TaxCut Premium Online has errors this year.

I spent a good portion of my already too short weekend doing my taxes on TaxCut online. The actual job of filling everything out and filling in the forms went well and took just over an hour. Then the State dialog was displayed. I noticed that the state product did not allow for viewing any of the input fields but rather took the information from the Federal return behind the scenes. A few extra questions and I was done.

At the end, my wife noticed an error. The program had doubled the income figures from my W-2 before adding it to hers.

After some time on the live help chat, I had learned something. The CSR kept referring to my second state on my W-2. Well I did not have a second state, but I did have a second locality. Local taxes are withheld by both my home city and by the city where my employer is located. As a result I needed to add a second “State and Local Information” dialog to my W-2 form under the Federal tab.

My friend and I spend a few hours playing with the issue and figured out what to do to get the program to calculate things more correctly. It involved leaving some fields blank on the second “State and Local Information” dialog. The instructions did not address this. It was impossible to explain this during the chat, so I called.

I took the time to walk the representative through my problem. I demonstrated the doubling error. Even afterward when things were presumably correct, the State summary still indicated that my “Income” was the same as my “Taxable Income”. This makes me wonder what else might be incorrect. The fact is with the online program I was using it is not possible to inspect the forms at this stage prior to filing.

So I am at this point. I have a likely error staring me in the face. I have uncovered a second major error in the program. It caused a huge problem that was not caught by the error check was not addressed by the instructions and could easily have been overlooked as I submitted my return. I had taken the time to make the company aware of the issue, but neither the CSR nor her supervisor was able to offer me any sort of discount or reassurance that this issue would be addressed.

I informed the supervisor that I had not yet submitted my return or paid for the product and asked ‘why would I not simply go to TurboTax or one of the other tax software companies where my experience might be better’. She had no response except that the technical support line had no way to offer me any kind of discount. I asked ‘who did have a way to offer me something’ she said no one.

I was hoping for a discount or perhaps a free product for next year. It seems to me that TaxCut is not really interested in an issue that could cause problems for only a percentage of their customers. In other words they are not interested in quality.

My advice, be vigilant in checking your numbers if you choose TaxCut for 2007. There ARE errors that can affect your return.