Info Manager: IMHO Info Manager: IMHO(Personal experience) Last year for the first time, I used TurboTax for the Web to file both my family and my step-son's Federal income tax. Because of his income, he was able to file for free last year.
This year, the IRS is trying to get as many people as possible to do electronic filing. Therefore, they have contracted with several companies to do free calculation and filing of taxes. If you go to the web site at www.irs.gov, you will find the link to those companies.
Each company however has different rules about who qualifies. Most will provide free service for those with less than an adjusted gross income of $28,000. But at least one will only do it for those with incomes of less than $12K UNLESS you are over 50 years of age.
One site would not set up a good secure connection, according to IE on my Mac and thus, it wouldn't let any communication begin.
I initially signed on to TurboTax to do my step-son's taxes. But couldn't find a link there to the free service that was there the year before. So I went to the IRS site and linked to several and tried them out.
I tried TaxBrain Online Tax Center without realizing they were the one that required $12K or less AGI. But I found out, that I really like the speed of their service. TurboTax, TaxCut and a couple of others that I tried are formatted much like the TurboTax software, in that they ask you one question at a time. Making the process very slow.
TaxBrain asks several questions to start and then only gives you options based on those questions. I was able to do my own taxes in less than an hour. Where I inputting the data into TurboTax took me over 4 hours. (Redraw time was unreal.)
The plus here was that it also allowed me to file for free since I am over 50. The negative is that I had to request a code from them to provide me that free service. But that only took about an hour for an e-mail reply.
I also found a link on the IRS site that took me to the TurboTax web site's free page. (Don't know why there wasn't a direct link from their http://www.turbotax.com page.) From there I was able to access the data I had already entered and thus didn't have to input it again.
All in all, I would recommend on-line filing for anyone with a high speed connection. If only dial up is available, then TaxBrain would be the only way to go online. And you probably ought to go back to one of the commercial packages anyway. (H&R Block's site was suppose to work with my Mac and browser, but didn't draw the screen proper. The reply I got from their technical people was that my machine should work. Period. Nothing to help. Glad I didn't wait for them to reply.
After I wrote the above, CBS Market Watch had an article about complaints with the services over billing practices.
Have a great week...
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