I finished my taxes. I did them online with TurboTax. This year I did them online because I could have paid $100 or so in the store for TurboTax as I usually do, or I could actually use the online service and have them deduct the cost ($74.99) from my tax refund. Ergo, no cost out of pocket for me on the transaction.

When I finished, it gave me the opportunity to tell them how my experience was. They said be specific. I was, then they told me my entry was too long. Evidently I’m only allowed to be specific with up to 1024 characters. My specifics was three times that long.

So, that’s another stick in my craw and, instead of editing my comments, I simply am going to leave Intuit the URL for this blog post and tell them they can read what the rest of the world reads. With serach engine optimization, my comment will be forever in the ether, and with all the media and politicians that monitor my blog, I think that is serves them right for limiting my content when I was trying to be specific in order to help them retain my business. So, without further ado, here is the unedited comment to their question:

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How likely would you be to recommend TurboTax to your friends, family or colleagues?

I ranked it a 2 out of 10.

What would you say are the main reasons for your rating? Please be specific.

At the end I couldn’t deduct the cost of TurboTax from my refund…I had to give you a credit card. I even went through the help to try to select the option, which I had selected previously, by going to the Print & File tab, continuing, and looking for the “before we begin…” link which wasn’t there. Specifically, these instructions in your help:

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If you’d like to see the screen that allows you to choose different options for paying for TurboTax, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Print & File tab, above. Select Continue at the bottom of the page.

2. You’ll see the “Before We Continue, Tell Us Which Options You Would Like to See” page.

2. Select “Show me all my options”. Continue to finish your return. You should see all the options for paying your TurboTax fees and for getting your refund.
====================

So I went to the forum, which had a suggestion I go through the Personal Info tab, then repeat the Print & File routine above, and that still did not work. So, I had to use my credit crad or else “Clear” my return and start again. Not likely, friends, since I had spent hours already AND there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t encounter the same problem again.

So, Imagine my surprise when the cover sheet of my filed return says the following:

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Federal law requires this consent form be provided to you. Unless authorized by law, we cannot use, without yourconsent, your tax return information for purposes other than the preparation and filing of your tax return. You are not required to complete this form. If we obtain your signature on this form by conditioning our services on your consent, your consent will not be valid. Your consent is valid for the amount of time that you specify. If you do not specify the duration of your consent, your consent is valid for one year. Before we continue, we need your permission to check your tax return to see if you are eligible for certain options in our program. Specifically, we would like to check your age, whether you have a refund and the amount, your state of residence and whether you are a U.S. resident.

The following statements apply:
I authorize Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, to use the 2009 tax return information described above:
To determine my eligibility to place all or a portion of my refund on a debit card.
To determine whether a portion of any refund can be used to pay for tax preparation.
======================

Obviously I had checked the option and it never showed up, so I wasn’t able to apply the cost to my refund but YOU were able to retain my personal information.

Ergo, my only recourse is to follow the last line in the same section on my cover sheet:

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If you believe your tax return information has been disclosed or used improperly in a manner unauthorized by law or without your permission, you may contact the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) by telephone at 1-800-366-4484, or by email at complaints@tigta.treas.gov.
====================

Which I will have to do without some reconciliation from Intuit. And, I do NOT expect to see Intuit debit my return for the amount of the program, or we will have a serious issue!

That is why I will not recommend TurboTax online and made it clear already to my 1004 friends on Facebook through your convenient share widget at the end of the process.

I’m very disappointed.

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That’s it. I will now publish so i can give them the URL. I will post their comments if they send me an email. Perhaps though, they would prefer to make it a public discourse in order to reconcile and renew some goodwill?

Kristofer Cowles has written 306 articles on this blog.

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Kristofer Cowles is the Publisher of American|Writes. Kristofer has been a small business owner since 1981. He is a nationally recognized public speaker known as Mister American focusing on American Exceptionalism. He is a political activist and has consulted on more than thirty-five national level campaigns as well as numerous local and state candidacies. His political work has been featured on Red State and multiple local news outlets. A full listing of Kristofer's involvement is located on the Full Disclosure page of this blog. Kristofer belongs to an elite group of Twitter users as the 780th most prolific Tweeter worldwide having tweeted more than 100,000 times as of November 2011.