TurboTax Revises Software After Retired Lawyer Spots a Glitch
Intuit is revising its TurboTax software after a retired lawyer alerted the company to an error.
Charlie Freret, a retired lawyer from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs living in Chantilly, Va., used TurboTax to file his tax return electronically after he had already prepared his tax documents on paper, the New York Times reports. But there was a problem: TurboTax double counted his medical insurance premiums as deductions, resulting in a claim for a refund that was $600 too large.
According to Intuit, the problem was apparently limited to retired federal workers filing a CSA-1099-R form and survivors of federal employees filing a CSF-1099-R, the Times says. The company says the only retirees affected had health care costs exceeding 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income, and perhaps “several thousand” returns had the error. Intuit has a policy of paying interest and penalties on underpayments because of software errors.
Freret, 63, told the newspaper he decided to alert officials to the problem, rather than take the extra $600, because he feared the impact of a mistake, multiplied by millions of taxpayers, on the nation’s treasury. He reported the issue to Intuit, and when the company did not issue a broad warning, he called the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department. When federal auditors couldn’t replicate the problem, he contacted the news media.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” he told the Times.
