Are companies that offer free e-filing of IRS tax returns, linked from the IRS website, actually charging customers? [6abc]
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Last year they charge $10 for doing state taxes.
Last year, when I went from the IRS site to H&R Block, if I signed in as having done it the year before (I had) it wanted to charge me. If I started afresh, it didn't.
i've been using taxact for the past 3 years. it's free, but man do they ever try to get you to spend money. last year i inadvertently signed up for advice from j.k. lasser which cost me $8 & didn't really save me anything. what cracked me up was that i had to pay with a CC...if i wanted them to debit my checking account, it was going to cost ~$30. how does that figure?
I always felt like I'm getting ripped off by these fees. What exactly am I paying for except for some company to relay a bunch of bytes to the IRS.
The IRS should provide this capability at no charge. After all, when I file electronically, it is saving the IRS a ton of money on data entry costs.
@hoosier45678: I complained several times to Real for that back in the day but they never did a thing about it.
I only use Real on the Mac these days, because their Mac devs don't seem to quite be so moronic. The Mac version is also self-contained and well-behaved and easy to be rid of if desired.
That's odd, I never had to pay a fee for e-filing my federal taxes, and I did go through the website on the IRS to be able to do it.
However, what did happen is that because the companies can specify an Adjusted Gross Income limit for the free e-filing anywhere from $0 to the IRS limi, TurboTax online actually changed their limit from the IRS limit in 2006 ($54,000) to $27,000 (unless you were military), so I was disqualified from using Turbotax online for free. I switched to H&R Block and got them for free this year.
I used a free service last year and had no problems. I used the same service this year and after completing everything the site didn't relay my return to the IRS. Luckily I planned well enough ahead and had kept a hard copy of the return the site generated, I simply mailed it in and got my refund. Tried contacting their customer service to no avail.
Back when I qualified for free filing with "Quicken on the Web", the rules were that you always had to access your account through a link from the Tax Freedom Act page, which was practically impossible to find unless being linked over from irs.gov. This was similar to the old RealPlayer download page, where they'd make you go through several pages with an obscure "Click here for the free player" link in grayscale at the bottom, sharing the page with huge multicolored ads for their non-free player.
You'd get to the part where you're ready to send it off and all of a sudden they'd be asking for your CC for the $30 fees. In order to get around this you'd have to save you progress, logout, return through the IRS page, then re-login. Suddenly it was free again.