Monday, March 14, 2011

Getting It Wrong, When You're Right

The IRS did a good thing, when it decided to update Publication 555 that I talked about in my previous blog post. It meant another government institution was recognizing gay marriage, or at least registered domestic partnerships. The bad part about this is how late in the game they did this. The final update to this document came out on March 9, just a little over a month to go before the filing deadline of April 15, 2011.

The bad news for those of us in RDPs or same sex marriages is that many of us were waiting for this update to do our taxes, some because Intuit, maker of TurboTax asked us to because they were going to produce an update to TurboTax that would help us get our taxes done.

March 10, 2011 was the promised date of the TurboTax update. The R13 patch to TurboTax was released on March 9, 2011, a day early, claiming support for IRS publication 555. But in reality there wasn't any support, and an article on their support site pretty much told couples with investment income and rental property, they were out of luck with regards to TurboTax (after asking us to wait until March 10).

So TurboTax, has decided to leave us with no good options for getting our taxes done. It's too late to find a tax professional, as all of them will be booked, so the only alternative is to either hunker down and try to figure this out ourselves and do our taxes using pen and paper the old fashioned way, or file an extension and hope we can find a good professional to help us after the 15th of April.