Gordaen's Blog

For a few years now, I’ve done my taxes with Turbo Tax. If you go to the IRS site, you can select Free File and pick from one of the free sites, including Turbo Tax (assuming you’re not “well off”). Turbo Tax has always been good in the past, but this year they decided I needed twenty emails to remind me to do my taxes with them. Unfortunately, I’m not exaggerating the amount of spam they have sent. In the past, it had always been one or two emails, which is fine by me, but this year they were more than excessive. Since I hate spam, I decided that I shouldn’t use Turbo Tax anymore. I needed to do my taxes quickly in order to fill out the FAFSA, so I chose to go with H&R Block. I figured being the name in taxes, their site should be great. As usual with corporate websites, I was largely disappointed.

Every time I fill out tax paperwork I wonder why it isn’t automated. Companies should report all employee wages, taxes, etc. Charities should report the donations. Banks should report the interest. The IRS should collate this data and send out a simple, easy-to-read report to each tax payer. The information should all be correct, but the tax payer could review the data and file the necessary electronic paperwork to fix any errors. Unfortunately, this would be easy, logical, and far more cost effective than our current system, so we don’t do it.

Back to the point: H&R Block is a huge disappointment. Overall, their online process was going pretty well, then I clicked the button to tell it I needed to enter a cash donation. It wasn’t any huge donation, but I try to be thorough with my taxes. After I entered the donation, I came to a screen for entering non-cash donations (e.g., to Goodwill). I did not feel like guessing what my meager contributions were worth. The question was essentially worded “Do your total non-cash donations add up to less than $500.” Well, since I wasn’t going to put anything, I figured $0 was less than $500. As usual, my logic was flawed. The site expected me to enter an amount and not doing so made that section of the return incomplete. I tried to delete all of the donation info and it was still incomplete. I ended up making a non-cash donation of $0 to N/A in order to complete that section.

Finally I make it to the section where I put in my bank routing and account numbers. Entering my routing number, I found that the field was masked (i.e., the characters entered show up as asterisks), but they had a second field, just like if I were entering a password. I thought that was a little funny (SSN was not hidden, so why bother with the routing number (which is specific to the bank and can be found online in most cases…)?), but I entered it in and started to enter it in again in the second field only to discover the second field was not masked. WTF MATE? It makes no sense to hide a field and then confirm it with a visible field…

Toward the end of the whole process, there is a chance to fill out a survey. I thought I should let them know some of the flaws of their system, so I filled out a detailed reply. Toward the bottom you can pick what form of contact they should use if they have any questions about what you said. Being technologically anti-social, I selected e-mail only to realize there is no box to put in my email address.

Okay, so maybe they use the address I have on file, so I submitted the survey and the page reloaded with an error:

I decided if they didn’t want to do the 10 seconds of testing on their survey page it would have taken to catch that error, then my opinion must not be very important to them. Fine, I deleted all the data I had entered and continued. A few “next” clicks later and…

That’s right, a 404 (page not found) error. I thought I was flabbergasted before, but at this point I didn’t have any acronym that meant WTFx10. How could they have that many problems on their pages? Did they code only for Internet Explorer, expecting that the people who are technologically savvy enough to do their returns online would want to use the least secure browser they could to put in their social, bank account, etc. info? Needless to say, I will never use any of their services again.

If anyone uses any tax sites other than the two mentioned above (or if you have your own horror stories), feel free to leave comments (as if you shouldn’t feel free other times).