Topic: My vote.....
There are only two things certain in life- death and taxes.....some smart one told...
I am not sure what can be done with death but taxes can be made simple and annual ritual does not have to be as painful as some make it to be....
I have been using www.turbotax.com for last 4 years to do my taxes online....year after year the product has improved by many folds.....
One thing that I would like to avoid in every place is data entry....it is simply time consuming and error prone....it is also irritating especially when the same data is available in digital format on some computer on this earth..
Looks like smart guys at Intuit understood the problem well and put the latest technology of web service into reality.....
Now, you can have all your W2 (i.e. your pay data) etc directly extracted from those service providers directly into your tax forms....
With me, turbotax.com went to the payroll company of my employer and transferred all the data. I just had to eyeball them to dbl check. Same with my investments, got all the dividend, loss/gain info from my broker's data and filled it for me....so cool and painless....I hardly had to enter any data.....
Like with previous years, automatic debit or credit to your bank account for tax dues or refunds can be set up....Even IRS likes all this electronic based txns.....
Service fee is around 40 bucks if you do both state and federal taxes...There seem to be competitors who can do it for cheap but I stayed with turbotax for several reasons....first of all the historic data is there on their comps which even reduces entering personal data etc.....
As such, people are calling for further simplifying tax code...which I totally support....this whole tax system is a morass.....unnnecessary complicated.....
One thing total waste is going to personal tax prepares who are nothing but data entry clerks who are hired in hundreds by big tax preparing companies during this season... They are many times clueless what they are required to do....If your tax stuff is simple enough then you are lucky to have them not to mangle your data when they enter it manually....Go to a tax professional by all means if your taxes are complicated but just going to those companies which open make shif office in malls is just a waste of your time and money....you can do that yourself using a product like turbotax.com or plain old paper and pen stuff.
Good luck with taxes and may you get huge refunds that too fast :)
Cheers!
Posted by Mahesh
at 7:37 PM EST
