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 - great purchaseproduct was offered at a great price. excellent communication between seller and buyer. great service!!! Rating:  - California calculation errors for stock optionsThis product worked really well until I got to the California return. As other reviewers have stated, the program makes a significant error calculating California taxes when it comes to employee stock options. The program double-counts profits for AMT purposes, and so it calculates that you owe more tax than is correct. Even worse than the software having the bug, the response of Turbotax support has been very disappointing. I emailed them with a description of the bug on February 1, and then I discovered a workaround to the bug on my own and emailed them with that solution on February 4. They sent me an email back thanking me for my feedback but said they couldn't guarantee that a patch would be issued. They have a live community forum, to which I also posted a description of the bug and a workaround. But this only produced a few replies from other people who are also seeing the same bug. And the search engine for the forum is so poor that it is nearly impossible to find the post that I wrote, even if I type the exact title of my posting in the search engine window. Other people on the community forum (as well as other Amazon reviewers) have reported this bug as well. I found one post on the community forum stating that an update would be available on February 15, but as of today (Feb 23), the error still exists. Also, once an Intuit employee answers a posting, it seems to be marked as "solved" and no follow-up postings are allowed (even if it is not really solved.) Had I not carefully reviewed the forms this program generated, I would have paid thousands of dollars more to California than I owed, so I cannot recommend this program despite the otherwise superior user-interface. In past years I have always used TaxCut, which is more difficult to navigate but has never produced an error like this. For anyone else in my situation, here is a workaround to the problem: ----------------- On the Federal forms menu, on each Capital Gains Worksheet, line 38 gives a choice to report the transaction as single-line or multiple-line. Multiple-line is selected by default. By selecting single-line on each transaction, my California AMT and my total California taxes were reduced substantially. The fact that "single-line reporting" shows a different result than "multiple-line reporting" proves without a doubt that this is a Turbotax bug. There should be no difference in the tax calculated due to the reporting format. ---------------- Rating: - Premier ProductThis product lives up to it's name. It's very user friendly and easy to navigate after you initially get used to the different screens. I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised at using this software. This is the second year I have used it and will probably use it again next year. Rating: - Taxcut convertI used Taxcut for many years and decided to switch to TurboTax this year for no good reason. I am much happier with Turbotax!!!!! The interface is different and took awhile to figur out how to navigate, but found it easy after short time. The investment and deduction features (linked to realtime internet data) are great tools and easy to use. Turbotax was able to figure the cost basis of stocks i held for over 10 years with many splits and reinvested dividends (I was dreading doing this on my own). Turbotax is linked to a site for charitable deductions, what a great feature; it easily calculated the value of goodwill donations. Taxcut uses a seperate program, deduction pro, costing extra money. While Turbotax usually cost more then taxcut it is easy to find good deals on Amazon.com i will stick with Turbotax for many years. Rating: - Better than everThis year TurboTax has outdone themselves once again. The new version asks all the right questions and makes filing as easy as can be. If it were something besides tax preparation, it could almost be perfect. However,the "FairTax" would help eliminate the need for even the simplest of software programs.
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