I've lived abroad since 1977 and have a complicated tax return: Foreign bank accounts, foreign self employment, foreign earned income exclusion, house rental income in Oregon, etc. Turbo Tax is one of the few online tax preparers that can handle all this, so I have used them in the past. For 2017 I had to use IRS free file because Turbo Tax couldn't handle the first year of treating a non-US citizen as a resident alien for Federal income tax purposes. I made a few stupid errors on that return so decided to go with Turbo Tax for 2018.
Both my Federal and Oregon non-resident returns were easy and both were accepted for electronic filing. I got my Federal refund very quickly and my wife's self-employment income is already posted to her Social Security earnings record.
But then I got a letter from Oregon revenue pointing out an obvious mistake on the state return. It took me a long time to review their six page letter with a total of 13 tax return errors, all of which flowed from the original mistake. They were right. Turbo Tax made a silly error making the tax return internally inconsistent. (They erroneously claimed my entire Federal pension as a "subtraction" even though none of that income was taxable in Oregon. The subtraction should have been zero.)
Even if this error was caused by my input, the Turbo Tax software should have caught and warned about the internal inconsistency.
How to tell Turbo Tax about the error? Well, it's pretty much impossible.
I tried posting to their user forum where the only suggestions were to call (not really very practical from Thailand) or contact them by sending a message on Facebook or Twitter.
Really? Facebook or Twitter for customer support? I gave up on FB long ago. I never really figured out how to make use of Twitter, but I still have an account, so I sent a message. Four days later I received a reply telling me to contact Oregon Revenue. I patiently explained that Oregon Revenue was right and that Turbo Tax needed to fix a glitch.
Two days later I received another message telling me to use audit support. Well, it turns out that the only option in audit support is to call them during business hours. Their website said that the current telephone wait time was one hour and fifteen minutes.
I told my wife about the hour plus telephone wait. She is Thai and happens to be an attorney. She just laughed and said, "Who's gonna wait an hour on the phone?"
Yeah, who?
Has the US really gotten to the point where this sort of time-consuming hoop jumping is an acceptable way to provide customer support?
(Well, now I've got that off my chest. No need to reply.)
Both my Federal and Oregon non-resident returns were easy and both were accepted for electronic filing. I got my Federal refund very quickly and my wife's self-employment income is already posted to her Social Security earnings record.
But then I got a letter from Oregon revenue pointing out an obvious mistake on the state return. It took me a long time to review their six page letter with a total of 13 tax return errors, all of which flowed from the original mistake. They were right. Turbo Tax made a silly error making the tax return internally inconsistent. (They erroneously claimed my entire Federal pension as a "subtraction" even though none of that income was taxable in Oregon. The subtraction should have been zero.)
Even if this error was caused by my input, the Turbo Tax software should have caught and warned about the internal inconsistency.
How to tell Turbo Tax about the error? Well, it's pretty much impossible.
I tried posting to their user forum where the only suggestions were to call (not really very practical from Thailand) or contact them by sending a message on Facebook or Twitter.
Really? Facebook or Twitter for customer support? I gave up on FB long ago. I never really figured out how to make use of Twitter, but I still have an account, so I sent a message. Four days later I received a reply telling me to contact Oregon Revenue. I patiently explained that Oregon Revenue was right and that Turbo Tax needed to fix a glitch.
Two days later I received another message telling me to use audit support. Well, it turns out that the only option in audit support is to call them during business hours. Their website said that the current telephone wait time was one hour and fifteen minutes.
I told my wife about the hour plus telephone wait. She is Thai and happens to be an attorney. She just laughed and said, "Who's gonna wait an hour on the phone?"
Yeah, who?
Has the US really gotten to the point where this sort of time-consuming hoop jumping is an acceptable way to provide customer support?
(Well, now I've got that off my chest. No need to reply.)
