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February 19, 2023
Question

Got a notice from IRS that I underreported income on 2021 taxes. I relied on Turbo Tax to collect all relevant info. What's the Turbo Tax "guarantee"? No info on site.

  • February 19, 2023
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rjs
Employee
February 19, 2023

TurboTax cannot "collect" information about your income. There is no way for it to obtain that information, except to ask you. It has to depend on you to enter all of your income, and to enter it accurately.


The TurboTax accuracy guarantee says that it guarantees the accuracy of its calculations, using the information that you enter. It cannot guarantee that you entered your income correctly. It has no way of knowing that.

 

February 19, 2023

Yes I am aware that ultimately I am responsible for entering all income and this was my oversight. However, in this case, I specifically chose the Premier edition of the product *because* I have rental income....just like I have for the past 7 years I've used Turbo Tax. I entered all the rental expenses but somehow failed to enter the actual rental income. Shouldn't there be some sanity check built into Turbo Tax to say..."hey dummy, you've always had rental income in the past and you entered a bunch or rental expenses so don't you think you should enter the income, too?" I can only assume I skipped that field because I didn't have the number handy at the time and probably assumed that there would be some prompt to enter that amount before submitting. But that didn't happen.  This is a simple validation that could and should be built into the application.  Really disappointing that such an obvious mistake was not flagged. I will try to do better. Turbo Tax should too.

rjs
Employee
February 20, 2023

It's not such an obvious mistake. When a rental unit is vacant, it's normal to have expenses and no income.