I used TaxCut for both my wife's and my individual taxes (we filed separately). We filed both Federal and California taxes. My wife worked for a company for the entire year, and I worked for a small company for about ¾ of the year, and then contracted for ¼ of year. My wife and I are both computer folk--I'm a Windows software engineer, and she's an NT/Unix SysAdmin--so we know our way around computers & software. Regardless, TaxCut caused me all sorts of grief. Here's a list of the problems I ran into whilst using TaxCut:

- Though I have a full-time broadband connection, TaxCut couldn't find the network. This meant that I couldn't do online updates (I had to download & install them manually) *and* I couldn't file my taxes online (hence I couldn't take advantage of TaxCut's online-filing rebate). TaxCut's technical support was worthless at helping me solve this problem - though admittedly I didn't spend too much time working on this problem, and just resigned myself to paper-filing.

- The software reported incorrect results for my wife's California return! It was reporting that her refund was going to be every penny she paid in state taxes (~$6K), rather than owing $133, which turned out to be her real state tax liability. Oddly, though, when I reviewed her internally-generated state tax form (using the "view Form" feature), it showed the correct (owe $133) value - somehow TaxCut's left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing! This was problematic, because even though the form was correct, the "interview" wizard still acted as though I was going to get a refund - and I have no idea what sort of deduction it was using for the federal taxes. After banging my head against this problem solo for quite a while, then going round-and-round with TaxCut's horrible tech support folks (they were utterly worthless), I finally started over w/ my wife's taxes - this time, it got it right. (Note: I *believe* the problem had something to do with me initially telling TaxCut that my wife was not a resident of California - though after seeing and fixing this problem and then reviewing all the interview questions & answers multiple times, TaxCut still couldn't figure it out.)

- While I find TurboTax's interview process to be fairly "engaging" and helpful, I found TaxCut's interview to be little more than original IRS instructions. If TurboTax was the computer simulation of your helpful tax accountant, then TaxCut is a simulation of an IRS government worker: not very helpful, clear, or informative.

- "Help" is not context-sensitive. Clicking on "Help" just shows you the Help table-of-contents. TaxCut sometimes has some context-related FAQs for an interview question, but I find that there's not nearly enough when your taxes are at all tricky. The online help is really not too much more than the IRS & state tax publications.

- Quite a few times TaxCut's interview process couldn't handle my particular tax situation, and forced me to pop its electronic version of an IRS form or worksheet, and had me fill it in by hand. This was particularly true for self-employment-related issues: for this stuff, TaxCut really wasn't too much more than an electronic 1040 worksheet with a built-in calculator.

- I owed the government a penalty for not paying estimated taxes. After answering the interview questions, TaxCut calculated the penalty at ~$500. I then went back and answered the questions slightly differently (but still accurately: I just answered the, "Would you like to use this method to calculate X?" questions a bit differently), and it got the penalty down to ~$68! This is the type of thing that I could usually trust TurboTax to do for me: calculate something via the two different ways, and give me the better of the two results. (If nothing else, TT usually asks better questions that more readily guide me to the best responses).

- One annoyance that kinda sums up my entire TaxCut experience: when I got to the California state interview, one of the first questions was "will you be attaching your federal tax form to your California tax form?" Jeez, I don't know! By clicking on the FAQ, it tells me that I will need to include the federal form if I'll be sending in anything other than a 1040, and few Schedules it lists. Hmm....Doesn't TaxCut know what forms I'm sending?! I surely didn't know - it wasn't until *after* doing the state interview that you actually print your federal forms for mailing, and I couldn't figure out any easy way of discovering this information.

- TaxCut doesn't calculate 2003 tax estimates and print out the quarterly payment vouchers. This very much surprised me: though I've never had to pay estimated taxes until this year, I always found TurboTax to be very pro-active and fully-features w/rt estimated taxes.

All-in-all, while TurboTax for me is much more of a "full tax solution", TaxCut is just more of a "helper app". If you use TaxCut and your taxes are at all out of the norm, expect to be reading over IRS publications and filling out the forms pretty-much by hand.

"Go back to Turbo Tax!"
I purchased this product based on the reviews that it was better than Turbo Tax, but was very disappointed. There were so many errors and omissions in this program that couldn't be repaired, and no explanation about what was going on. I had to go back and change some items and they were either never recorded or recorded incorrectly. I eventually compared my results with Turbo Tax, which offered much clearer explanations, and I went from owing over $1000 with tax cut to getting a refund of $400 with Turbo Tax. Tax Cut needs to be improved before it should be released to the public!

"It's April 13th and the program can't complete my taxes"
I just got off the phone with tech support

Please start your taxes again! The file you have worked on for 40+ hours is corrupt!

Well not completely corrupt as it passes all of the checks, it
it prints. It just won't allow the state program to work.

Once you install the state program it will have runtime errors and corrupt the program.

This program is poorly written trash.

"Doesn't work in California"
I bought this because TurboTax instituted it new one computer policy. It is not worth the money.
Federal and state deductions are different in CA, and TaxCut calculated the state deductions incorrectly.
It's user-interface was not user friendly.
The help site at IRS.gov was easier to use and understand than the help with this product.
The error checking created more errors than it caught, and ended up creating a loop so that I had to manually fill in the forms to fix.
In the end, it told me that it could not electronically file a standard form in California. It can only file the EZ form, and I would have to print out my forms and mail them in.
By the time I downloaded the extra forms and worksheets needed for this progam, battled with the software, and was rejected by the e-filing system, I could have filled in the forms by hand with a calculator and done a less frustrating, faster, and better job.

"Excellent, easy, w/ no spyware"
Both Taxcut federal and state (California) worked perfectly for me. No missing forms, no calculations left to me, and nothing extra I had to do. I had a moderately difficult return (moving between states last year) and the total time to get all my returns done was about 2 1/2 hours. In previous years I've used turbotax, but the price and spyware/registration difficulties scared me off, since I was preparing my return on the 12th. No time to fix it if I had problems w/ turbotax. Downloaded both the fed. and state packages, got a full rebate for the price of the state package, and was working on the taxes about a half hour after I started the purchase. I'll definitly use taxcut next year.