DRM into the Master Boot Record.) For future years, I'd recommend Tax Cut, whose Mac version is back after a year's hiatus in 2005.

[mst3kforall.livejournal.com]

[ TurboTax ... ] released a version in 2002 that wrote its DRM into the Master Boot Record

Whuhhh?

And how did you find out?

[indecisionwins.livejournal.com]

But with all those problems...why not just use a tax form, an instruction booklet, and a calculator? Your taxes may be more complicated than mine, but I actually used online filing for the first time this year, using TurboTax online, but I really wasn't impressed by it. (In the past, I've just gotten the forms from the IRS Web site and filled them in.) I mean, it did tell me about the telephone tax credit that I may not have noticed otherwise, and by filing online, I got my tax refund in like just over a week, which was nice, since I ended up having a pretty substantial refund based on the way my summer stipend was paid out last May. But other than that...it seemed to make things more tedious, rather than less...

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

why not just use a tax form, an instruction booklet, and a calculator?

Mainly because I'm convinced that the software will know enough more about deductions than I do to pay back its cost and then some.

[indecisionwins.livejournal.com]

Hmm, OK--I guess if you have enough deductions that it's worth itemizing them rather than taking the standard deduction, then that could make sense. I honestly don't know much at all about what kinds of things can be listed as itemized deductions, but isn't it fairly difficult to do better than the standard deduction, unless you own a house or have medical bills or something?