AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

Poor Service from Turbotax - Thanks but No thanks

I filed my income tax return on the evening of April 14. At 11:38 PDT on April 15, Turbotax notified me that the IRS rejected my return April 14 because an employer ID number was copied wrong. By the way, I am on EST, so 11:38 on April 15 is actually April 16th my time. Thanks a f-ing lot Turbotax. I believe that it is really poor service that it takes them 24 hours to get back to you when the IRS notified them that the return was rejected within minutes. Now I may have to pay a penalty when I could have easily filed the return by mail and paid none. Moral: next time I'm either going to try a Turbotax competitor or just forget about electronic filing altogether.

New Privacy Breach - is Turbotax to blame?

While trying to discover if I was going to have to pay a penalty because Turbotax notified me too late that my income tax return was rejected, I discovered wat appears to be a massive privacy breach that might (or might not) be Turbotax related. While searching for information regarding penalties for rejected returns, I found that hundreds of complete rejected tax returns, including names, addresses, social security numbers, the whole 9 yards, are completely accessable on the web. From what I could see the dates ranged from 2004 to 2000. I can't say for sure that Turbotax is at fault, but what I can say is that when you take Turbotax out of the search picture the results aren't as compelling. I am in the process of notifying folks that can help address the problem. I suspect that hundreds of other innocent web searchers are stumbling upon these tax returns as I write this. It looks like about 1000 returns are affected, so it's only about 1% the size of the choicepoint breach, but the accessibility of the returns is striking and shocking.