This rant sponsered by the IRS and Turbo Tax

Oh yes it is that lovely time of the year again where we must all subject ourselves to one of the two life guarentees.  Im actually quite fortunate in that I probably have the simplest possible tax scenerio around; single, no dependents, one source of income.  An H&R Block agents wet dream!  20-30 minutes work for whatever the hell they are charging these days.  Which is precisely why I prepare my own taxes.  For 3 years I have used Turbo Tax with no difficulties.  Last year I encountered an automatic updating issue that I was able to resolve in ~30 min through their online tech support.  So this year when I encountered a similar issue I wasnt too  concerned.  Went to the online support found the exact error message I was getting performed the prescribed fix and....it didnt bloddy work?!  Uninstalled reinstalled program, reperformed patch...nada.  Booted in safe mode..nada.  Basically, 6 hours later after performing every trick I know the program still refused to install the updates because it was getting hungup and timing out due to some programing glitch.

Thank God the IRS has online PDFs that you can fill in and print, so thats what I did.  That and I owe this year so I definately feel like mailing it in at the last possible minute.  Whats pathetic is that Turbo Tax did precisely what it was supposed to do and calculated everything correctly, but due to some poor programming or unforseen software conflict would not perform the install to update the finalized forms and therefore would not e-file my taxes.  Actually, I really couldnt even print it out and mail the form in either because it had overlaid in BOLD letters "FORM NOT FINAL: DO NOT MAIL".  Oh well I do hate prepairing taxes, and refuse to pay someone else to do mine since I have such a simple case.  I just wished the whole damn system was a lot more streamlined.  Uhgh, just wasted a beautiful saturday afternoon.

Posted by bunsen27 on Sat Apr 15, 2006 @ 8:55 pm EDT | 0 Comments