The wife and I use- uhh, used- H&R Block software to e-file, used it for I don't know how long, 12 years, 15 years, maybe more.

Anyhoo, that's a thing of the past now. Thankfully, we had filed before yesterday evening, because since then, people attempting to e-file are getting a gateway error:

User reports indicate problems at H&R Block

HRB didn't even acknowledge the problem on social media until today. One guy posted that he waited 51 minutes on hold this morning, then the IVR prompted him to leave a call-back number. He got a call back about a half hour later, sounded like from India or Pakistan. The rep listened to his complaint, let him speak his whole piece because, hey that burns up time in their shift, right? And then, without saying anther word, she hung up on him. Others are reporting that they waited on hold upwards of an hour and then were simply dumped out of the queue with no warning or prompts.

Also posted by several people, for the past six hours or so, HRB's third world call center has been telling callers that the system should be up within the hour, but they should go ahead and mail in their returns. Man o man.

Needless to say, people are anxious and frustrated. Each time they tried to send their return, the 30 or 40 dollar filing fee they are charged was sent to their CC company for authorization, and consequently, CC companies seeing 20 or so requests for authorization of the same charge, began declining the requests, so users will have to straighten out that, too. So fucked up. HRB customers do not deserve this treatment.

HRB comes across in this incident as incompetent, dishonest and uncaring, and I'm done with them.

I feel your pain. When our first accountant died we assumed his partner would file for us. Well she suddenly developed an autoimmune disorder and sent our files to an idiot.Not only did he make mistakes we had to drive to his office on April 15 and get the return out of the bushes. We barely made the deadline. Our current CPA is good but he is in his late 70s and will retire.
Private CPAs are not cheap but worth a look.

It's not my pain. We filed before the incompetency festival kicked off.

I encountered this debacle attempting to efile, and gave up and went via mail.

Screw using them next year.

Is it the rush to beat the deadline?

Servers can’t keep up?

That’s pretty pathetic for such a big company to not anticipate that.

I used them back in February when I filed and had no issue.

Turbo Tax messed up this year as well. This is the first year you needed to make an account to use the software. Setting up that account online requires one of the most specific browser/permissions combinations I have ever seen. In the end, I have no clue what finally made it work.

I file with TurboTax download app (not the web app) every year as soon as I get all my documents. I think I submitted in early February and got my refund by mid-February.

Always do them early, never wait until the dealine (although I am not so pro-active with some other things). But it's my mom's taxes that I waited to do until two weeks ago. I have an accountant do those and they got them done on time.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
HRB comes across in this incident as incompetent, dishonest and uncaring, and I'm done with them.

I too used HRB for years, but last year switched to a competitor because of a bug in their printing logic. For those interested, the printing problem manifested itself on several mail-in forms including the 1040 by not honoring margins and squishing everything to the right with some of the information off the paper. Multiple printers and the PDF output showed the same problem. What got me to switch was not so much the bug itself, but how they responded to my request for assistance:

1) deny the problem existed
2) claim that it was caused by the OS
3) require multiple reinstallations of the printer
4) deny the problem existed

rinse and repeat, this happened at multiple levels of escalation.

Now, two years later, the 'net has noticed the problem and have found that it isn't exhibited if you are using Adobe printer/PDF drivers on Windows. These are not available for Mac, nor has any other work-around been found.

Block still will not admit that a problem exists.

I did like the Block interview/preparation process better than its main competitor (which has problems of its own), but I'm not sure that I'd switch back if they fix the problem.

After telling me the system did not e0file, I now get TWO notices the efile went through.

I already mailed them, too.

Now I have three filings for 2023.

Screw these guys next year.

We switched from TurboTax to Tax Act years ago and have been happy until this year. We had a similar problem the HR Block people are having and we tried filling last week. We're not sure who we will use next year. They are all bad choices apparently now.

quote:

One guy posted that he waited 51 minutes on hold this morning, then the IVR prompted him to leave a call-back number. He got a call back about a half hour later, sounded like from India or Pakistan. The rep listened to his complaint, let him speak his whole piece because, hey that burns up time in their shift, right? And then, without saying anther word, she hung up on him.

