FileYourTaxes.com Sucks

The following is personal opinion about a personal experience with "FileYourTaxes.com".

Last year I did my daughter's taxes by going to the IRS.GOV site and selecting one of the "free" sites for doing taxes. I selected FileYourTaxes.com, filled out the forms, and submitted her Federal taxes. Everything went as expected and she received her refund.

This year since we had used FileYourTaxes.com last year I decided to go directly there and fill out forms expecting everything was still free. I even looked at the Frequently Asked Questions and found the question: "Is this service free?". The first answer states something to the effect "Only certain portions of the service are offered for free." If you click further to view the "free services" you will see the next answer, something to the effect: "Electronic Filing (eFiling) of a return constructed by FileYourTaxes.com has always been free." Reading through the rest of this FAQ we see "Free Printing", "Free if your income is below $10,000...", Free, Free, Free. Okay I am convinced, this must still be Free for filling out my daughter's taxes.

So I fill out the forms for Federal and State but when I go to submit them up pops a Fee (not Free) page. The charge for "Construction" of the Federal forms is $36.75 and the charge for "Construction" of the State form is $33.50 (Note: efiling is still free). For my daughter who should be getting about $40 from federal and $20 from state (everything she paid in), it looks like she will need to pay a few dollars instead of getting anything back. I went back and carefully re-read the the "Free" information and found a sentence that says something to the effect: "All taxpayers must be referred to us from the Free File page of the www.IRS.gov website as they arrive on our site to qualify." So, because I went direct to the FileYourTaxes.com site and did not go through the IRS.gov site, this free service was now a Pay service. Oh and once you have gone to them directly you cannot go back to the IRS.gov site to get this service for free.

In my personal opinion, this is a rip-off. This is an underhanded trick to get you to pay for their service. When I explained this to my wife, she said "Isn't that illegal?". The answer is surely no. If you read and understand every sentence of their "Free this" and "Free that" paragraphs you will see that it is not always free.

So what did I do? I went back to the IRS.gov site, and selected the Free TurboTax product (TurboTax.intuit.com), filled out the forms, submitted them for FREE. I for one, will not go back to the flakey FileYourTaxes.com site to use it for filing taxes, ever! I suggest you think twice before using this service.

The TurboTax program was easy to use and asked a few more questions than FileYourTaxes. The whole process of using TurboTax was quick and painless.

TurboTax is as well known product that has been around for many years. The company that makes this product is Intuit (Intuit.com). Intuit makes an outstanding family of personal financial products named Quicken that I would also recommend. Intuit also makes a family of small-company financial programs called QuickBooks that I believe are used by just about every small company to keep their books. I have no personal experience with QuickBooks but would recommend them due to the popularity.

This is NOT an advertisement. This is a personal experience. There are no ads for TurboTax on this page. The information to find TurboTax is not a hot link where I get paid. I am doing this so others will be warned NOT to get ripped off by FileYourTaxes.com and there are truly FREE Tax services.