Where’s my teleFile? Seriously, filing my return online this year sucks. Hard. Having taken advantage of IRS’ teleFile in the past and finding the total time involved to be greatly less than an hour, I am greatly disappointed thus far in the various ‘free’ filing options available via third parties linked to via the IRS’ Web site. Some of these sites are so useless it’s scary.
Ultimately, I ended up using Intuit’s TurboTax Online, even though I really don’t like Intuit’s business practice of forced upgrades and locking people out of their financial data. However, it’s the only online option I found on my fourth attempt that actually worked correctly.
If you can deal with being courted to buy the latest Turbo Tax and subscribe to professional services literally every third page you visit, it gets the job done. It actually works in Firefox, although it claims you need to use Internet Explorer on Windows and, amusingly, Safari on the Mac. (Why not Konqueror on Linux, then?) You also don’t need to initially sign up for an account, which is nice if you just don’t care, like me — later I learned I created an account a half dozen years ago and forgot about it, forcing me to create a second one as you can’t port your thirty minutes of data entry to an existing account.
It automatically adds expected items into form fields, like parenthesis around area codes and dashes where they go for social security numbers and employer identification numbers. The online help is actually written in a manner that inspires some confidence that someone at Intuit has some idea about 2005’s tax code.
As a final step you will have to register, as if you had actually purchased a copy of TurboTax, so you can expect to get the usual special offers and related nonsense as the cost of using their free eFile option.
I tried eSmarttax, but found it tended to spend a lot of time ‘thinking’, forcing me to stop and click a form button again. Not exactly inspiring confidence. The W2 entry form looked broken, but worked. Further after completion they wanted to charge me for my free filing. I walked away.
CitizenTax wanted to hurt my brain with a requirement for a random, overly complex password. I walked away.
ezTaxReturn incorrectly calculated my return and had all manner of weird looking form entry fields. I walked away.
Others had copyright dates that hadn’t been updated recently, which seemed reason enough to discount them with so many choices. Competition in this space doesn’t seem to have improved offering quality just yet.
JasonH said,
April 15, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I just wanted to add my two cents on eSmartTax. DON’T USE IT!
I encountered the issue you had with the ‘thinking’ issues, where pages didn’t seem to load after clicking a button. But more importantly, I had an issue after submitting a form where it sat in the processing stage for nearly a week. I attempted to get a hold of them via their technical support mechanism (an online form), but their only response (a day later), was that they would have a “developer” look at the problem. After another 24 hours of no response, I attempted to contact them again. However, they DO NOT list a phone number or anything other than a general info email address which actually goes to Liberty Tax’s domain. I tried contacting Liberty tax, but they could only forward me to a voicemail box for eSmartTax. I then sent them another technical support message asking them to cancel my form, as I would submit it manually, only to have them FINALLY get back to me 4 hours later letting me know that they had fixed the issue and submitted my form. Overall, a terrible experience, and a business that doesn’t seem to care much about customer service.