Like many other people, I use TurboTax to do my taxes, because it’s horrible, but better than everything else. While completing my 2009 return with the online edition, I came across a bit of extra evil they’ve added.
By law, tax preparers and makers of tax software cannot use your personal information for anything other than completing your return. They cannot use it to sell you things. They cannot sell it to other people for marketing purposes. This is a little bit of consumer protection that’s necessary because under standard U.S. privacy laws, you don’t actually have any privacy.
However, they can ask for permission to do these things. Recognizing that most people will sensibly decline to offer such permission, some companies – like Intuit – will attempt to trick you into it. As below:
It’s phrased so that if you are not reading carefully (and please, always read things like this carefully) you will think that by declining to fill out the form that’s just below the screen image above, you are going to miss out on some fabulous options to get your tax refund.
You’re not. There is one option, more fabulous than all the rest, that you should pick: having the IRS transfer your refund into your bank account. What you are really doing by giving your consent to “see all your options” is giving Intuit consent to use your personal information.
You don’t have to do it. If you select the unappealing-sounding “Don’t show me any options” (hey, who doesn’t like options, right?") you proceed to the next screen, where you can file or print your return. Which is really what you want.
It’s slick and kind of evil. One of the key considerations in selecting software for something like tax preparation is trust. Will it be right? Will your information be safe? Will the company stand behind their product and help you if they’ve made an error that results in an error on your taxes?
That’s why most of us select a well-known product like TurboTax rather than Bob’s Amazing Tax Return Maker. Except that you actually have to be careful, because Intuit is trying to trick you into giving them consent to use your information in ways that you probably don’t want. I suppose this creates some revenue for Intuit, but at the expense of trust, which may not be a good trade-off for them in the long term.
What I would really like to see: an online tax preparation created by the IRS that connects directly to their systems, with no shady middleman like Intuit.
Anyway, if you use TurboTax, read everything carefully, and don’t become an Intuit marketing victim.
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Wow. I haven’t used TT for a couple years, since having to deal with partnership tax issues and such. What’s particularly slimy about this is that it’s really not clear what you’re opting “in” or “out” of — it’s not simply that they’re failing to ask clearly “can we use your information”; they’re pro-actively muddying the waters. “Don’t show me any options. [paragraph] This agreement does not apply to you…” Huh? I’m a lawyer and I have trouble parsing that double-negative-with-paragraph-break.
Btw, this does not occur in their [install on your own computer] software. As someone who wades through legalize on a regular basis, I agree with Wutzke, the above is intended to mislead.
If you think things are bad now, just wait until all that corporate money starts driving our elections. Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Stephen, yes it does. I’m using the desktop version of TT (for Mac OS).
Other than that, it works fine, but I loathe Intuit with a passion to the point where I’ve pirated TT every year since about 2005 after they burned me badly on their bogus rebate scheme, and they are about the most incessant rebater on the planet.
I used to use TurboTax on the Mac, back before Intuit bought it. I’d have to go scout out the disks to see what it was called back then. I stopped using it a few years after Intuit bought it, when they discontinued the basic Mac version and forced you to buy the expensive bells ‘n’ whistles version if you used a Mac. I switched over to Kiplinger’s TaxCut. Same thing, different vendor, but they ship a Mac version in the flavor I want.
The other thing about TT which bugs — heheheh, he said “bugs” — me to no end is their built-in “updates checker.” Do we honestly believe that every time we start up there is some new tax deduction that they want to make sure we get? Some law has changed since yesterday? Really? More like, “our developers found bugs or security flaws since you last started our software.”
I use the Windows version, and have completed my taxes, and have not encountered that ugly screen. Perhaps I will encounter it when it’s time to actually file my taxes.
Btw, almost all software has bugs. Software with more than a few thousand lines of code is guaranteed to have bugs — that’s just the nature of the beast. The mark of good software producers is that they update their software regularly/often with bug fixes.
And yes, in these early days of the year, the government continues to publish new tax forms. It takes time for software producers to incorporate these forms into the software. I have often had to wait until February to file my taxes because I am waiting for forms to be published by the government and released by the software. (I generally complete my taxes during the first week of the year.)
Hey, you got an icon! Before when I would pull down my menu, “By the Bayou” would just have the generic “blank page” next to the title, but now you’ve got a nice blue grid thingy. Nice!
Um… wow. I didn’t do anything. I don’t see the icon either. Well… yay!
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