I knew I was doomed about five minutes into this year’s tax-prep ordeal. Two different programs — having been fed nothing more than basic personal info and the contents of a pair of W-2s — did not agree on the total tax bill for my wife and me.
H&R Block’s TaxCut Online and Intuit’s TurboTax Online should have coughed up identical responses to such a simple input, but instead they were $857 apart.
Sadly, I wasn’t surprised to see the two dominant home tax-preparation programs disagree, merely disappointed to see them part company so quickly. I have long since abandoned all hope of understanding how these applications compute my tax bill; I just want to know which one can end the agony first.
When judged on those limited criteria, tax-preparation software has improved a little — especially the Web-based versions that most people use, which need no software installation, securely encrypt work online and are free for simple returns. Others can try them for free, then pay to print or file (or, at no cost, copy data from them into the IRS’ new, free Web-filing system).
This year, I tried roughly comparable Web applications: Block’s $19.95 TaxCut Online Basic and Intuit’s $29.95 TurboTax Online Deluxe. Each worked in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3 in Windows; Safari 3 on a Mac. Intuit supports Windows 2000 or newer and Mac OS X 10.2 or newer, while Block only allows Win XP or Vista and OS X 10.3 or newer.
After some long nights of plugging in numbers for two salaries, a little freelance income, multiple bank accounts and investments, a mortgage and too many other details, TurboTax left me with a slightly higher tax bill than TaxCut. And yet I felt more comfortable with TurboTax’s estimate and less annoyed by its performance.
That’s partially because TurboTax required…