Monday, March 3, 2008

TurboTax Trouble with HSAs 

Filed As:  Health Care

There are gremlins at TurboTax thwarting people trying to enter their tax deductible Health Savings Account contributions. A number of people have been frustrated in dealing with the software, including a top HHS official, who recounted this experience:

In TurboTax's on-line tax form, "their system logic doesn't allow you to enter HSA contributions. With TurboTax, you go through items of income and then deductions, and it prompts you with every item on a 1040. But it does NOT prompt you to enter HSA contributions.

"I had to call them, wait on hold for 15 minutes, and then talk to some person who didn't even know what an HSA was. Finally, he figured out how to do it, but you have to search for the form and fill it out which, in total, took nearly an additional 15 minutes.

"In prior years,the system logic just defaulted me to the form where I have spent a grand total of 30 seconds entering my information. And when I asked him why they had changed their system logic, he told me that he didn't know.

"When I pointed out that entering my contributions had saved me $900, but that there were likely taxpayers who didn't understand that they would need to look for the form and would wind up overpaying their taxes due to TurboTax's negligence, I was greeted with silence."

Expect to hear more about this. In the meantime, here is the (equally bewildering) "Help" page on the TurboTax website.

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