I’ve used Turbo tax for as long as I can remember. We’re self employed and probably have a pretty complicated tax return I think. Most people would think I’m foolish for doing it on my own, but having worked in finance before and having seen wrong and bad advice given by CPAs when meeting with clients, I suppose I’m a bit skeptical that “any” CPA or EA will do a good job. Any “great or top” CPA/EA will have too many clients if they are good and not enough time to focus on doing a good job on just your return or your business/tax situation I feel.
The main benefit I see with using Turbotax is it just works and you can open any form if you need to. I’ve had to do that on a few occasions mostly for Schedule C stuff, but if you know the tax law a bit, you would know where to look and since it transfers stuff over from one year to the next, you can look at your last years return and make sure you get the same deduction if the program forgot it which it did last year on a few things.
Another thing to consider is you, as a tax payer simply care more about your return than anyone else. The CPA can do your return and has all the knowledge, but even then, I don’t think all CPAs care/love tax so this varies and their goal is just to “mostly” bill and move on to the next guy.
I love learning about and doing my taxes and find it’s fun to save as much as I can so I enjoy doing it myself. It’s nice to see the Turbotax calculator drop what you owe as you enter the numbers. I also spend a ton of time keeping up and reading various tax boards and any relevant tax news so it is a large time commitment to see what has changed from year to year. Turbotax does a decent job of keeping you informed in general.
As others have mentioned, keeping up with your own data that you’d need to give to the CPA is the big pain point and the CPA isn’t going to be helping me entering all the business data so hiring one wouldn’t help me much.
If your return is relatively simple, I don’t see why anyone would need to hire a CPA honestly as most major tax deduction legislation would be hard to miss by Turbotax.
