Turbo-taxed

A friend of mine thinks heads should roll at Intuit over the big Turbo Tax fiasco.

Although it sounds like a gut reaction (like the calls for a class action suit against Intuit) on reflection I think I agree, heads should roll.

I filled both my returns Monday night. All Tuesday I was waiting for confirmation of receipt but both returns were listed as "pending". At 1am Wednesday morning TurboTax told me I had NO returns e-filed. WTF!

I think head should roll because:

a) there is no automatic confirmation of receipt by Turbo Tax. I'm paying $15 a pop to Intuit for a service that is free at IRS - can't Intuit even give me a guarantee that if I attempt to e-file before the deadline then even if the feds or state haven't confirmed by the deadline then I'm okay? As of Wednesday morning I had no idea if Intuit had actually eaten my returns, and I had no confirmation of my attempt to file that I could show to the feds or franchises.

b) they had NO contingency plan - why wasn't there an automatic "our servers are too busy, rest assured everything's going to be alright - here is a confirmation code that you attempted to file and the IRS/your state will accept this as proof of a an attempt at filing and so long as you retry within X-days you'll be okay? Why didn't they clear all this ahead of time?

c) Intuit claimed they were overloaded because of a massive peak of "50 transactions a second" - is that all? I've seen single PC servers able to handle more than 50 TPS. Are we supposed to have any sympathy for them over that pathetic throughput? Maybe 1000 TPS or 10000 TPS... Intuit you have millions of customers and this is is your single busiest night of the year and you didn't even bring in capacity to handle a measly 50 transactions per second. After all at $15 per transaction they were making $750 per second which is 2.7 million dollars per hour... I think you could buy a LOT of capacity and bandwidth for that. Shame on you!

Fortunately for me the IRS caved, but because of b) for a good 24 hours I had no idea if that would be a problem. However since I filled Monday night I was reasonably confident things would be okay (fingers crossed) so I didn't rush down to the post office with a print out and I eventually slept okay Tuesday night, I know for a fact a good many didn't....

36 hours after I originally filled I was able to confirm online that not only was the previous night's "you have no e-filing on record" a "glitch", but that both the feds and California had accepted my filings. Phew! Then when I checked my "filing history" it turns out that even though I filed my returns Monday night Inutit didn't send my Federal return to the IRS until Wednesday morning. WTF? This was no "last minute rush" problem it was clearly a SNAFU beyond all proportions. As I said, heads should roll at Intuit and refunds should be dished out as a matter of course.

And in case you're wondering - yes I will consider using some other online tax service next year. However I'm smart so I know that the alternatives like Tax-Cut probably just got lucky in that they are the #2 and hence didn't get swamped at the last minute. Their time will come... Maybe next year, just for once, I'll file a week in advance. Yeah, maybe...

Free directory information coming your way?

With the advent of 1-800-GOOG-411 and the soon too be Microsoft 1-800-555-TELL it seems that consumers could soon be presented with some real high quality free speech recognition driven directory services. That's a nice change from paying the exhorbitant fees that SBC-ATT-whatever-it-is-this-month wants to charge us. However given that most of us are using mobile phones for personal calls the majority of the day we'll still have to burn precious airtime minutes for those calls.

My initial experiments with 1-800-GOOG-411 were quite positive, not 100% since it consistently failed to give me the number for my partners business, however everything else worked pretty well. It would be nice if they could roll in information on local stuff like movie times, I'm sure that will arrive in due course. As for TellMe, well they have been doing this since the early dot.com days and Google should have bought them as they almost certainly have superior voice technology.

In the mean time I'll look forward to ATT and the rest cringe as some real competition muscles in on the directory services businesses. But let me warn you - once Google and others have captured the market share they want expect some overt advertising thrown in with your number look up.