Two Certainties in Life – Taxes and Taxes

Borrowing from Ben Franklin’s quote, I have been dealing with a double dose of one of his certainties — taxes. Now we have both UK and US taxes to deal with.

I hate to admit it, but I kind of enjoy filling out our tax return every year. Though, with TurboTax, it is never very hard. Simply enter all the forms received in the mail, add in a few deductions, and job done. This year, however, is a bit of a different.

Certainly, we have had a number of complexities added to our return this year — selling the house, moving abroad, earning foreign wages, and paying foreign taxes . To compound this complexity, I believe I have found a bug in TurboTax.

After completing the Foreign Tax Credit portion of the “Interview”, our refund suddenly became absurdly high. At first I was excited, but quickly became suspicious. Upon reviewing the numbers, it looks like they have included the foreign tax credits, but not the income. While, I kind of like the result, I doubt the IRS will agree :-).

Currently, I am on the phone with their Tech Support. We went through the foreign income questions (which gets stuck in an loop) and upon realizing the problem, the the poor guy asked me to wait while he goes to investigate. I am coming to the end of this post and haven’t heard back from him yet. My guess is this is a real bug — I am surprised that it is March and no one has discovered it yet. Good thing we have unlimited calling to the US!

UPDATE: The customer service rep came back and asked for my phone number to call me back in 48 hours after one of their software engineers reviews the issue. Working in the industry, I can say that definitely translates to, “you found a bug, we’ll try to fix it before we call you back.”