[DM-MUG] TurboTax 2005 experiences

[Chris Tyrrell]

Good evening all. I thought I'd share my experiences with this year's 
TurboTax. I'm curious as to whether others out there have had the same 
problems.

I installed it yesterday on my iMac DV, allowed it to download updates, 
and all was well. My financial picture is quite simple, so within a 
couple hours, I was ready to submit my state and federal returns. I ran 
a final error check, which revealed that I needed one more update 
before I could file. Ok, I thought I did that, but what the heck, let's 
try again.'s

The update check found that I needed no update, or rather, there were 
no updates to be had. But...I...

Ok. Try again with the final review. Again, I need an update. Again, 
there is no update. I see where this is going. A quick search of 
TurboTax support site returns nothing useful.

Ah, but look! Live chat with a support rep! Just sign in and wait. And 
wait. And wait.

20 minutes later, I gave up on live chat and sent an email. A few 
minutes later, I received a reply. It's mostly generic, save for an 
actual name of a support rep and a URL to a page with the answer. 
Finally, getting somewhere.

Open the suggested URL and find instructions for manually installing 
TurboTax. Not only do I not have a problem installing, but the 
instructions are INCORRECT! Nothing in the message from support 
actually attempted to address my issue, so I don't know if the rep was 
suggesting that I needed to uninstall and reinstall manually, or 
perhaps he just pulled out a random URL. I suspect the latter. I 
imagine his incident resolution stats are quite impressive. He got an 
answer out the door in minutes and closed the ticket. Ok, I'm just 
guessing that's how it works.

Back to the message. It's from a one-way address. I can't reply to it 
to have a conversation of sorts with anybody in support.

Back to the support site, submit a second message, referencing the 
incident number issued in the first message, explaining the problem 
again and why the solution was no help. I further offered an opinion 
regarding the probable intellectual capacity of the the support rep.

A few minutes later, a reply to my second submission is received. 
Again, very generic, but this time with a different name and a 
different URL. I was doubtful, but I crossed my fingers and opened the 
URL. Ah, of course. Instructions for manually installing updates under 
Windows. <sigh> The second support rep seems to be racing the first to 
the bottom.

Ok, back to the support site. This time, I started with their top 
issues list. Each of the support articles behind these top issues 
concludes with a few related links. Following these, I eventually came 
across one about a Final Review Loop.

The eventual answer was found in that article. "We are working on a 
solution to this."

I should add that except for one-time dalliance with Tax Cut, I've used 
TurboTax every year since '92 (it was MacinTax then) and never had a 
problem. I'll probably continue to use it every year. But I just might 
give TaxCut another look first.


Cheers,
Chris


"The opinions expressed in this message are not necessarily a 
reflection of reality or consciousness."
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