The fuck? yeah. that can be frustrating. I just spent an hour with software tech on a software I've been using for at least 15 years. it's a screen capture program. I thought it was an AI because it asked me for what version is my app and I said, did you not read I manually uninstalled it because it wouldn't update and it still wouldn't update from the fresh download?

Then she had me use a different browser as if that would make a difference. I don't want to relive it so I'm stopping.

I’ve been using TaxAct for the past 12 years or so and I had no problems whatsoever. I’ve been very pleased, and will continue to use them until I have an issue.

quote:

Originally posted by Lefty Sig:
I file with TurboTax download app (not the web app) every year as soon as I get all my documents. I think I submitted in early February and got my refund by mid-February.

Always do them early, never wait until the dealine (although I am not so pro-active with some other things). But it's my mom's taxes that I waited to do until two weeks ago. I have an accountant do those and they got them done on time.

I do a preliminary tax report Nov 1 just to see where I am and to give myself time to make any adjustments in income. Then I file Feb 17 as Feb 15 is the latest for any new or corrected tax documents issued from Schwab.

The biggest work with tax returns is just organizing the documents and going electronic has made it even easier. I just file the documents as they become available. For paper documents, I just scan them into pdf files and file them also.

We are leaving them as BlackRock seems to have a big toehold into them and going back to a local dude!

quote:

I file with TurboTax download app (not the web app) every year as soon as I get all my documents. I think I submitted in early February and got my refund by mid-February.

This has been my solution for a couple decades now, and works well. Having the app locally is helpful if you ever need to amend, plus it can be used for next year tax projections, etc. pretty easily.

For that and (I suspect) most packages, you can file as early as you want but select a time of your choosing for any payment due to be made. So I filed in mid-February, debits for tax due hit my account this past Friday.

No matter how robust, the combo of relying on an online tool AND pushing it to the very last minute is going to be a gamble no matter who it is.

A post on downdetector lays out the issue, which is not the outage itself:

"The outage, while really, really bad is something that can happen. We can speculate on the cause but to me that is irrelevant now. The issue I have is their response, or lack thereof. We were left in the dark. No acknowledgement from them. No message, nothing. You couldn't even get through to support.
How hard would it have been to post something on Twitter or their website? All they had to do was to post "We are experiencing issues at the moment due to the large volume of returns. We have all of our staff onboard working to get our systems back online. We will check in with periodic updates and expect to be back online shortly."
But no. Only those of us who thought to check down detector had some inkling that they were down. For the other 99% of their customers, there was the complete unknown.
This was a case study in how NOT to handle an outage. Outages happen. How a company responds to an outage tells me about the company."

HRB is dishonest and their lack of a response shows disregard for paying customers. This is inexcusable.

I've been using HR Block for a few years now without an issue, procrastinated this year and finally did my taxes about a week ago and everything went through as expected. Glad I didn't wait another week to file.

quote:

Originally posted by BB61:
We switched from TurboTax to Tax Act years ago...

I can remember paying like $35

I think it was near $135 this year. $10 more than I got back from the state.

I've used turbo tax for years and I always owe so I file electronically near the deadline, paying my bill via e-check.

I hit send Friday 4/12 and pay on 4/15. Got a confirmation # when I filed and a notice that an acceptance e-mail would come 4/15. That is usual.

Nothing in my e-mail box yet but the money was deducted from my account so guess I'm good til June 15 and 2nd qtr est tax.

Two people in my department had this exact same problem with H&R when they attempted to file on the wire. Large scale fubars are a thing, but lying about it and failing to take immediate proactive measures to protect their customers first and foremost, is worse. Why executives and managers don't understand this as if it were common sense is staggering.