[9erdelta]

Anecdotally, I stopped using TurboTax (after using it for 8 years) for 2 reasons. I was never confident that my tax situation was being handled correctly. The UI is noisy, the explanations don't explain. So I would buy audit insurance just in case. The second reason, it was slow and navigating between pages and sections was annoying. So now I pay a real person to do my taxes. It takes a quarter of the time, costs about the same as TurboTax + audit insurance, and now I now longer stress about taxes.

[gowld]

Audit insurance is a scam. If you get audited, you just update your return (unless IRS already did that for you) and pay (or get credit for) the correction. IRS isn't trying to put you in jail, they just want you to file correctly.

What do you think the "real person" does? They put your data into TurboTax or equivalent.

[LorenPechtel]

This. The IRS will only come after you if they think you were deliberately lying. Mistakes are simply to be fixed even when they are doozies. (One year I ended up amending my previous year's return because I had managed to fat-finger an extra digit into a number. It didn't change my tax bill *that year* by a single penny so nothing looked off. It was only when I saw the huge amount of losses being carried forward that I realized something was off. I didn't get any sort of complaint from the IRS about that despite it being a 5-figure error.)

[bob1029]

> IRS isn't trying to put you in jail, they just want you to file correctly.

A lot of people would live much easier lives if they believed this.

You can make a really half-assed filing and all they will ever do is send you an invoice for the difference.

In fact, you could simply not file your taxes ever and the IRS will eventually inform you of your actual tax burden, at which point you should probably pay accordingly. I've never gone beyond this point.

[bombcar]

The IRS is one of the most reasonable divisions of the government to get in a fight with, and there are insane amounts of protections built in for people who honestly believe they’re filing correctly. My dad even had them inform him of a filing error and included the additional much larger return he was due.

What you hear about and what they WILL get you for is deliberate fraud.

[astrange]

If you're not self-employed there's like a 0% chance you're getting your taxes wrong by holding TurboTax wrong.

If you're FAANG there is some chance you're overpaying by not doing the RSU cost basis properly.

[lkbm]

I imported Coinbase Pro transactions and they all got counted as short-term gains because they'd been moved from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro within the past year, despite having been purchased several years prior.

Now, you can definitely make the case that this is mostly Coinbase's fault for not sending over the actual purchase date, but TurboTax charged me a bunch of money to do that import, so I feel like they should have done some basic quality control.

I don't trust TurboTax to get my taxes right, because last year they got it very, very wrong.

[astrange]

But that's an example of you overpaying - no need for audit insurance if you're making mistakes in their favor.

I don't think it does wash sales across different brokers properly though, but neither does anyone else.

[lkbm]

Oh, I definitely don't worry about audit insurance, and operate on the assumption that the IRS will be non-antagonistic towards me if I make a mistake. I want to pay the correct amount in taxes, and the IRS wants me to pay the correct amount in taxes. We're on the same side, and my understanding is that they'll act as if we're on the same side unless there's clear reason to believe otherwise.

What I'm objecting to is the idea that I'm not going to get my taxes wrong using TurboTax. They fucked up badly.

I'm certainly not arguing that the solution is to buy audit insurance from the same company that told me to overpay by several thousand dollars. Every penny I pay to Intuit is a moral failing on my part, and on the part of the legislature that succumbed to their lobbying.

[9erdelta]

That's a fair point...I tend to be paranoid about these things, and I think your point reinforces mine to an extent. Yeah I have simple taxes, and yet couldn't feel confident about it through TurboTax. But at this point we're way off topic!