Tax Software Woes

During the last Tax season, Turbo Tax decided to treat all their consumers as criminals. They built in many obstacles into their software that prevented even people who bought the software from using it. The software had to be activated to be used on a single machine. This meant that if you used your Home PC to prepare taxes, you could not take a print out on the office computer. And to prevent users from misusing the system, Intuit also installed third party monitoring software on the PCs.
Due to this “Walt Mossberg”:http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20030130.html of Wall Street Journal had said that time
bq. So, this year I emphatically recommend H&R Block’s TaxCut over Intuit’s TurboTax. They both do the job of preparing any straightforward tax return. But Intuit has decided to treat all its TurboTax customers like potential criminals, and to limit the ways that even honest people can use the product. Why subject yourself to that?
I followed his advice and bought TaxCut and found that it does not accept my wife’s ITIN. It allows only people with Social Security Numbers to file taxes. But as per IRS, people who do not have SSN can use their ITIN. It would not even go to the next screen.
But now Intuit is “apologizing”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/tech_intuit_dc for past behavior.
bq. “I want to personally apologize for any frustration you may have experienced due to the restrictions that came with our use of anti-piracy technology,” Tom Allanson, general manager of TurboTax, said Thursday in an open letter to customers. The letter was published in advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, as well as on the company’s turbotax.com Web site.
Now the activation technology has been removed and the software can be used on multiple PCs.