Some things you should do when using TurboTax, or any other DIY tax product:
Pay attention - Read everything. You know how you can pay for your filing fees with your refund? Well, watch your email because TurboTax WILL DEBIT YOUR ACCOUNT if you don't get your refund in 36 days.
Tax Due is NOT a refund. TurboTax displays the Refund amount in the same exact place as the Tax Due amount. Pay attention when filing your taxes - no matter how boring it is.
Tax Due means you OWE MONEY. Also, when you transmit your return, they will ask how you want to PAY your taxes (that's not a refund - it's a tax bill that YOU OWE the IRS) If you give TurboTax your account information, and it uses the term "direct DEBIT" that is NOT a direct deposit. It's going to DEBIT your account, i.e. take money OUT.
Even though many companies are predatory in their business model, this isn't an example of predatory behavior. TurboTax has no stake in you owing tax. They do not get a cut from the IRS. However, they do seem to be very unconcerned with the fact that they don't really do a good job of calling the customers' attention to the fact that they owe taxes. For example, they display tax due in the exact same place and the exact same way as tax refund in the interface. That is at the very least very misleading. If they would make a few changes it could prevent people from being overdrawn in their accounts because they didn't read what the screen says. I'm not saying it's the customer's fault, but if we are all capable of doing our own taxes, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to expect us to actually read what is displayed on the page. Still, I believe TurboTax could do much better for their customers by making TAX DUE more conspicuous - maybe bold, red letters - and call attention to it instead of letting it display virtually the same as a tax refund.
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See the following info from the TurboTax Community pages for details on how this works:
"When you filed your tax return, you can choose Pay With My Refund, which lets you deduct your TurboTax fees from your IRS tax refund instead of paying them with a credit or debit card.
Per the Refund Processing Agreement, you authorized us to debit your bank account if your refund was insufficient to cover your fees:
In addition, by clicking the "I Agree" button below, you electronically sign and authorize Intuit (through its third party processor) to debit the TurboTax Fees, Additional Products and Services Purchased, and any applicable sales tax from your bank account number identified in the Agreement below, in the event that you do not receive a tax refund that is sufficient to pay for them.
Before we debited your account, you would have received 4 emails from us:
An email with instructions to pay your TurboTax fees (minus the Refund Processing fee, if any) online by a certain date.
Two more follow-up emails asking that you either pay or request a deferment to prevent the fees from being automatically debited from your bank account.
A final email letting you know that we're debiting the fees (minus the Refund Processing fee, if any) and that the auto-debit process cannot be stopped.
You can also be auto-debited if you signed up for Pay With My Refund and your refund is sufficient, but the IRS is still holding your refund 36 days after your original estimated refund date. In this case, you'll get the same email notifications from us, except we will debit the Pay With My Refund fee (if any) in addition to your other TurboTax fees."
