I received in the mail the other day a TurboTax install CD with an offer for free filing of federal and state tax returns. Neat, I thought, and I was initially under the impression that they were giving me TurboTax for free. Nope, turns out I still have to pay $60 for it, but whatever, there’s a $10 mail-in rebate and I’d pay at least $50 for it or a similar program at Walmart. So I decided to install it just now and get everything set up for when I file my taxes in a couple/few months. I’m under the impression that Mac support for the TurboTax install was tacked on as a last thought, because I couldn’t get past the fill-in-your-address screen to buy the program.

My first little problem came when I was going to have it create an account for me so I could easily buy TurboTax again in the future. The labels for “Password”, “Password Again”, “Security Question”, etc. were offset from the form elements they went with. Not a big deal since I could mostly figure out what went where, but it made me leery of trusting the company with my personal details. If they can’t put some polish in their program to, uh, make their forms legible, which is kinda basic, I don’t exactly trust them to get security and privacy down pat. So I skipped that step and was just going to do a one-time purchase for my 2009 tax return. I fully filled out the form with my name, address, and phone number but when I hit the Continue button, it popped up an error: make sure there are at least two characters in the Customer Billing Address2 field. Uh, there was no Customer Billing Address2 field. I had checked the “Billing address same as shipping address” checkbox, and there was only one set of address fields available. Even in that set of address fields, there was only one field for “Address”, not a second one labeled “Address2″. I couldn’t get it to go through, so I’m thinking I’ll go with H&R Block’s tax program again this year, since it worked well for me last year.

On a side note, ever since I updated this blog to WordPress 2.9, I’ve been having trouble Publishing posts. I usually write up an entry in one shot and it auto-saves as I type, which is nice. However, when I hit the Publish button, it redirects me to a page saying my attempt to edit the entry failed, would I like to try again. I have to go to Posts > Edit, open the saved draft, add in whatever tags I had tried to publish it with along with the title sometimes, and then Publish. I hope this is fixed in an update.