Rating: 
Summary: Buggers screw you on the refund too...
Review: To add insult to injury Tax Cut also inaccurately calculated my tax return resulting in a correction from the IRS and a lesser refund. There's nothing like the cold-chill up the back when you see "IRS" in the return address box on the envelope. Thanks H&R! The mail-in refund people play games with the Catch 22 of needing original copies of the receipt and UPC in two places at once. Of course I got the cheaper refung only. I never seem to get used to all the incompetence & dishonesty in our society everywhere. Zero Stars for Tax Cut!!!
Rating: 
Summary: It works for me
Review: I was a TurboTax user. I bought TaxCut Deluxe this year because I hate TT's spyware. On my Windows 2000 PC, TaxCut runs fine, no problem. Frankly speaking, the software itself is not as easy to use as TurboTax. But it does the job, and it does not have spyware. That's the whole reason I swithed to TaxCut, and I'm happy with the switching.
Rating:
Summary: TaxCut blows
Review: I'm always hesitant to write these reviews on products I don't like. Not that the reviews aren't worthwhile - I'm just fairly unmotivated when it comes to this sort of thing. But TaxCut was such a dismal piece of software that I just had to tell other interested folks about my experience. I purchased TaxCut because I wanted to "take a stand" on the TurboTax locked-license issue (read the TT reviews for more info). After this experience, though, I am *very* glad that the Quicken folks have stated they won't lock next year's TT! Otherwise, I would've had to resorted to doing my taxes by hand. For me, TaxCut was that bad - I would've saved more time and frustration by doing my taxes by hand.I used TaxCut for both my wife's and my individual taxes (we filed separately). We filed both Federal and California taxes. My wife worked for a company for the entire year, and I worked for a small company for about ¾ of the year, and then contracted for ¼ of year. My wife and I are both computer folk--I'm a Windows software engineer, and she's an NT/Unix SysAdmin--so we know our way around computers & software. Regardless, TaxCut caused me all sorts of grief. Here's a list of the problems I ran into whilst using TaxCut: - Though I have a full-time broadband connection, TaxCut couldn't find the network. This meant that I couldn't do online updates (I had to download & install them manually) *and* I couldn't file my taxes online (hence I couldn't take advantage of TaxCut's online-filing rebate). TaxCut's technical support was worthless at helping me solve this problem - though admittedly I didn't spend too much time working on this problem, and just resigned myself to paper-filing. - The software reported incorrect results for my wife's California return! It was reporting that her refund was going to be every penny she paid in state taxes (~$6K), rather than owing $133, which turned out to be her real state tax liability. Oddly, though, when I reviewed her internally-generated state tax form (using the "view Form" feature), it showed the correct (owe $133) value - somehow TaxCut's left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing! This was problematic, because even though the form was correct, the "interview" wizard still acted as though I was going to get a refund - and I have no idea what sort of deduction it was using for the federal taxes. After banging my head against this problem solo for quite a while, then going round-and-round with TaxCut's horrible tech support folks (they were utterly worthless), I finally started over w/ my wife's taxes - this time, it got it right. (Note: I *believe* the problem had something to do with me initially telling TaxCut that my wife was not a resident of California - though after seeing and fixing this problem and then reviewing all the interview questions & answers multiple times, TaxCut still couldn't figure it out.) - While I find TurboTax's interview process to be fairly "engaging" and helpful, I found TaxCut's interview to be little more than original IRS instructions. If TurboTax was the computer simulation of your helpful tax accountant, then TaxCut is a simulation of an IRS government worker: not very helpful, clear, or informative. - "Help" is not context-sensitive. Clicking on "Help" just shows you the Help table-of-contents. TaxCut sometimes has some context-related FAQs for an interview question, but I find that there's not nearly enough when your taxes are at all tricky. The online help is really not too much more than the IRS & state tax publications. - Quite a few times TaxCut's interview process couldn't handle my particular tax situation, and forced me to pop its electronic version of an IRS form or worksheet, and had me fill it in by hand. This was particularly true for self-employment-related issues: for this stuff, TaxCut really wasn't too much more than an electronic 1040 worksheet with a built-in calculator. - I owed the government a penalty for not paying estimated taxes. After answering the interview questions, TaxCut calculated the penalty at ~$500. I then went back and answered the questions slightly differently (but still accurately: I just answered the, "Would you like to use this method to calculate X?" questions a bit differently), and it got the penalty down to ~$68! This is the type of thing that I could usually trust TurboTax to do for me: calculate something via the two different ways, and give me the better of the two results. (If nothing else, TT usually asks better questions that more readily guide me to the best responses). - One annoyance that kinda sums up my entire TaxCut experience: when I got to the California state interview, one of the first questions was "will you be attaching your federal tax form to your California tax form?" Jeez, I don't know! By clicking on the FAQ, it tells me that I will need to include the federal form if I'll be sending in anything other than a 1040, and few Schedules it lists. Hmm....Doesn't TaxCut know what forms I'm sending?! I surely didn't know - it wasn't until *after* doing the state interview that you actually print your federal forms for mailing, and I couldn't figure out any easy way of discovering this information. - TaxCut doesn't calculate 2003 tax estimates and print out the quarterly payment vouchers. This very much surprised me: though I've never had to pay estimated taxes until this year, I always found TurboTax to be very pro-active and fully-features w/rt estimated taxes. All-in-all, while TurboTax for me is much more of a "full tax solution", TaxCut is just more of a "helper app". If you use TaxCut and your taxes are at all out of the norm, expect to be reading over IRS publications and filling out the forms pretty-much by hand.
