Intuit admits to a few mistakes with TurboTax

YOUR ACCOUNTS MAY BE SAFE from the problems with TurboTax but you could be in for problems if you try to use it on a different machine. As previously reported on The Inquirer, TurboTax has a copy protection and software activation system that has been getting on users' backs.

According to News.com, Intuit, the makers of the software, has responded to the problems by hiring an independent lab to investigate complaints about the software. Customers had complained that the SafeCast copy protection software runs continually on Windows XP, whether you have loaded TurboTax or not. PCTest, the lab, found that SafeCast used up 1MB of memory and that "they didn't find any appreciable deterioration in performance". Quite what they mean by 'appreciable' is not explained in the report.

The lab confirmed that no information about the user or the user's system was passed to Intuit by the activation system and that certain rumoured problems were definitely just rumours.

According to Intuit some problems were down to the company itself giving out poor information. The company said that confusion was caused by its own customer support team being less than spot on which meant some customers "got bad information early in the process."

The company has said it will be using a different type of copy protection scheme in its next version. µ

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