🚀 go-pugleaf

BY MIKE WENDLAND
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

You'd think that if anyone would be able to breeze through income tax
preparation software, it would be George Gregory and his wife, Lorraine.

He's a Birmingham tax attorney. She works for the Internal Revenue Service
in Detroit. But together, they count last weekend as lost after a
frustrating encounter with the popular TurboTax program from Intuit and its
new anti-piracy policies.

"I sympathize with their desire to stop piracy," said George Gregory. "But
in trying to do so, they have sure frustrated this legitimate customer."

While Intuit is generating plenty of controversy over the policy, it's an
issue software users are going to encounter more and more over the next year
as other companies begin trying to control software piracy. In the United
States, the industry says piracy accounts for 25 to 50 percent of the
software in use.

Intuit's new anti-piracy features aren't new. Microsoft has been doing the
same thing with its Windows and Office products since 2001.

The TurboTax CD for PCs has a software key code, like Windows XP and other
products, that links each copy of the program to the PC where it was
originally installed. The Macintosh version of TurboTax doesn't have such
requirements.

To make sure you don't give the program to all your friends, a feature
called C-Dilla is installed with TurboTax on your hard drive. Whenever you
run TurboTax, C-Dilla checks the activation code on the PC, making sure the
full program is running on the one computer that was authorized.

Users around the country have flooded chat rooms with howls of protest and
columnists like me have called it spyware. Technically, because it records
no personal information and doesn't report anything back to Intuit, it isn't
really spying on users.

But it sure can inconvenience them. Which takes us back to the Gregorys.

They bought the $79 deluxe version last week, which can be installed on
multiple computers, although C-Dilla makes sure only the one authorized
computer can print out forms or file a return.

George Gregory spent much of last Saturday in his Birmingham law offices,
meticulously entering in 1099 forms and his business income. He saved the
data on a floppy disk and brought it to his Troy home, where he would enter
in the personal expenses from the records kept there on his home PC.

"I planned to put the home information in and then take it back to the
office, where I'd print it out," he said.

What he found instead was that because the full program was activated on his
work PC, he could only install a so-called trial version on his home
machine. But he couldn't get the trial version to import all the data on the
floppy -- even though it was the same return he was trying to prepare. He
said he spent much of Sunday and Monday trying to get help from Intuit
customer service online and over the phone.

"They told me to buy another copy of the program," he said. "That's just
silly. They've made it too much of a hassle."

Intuit spokesman Scott Gulbransen told me Gregory should be able to do what
he wants and offered to personally help him straighten out the confusion.
But the piracy problems have forced Intuit and other software companies to
institute the new activation procedures.


See why companies like Intuit can no longer ignore the issues?
turbo tax