I’ve had the taxes queued up and ready to file for a month now. I was waiting to file them so we could determine if there would be a tax impact from some investments in another country. Now that we have that figured out, time to file the taxes.

I log on to Turbotax web and review everything. Turns out there’s a bug. It’s generating a form for my wife that we don’t need, relating to retirement accounts. Go over to retirement accounts… oh, there’s the problem. That box shouldn’t be checked. Uncheck it, click Next ->, Yes ->, No ->, Yes ->, Yes ->, No ->, Yes ->, OK ->, Yes ->, No ->, Yes ->, Yes ->, No ->, Yes ->, Finished. At the summary screen, the calculated amount is still the same. Go back to the checkbox screen, and the value I need unchecked is checked, causing my entire tax return to be incorrect and unfileable. Uncheck it again, Next -> Yes ->, etc. Summary screen: still wrong.

Next step is to do what I know is unproductive and will in no way solve the problem: open a ticket with technical support! Bear in mind, I’ve already paid the Turbotax fees, so I’m committed at this point, unless I want to get the credit card company involved.

To Intuit’s credit, my response comes fairly quickly. Then again, I suppose it is Monday morning in India when I send my email.

Good day!
This is (omitted),but my real name is (omitted) your technician from Turbo Tax. I do apologized for any inconvenienced this might have caused you. Let me make sure I understand your concern correctly even if you changed informations about Form (omitted) for your wife and uncheck the boxes for her. It was still generating incorrectly. I’ll be happy to check on that concern, turbo tax online for any changes to be made like deleting and correcting informations after doing these. Please move forward atleast five pages from the page changes made so that the software will recognize and refresh the new entries put in. After that sign out and sign back in.
If error persists please repeat the steps. For further assistance please contact us so i can even guide you through.Thank You so much.

Insightful! I manage to parse the message after a few read-throughs and, while I’m extremely pessimistic, based on what I know about web-based software, I give it a try. It doesn’t work. Sigh.

Off to the support forums I go, because surely someone else has had this ridiculous problem. Viola! On page 5 of a 60+ message thread about a related topic, I find a suggestion: delete the form using the Other -> dialog, then re-enter the retirement info. And like magic, all was right with the tax return.

It was enough to make me very leery of Turbotax for the Web. Another case where computers can be our best friends or our worst enemies.

UPDATE: And what the hell was with the “This is (omitted),but my real name is (omitted)” business? It wasn’t even like the ‘This is’ name was a nickname. The names were flipped, too… the foreign-sounding name was first and the Anglican name was second. “This is Purvesh, but my real name is Christopher.”