A message from Sasan Goodarzi

Should have went with ATX........

Sasan-

Unfortunately, through midnight last night, the system was simply no longer accepting returns. As a preparer, we cannot rely on your statements where clients have $ on the line without any direct feedback from the IRS. Your problem was further compounded by the misinformation disseminated by your customer service personnel yesterday.

The IRS should seriously consider whether or not Intuit is qualified to be a transmitter at this point in time.

HA!

i could not be happier after leaving atx to proseries.. atx shut down their forums.. wonder why?

i had a couple returns hang up not go thru last couple days

i tried again and they went thru

I called tech support to ask about my concern about the e-filed returns and extensions with direct debits. I asked if they were not processed in time and my clients incurred penalties for late payment and late filing was Intuit going to pay those? Of course, I was told that they didn't know and I should just keep trying to send in the returns and extensions. At that point I had already been trying for HOURS to get these transmitted.

I read this on the internet by Lisa Leff, Associated Press Writer: "A flood of last-minute tax filers swamped the servers of Intuit Inc. on Tuesday, causing hours-long delays in getting forms sent in electronically to the government, said Harry Pforzheimer, a spokesman for the Mountain View-based company."

What really bothers me the most is that Intuit has known for YEARS that e-filing is getting to be more and more popular AND WILL CONTINUE TO DO SO, so WHY can't Intuit plan on having the necessary equipment in place BEFORE the last minute flood of e-filing? This has been an ongoing problem for YEARS. This is nothing new.

As a tax preparer it would be detrimental to our business to tell our clients that they can't wait until the last minute to get us their information so we can e-file their return/extension timely. We try to ask that they do so, BUT there will ALWAYS be procrastinators. I can't control that and we work very hard to meet our client's needs. Yet, it appears that once again Intuit has understated their client's needs.

I suggested months ago at the ProSeries Feedback Center that "When I go to "My ProSeries" I would like to see a link titled ALERT or URGENT (or something like that) added in BIG BOLD RED letters at the top of the Support Section. Urgent issues could be easily addressed by ProSeries and located quickly by the user." If this had been done then perhaps some of the frustration from yesterday's e-filing fiasco would have been at least somewhat alleviated. I certainly don't understand why ProSeries couldn't have sent out an e-mail to all the people who received the ProSeries News dated April 17, 2007 letting us know what was going on.

I have addressed this issue for YEARS now that while ProSeries has the ability to quickly contact us or inform us of problems in a variety of ways, it always seems to be that when something goes wrong, your company ends up leaving us pretty much in the dark as to what is happening. Why can't you assign just ONE person to be in charge of setting up TIMELY e-mail or web-site alerts throughout the tax season? How about a "Quick Alert" system like the IRS has - I get an e-mail AND a phone call VERY timely if there is problem. As it stands now yesterday's fiasco was a very distressing way to end tax season.

I truly hope that Susan Goodarzi will read this message and be effective in making sure that changes occur so that we don't have to go through this once again next year, or at the very least we are not kept in the dark when problems are occurring.