[DM-MUG] TurboTax 2005 experiences

[Ray Bowler]

My sympathy. I have had this with Turbo Tax most years but my 
situation is slightly different in that I have income from rental 
property(or rather my spouse does). This usually means that the final 
version of a form has not been released by the IRS.

At 10:15 PM -0600 1/23/06, Chris Tyrrell wrote:
>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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-- 
Ray

Des Moines, IA Mac Users Group
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