Rating:
Summary: Program crashes, company unresponsive
Review: The previous year's version failed to print out some required forms for me, and the IRS mailed me a nasty note.
Also did not limit assorted credits properly, gaining me another nasty note from the IRS. Emailed my concerns to the support page, and got no response. This year, the program crashes repeatedly
"Creating a copy of form TCImmutableIdentifier: immutableID(190) would exceed the maximum copy limit of 1"
or
"Tax form type TCImmutableIdentifier: immutableID(92) was not found (see TaxReturnDesc::getTaxFormDescriptor(id)())" And did not save recent versions. Do not discover first hand how bad it is. I won't find out next year.
It's so bad, I'm taking time off from doing my taxes to complain.
Rating:
Summary: Go back to Turbo Tax!
Review: I purchased this product based on the reviews that it was better than Turbo Tax, but was very disappointed. There were so many errors and omissions in this program that couldn't be repaired, and no explanation about what was going on. I had to go back and change some items and they were either never recorded or recorded incorrectly. I eventually compared my results with Turbo Tax, which offered much clearer explanations, and I went from owing over $1000 with tax cut to getting a refund of $400 with Turbo Tax. Tax Cut needs to be improved before it should be released to the public!
Rating:
Summary: It's April 13th and the program can't complete my taxes
Review: I just got off the phone with tech support Please start your taxes again! The file you have worked on for 40+ hours is corrupt! Well not completely corrupt as it passes all of the checks, it
it prints. It just won't allow the state program to work. Once you install the state program it will have runtime errors and corrupt the program. This program is poorly written trash.
Rating:
Summary: Doesn't work in California
Review: I bought this because TurboTax instituted it new one computer policy. It is not worth the money.
Federal and state deductions are different in CA, and TaxCut calculated the state deductions incorrectly.
It's user-interface was not user friendly.
The help site at IRS.gov was easier to use and understand than the help with this product.
The error checking created more errors than it caught, and ended up creating a loop so that I had to manually fill in the forms to fix.
In the end, it told me that it could not electronically file a standard form in California. It can only file the EZ form, and I would have to print out my forms and mail them in.
By the time I downloaded the extra forms and worksheets needed for this progam, battled with the software, and was rejected by the e-filing system, I could have filled in the forms by hand with a calculator and done a less frustrating, faster, and better job.
Rating:
Summary: Better hope you don't need tech support!
Review: TaxCut provides support via a long-distance number (Dallas, TX) not an 800 number. Their tech support online is useless unless you just need some hand holding. They promise e-mail Tech support in 48 hrs, but my request took over a week to get a non-satisfactory reply. I wanted to return this for a refund, you'll also find they make that difficult.
On a side note, if you were leaving TurboTax because of the spyware/spam associated with it, TaxCut may not be a good choice either. Read their privacy policy, they will sell your information to third parties.
Rating:
Summary: Incompetent software if you moved during the year
Review: I've been a Turbotax user in the past and had no problems, but concerns about spyware this year made me switch to Tax Cut. Since Turbotax has provided a means to uninstall the questionable program, I'm going to use that this year after all even thought I have "finished" doing my taxes with Tax Cut. Why? I've had a host of problems and outright mistakes, impossible to override without losing e-file ability, because I moved last year. Addresses change willy-nilly within the software. State income is computed incorrectly. My state tax income withheld is no where to be seen, and trying to override the entry takes me noplace except the dreaded threat to void my e-file status. I'm technically competent with a PhD in science, and this thing is more frustrating than an oral defense. Bottom line, Tax Cut seems to be just fine for federal filing. If you moved and are a partial year resident and trying to file your state return(s) with Tax Cut, just forget it. This stinker makes Microsoft's worst dog a prize winner.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, easy, w/ no spyware
Review: Both Taxcut federal and state (California) worked perfectly for me. No missing forms, no calculations left to me, and nothing extra I had to do. I had a moderately difficult return (moving between states last year) and the total time to get all my returns done was about 2 1/2 hours. In previous years I've used turbotax, but the price and spyware/registration difficulties scared me off, since I was preparing my return on the 12th. No time to fix it if I had problems w/ turbotax. Downloaded both the fed. and state packages, got a full rebate for the price of the state package, and was working on the taxes about a half hour after I started the purchase. I'll definitly use taxcut next year.
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