Alternative tax programs?

TurboTax is the "home version" of ProSeries, which is professional tax software made by the same company that makes TurboTax.

Bob Sandler

To put my complaints in a nutshell, it seems that TurboTax, at least the Macintosh version, does not use the features of the operating system. It often requires working AGAINST the ordinary and commonly used aspects of the Mac operating system. That is especially true of keyboard equivalents for mouse techniques. Does the Windows version have similar problems? My guess is that it does and that swithing to Windows will not help.

Now for a some commentary that may be considered to political.

With the IRS making digital copies of tax forms available, why not have the IRS also HELP Joe Taxpayer prepare the tax forms? They must already have the software to check the electronically filed forms. Whenever I make a mistake a mistake, they seem to catch it quickly. On one return I claimed the same estimated payment for two different years. They caught in time for there to be no penalty. It took me a few hours to track down my error.

The only reason I can think of for the IRS not to generate tax software to link together the forms they already supply electronically is that there is a lobby of tax professionals living off of Joe and Jill Taxpayer. Congress likes that!

I wouldn't be surprised if the IRS's software is some ancient batch COBOL application, not something that can be adapted easily to home computers or the web.

I have not experienced any problems of that sort with TurboTax in Windows.

Bob Sandler

I see no reason (technically) that the IRS fill in PDF forms cannot be made to include calculations. But, this is a political issue, with me being one of those left out.

On Mon, 2 Dec 2013 19:36:51 EST, Salmon Egg wrote in Re Alternative tax programs?:

Have you tried TaxAct?

Intuit and other companies in the tax prep business have repeatedly lobbied Congress - successfully so far - to defeat return-free filing, tax simplification, and other measures they perceive as threats to their business model. At least $28 million has been spent on lobbying by the major firms.

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Your technical complaints seem to be Mac-based. Go complain to Apple, maybe it's their 30% cut of the developer's revenue that scares away the developers...

You could get better results than TurboTax using ProSeries (as previously mentioned), which can be obtained for about $200 plus another $50 pay-per-return fed+state efiling fee, but again, only under Windows will you get the best results.

Unlike IRS, California does support CalFile and ReadyFile -- one is online-filing of basic forms (you provide the numbers), the other has wage and a few other basic income items pre-filled for certain eligible lower-income single taxpayers.

"A lobby of tax professionals" -- what's that, like a herd of cats? Granted, there are a few fat cats, such as Intuit & H&R Block. But plenty of other cats, too. I only wish the national Enrolled Agent association were as powerful as you imply.

Apple only gets a 30% cut of the application price if the developer chooses to sell it through the Mac App Store. Developers can avoid the expense by selling their applications directly to the consumer.

As for the iOS App Store, it offered more than one million apps in October 2013. How many developers do you think that leaves who Apple "scares away"? Those few who are can always sell to users who have jailbroken their devices.

In any case, most of the tax applications for the Mac were discontinued long before either app store came to be, driven out of business by competition from Intuit.

You're right, I took an unfair swipe at Apple (not that they noticed), and I retract my inaccurate comment about Apple and developer revenue.

"Salmon Egg" wrote

I use Drake software. They have a pay-per-return option if you plan to prepare several. Don't know what the minimum is, but I suspect it's in 25 or 50 return blocks.

They have (or will have) a web based preparation service for DIY'ers. Don't know the price on that either, but have been told that it's competitive with the other players.

I have not used the consumer tax preparation program, so I can't speak to it's stability or user friendliness.

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