This Flowchart Will Help You Decide If You Should Use TurboTax This Year
You know what isn't great? The way Americans file their taxes right now. It's a topic I covered for Digg just a few weeks ago, and one I became a great deal more passionate about in the course of working on my piece. I strongly support any move to challenge the status quo preserved by the tax preparation industry, I wish we had a form of automatic filing in place and I'm absolutely appalled that millions of Americans who could file their taxes for free by using Free File Alliance software don't, simply because the option is poorly publicized.
You know what is great? The work that journalists at ProPublica have been doing for years on tax preparation, and especially on how Intuit, makers of TurboTax, lobby against any reforms that would improve the way we file taxes. Long story short, instead having of automatic returns or free IRS-made tax software, Intuit fights to keep the Free File Alliance arrangement in place to protect their own bottom line. ProPublica has been beating the drum about this for years, and without their work, my article decrying our broken system and many others wouldn't exist.
Just this morning, Justin Elliott published a report at ProPublica concerning the Taxpayer First Act, a piece of legislation with bipartisan support that would bar the IRS from ever making its own free tax filing software. This isn't the only aim of the Taxpayer First Act, but if it passes both the House and the Senate as-is on the merits of its other provisions, it'd be a huge win for Intuit and other tax preparation companies… at the expense of taxpayers, of course.
As I noted in my earlier piece, I am neither a top-notch tax expert nor is there a one-size-fits-all solution for filing taxes. If you make under $66,000 with a W2 and plan on taking the standard deduction, filing your taxes will probably be pretty simple. If you're in a higher income percentile, plan on itemizing your deductions and/or have a stack of 1099s you eye with dread, seeing an accountant is likely worth it.
But enough about all that, you came here for a simpler question: to see if you should file your taxes with TurboTax. I made a flowchart that'll tell you what to do regarding Intuit's offering, whether you're paying to file or not:
There you have it. Don't use TurboTax, don't use H&R Block — hell, if you're really motivated you can plug in the names of other providers at OpenSecrets.org to see if they've directed their money somewhere you find particularly unsavory. Oh, and do make sure to file your taxes or file for an extension soon. The whole process may really, really stink right now, but we've gotta deal with it.