Tax Software for 2022 | Income tax filing | Discussion forum

TurboTax is available since mid-January. This year, it is hard to find retailer selling CDs with TurboTax, wherever I look it is "download only." For my money, I'd rather have something tangible.

Alexandre said
TurboTax is available since mid-January. This year, it is hard to find retailer selling CDs with TurboTax, wherever I look it is "download only." For my money, I'd rather have something tangible.  

except the software update to make it current is still online 🙂

AltaRed said
Almost no one has CD/DVD drives any more in their equipment. Why would you want a CD cluttering up space?  

Exactly. Plus most of the time online updates make whatever is on the CD "old" anyway. Bad for the environment if you ask me.

I suppose but it is yet more materials that had to mined and manufactured adding more burden to our environment that is unnecessary.

Same thing applies to snail mail and paper that did not need to be produced.

Not directly related but I like to look at the statistics each year of the filing method for T1 tax returns per https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/corporate/about-canada-revenue-agency-cra/individual-income-tax-return-statistics.html

I don't know if the data includes Final T1 returns that must be filed by paper (about 200+k returns per year) but will assume it does not. The chart at the bottom of the link is interesting as it shows the steady decline in the number of paper returns in the last 5 tax years, about 1 million fewer such returns. Much of the decline potentially from aging taxpayers perhaps.

Will the decline continue at approximately same absolute number (about nothing in 10 years) or will it become more of a second order tail decline to perhaps some terminal rate in 10 years? More probably the latter but it is one of those trivial statistics in life that will continue to amuse me.

I'm guessing almost zero % of people under a certain age file paper, I assume the option will disappear at some point. I'll be the last one, I'll turn out the lights.

Not surprisingly to those familiar with our CHISA crowd, I do paper returns and have researched and executed them myself for decades. I like to learn what's changing and what's behind the way taxes work.

And the CRA site is not something I trust, after several attack alarms and shutdowns, not to mention the risk of political interference or dodgy staffers.
RetirEd

RetirEd said:
"Not surprisingly to those familiar with our CHISA crowd, I do paper returns and have researched and executed them myself for decades. I like to learn what's changing and what's behind the way taxes work.
And the CRA site is not something I trust, after several attack alarms and shutdowns, not to mention the risk of political interference or dodgy staffers.
RetirEd"

I did, as you still do, for many years and for the same reason. But I changed after the year I calculated my taxes correctly but still got into a problem. I incorrectly completed the T1 that I sent to the CRA. I did not fill in on line 12010 the "Taxable amount of other than eligible dividends" that I had received. I had done my own copy correctly and I had remitted the correct amount of tax. The CRA did a quick assessment of my T1 and sent me a refund. Later they caught their error and asked me to pay back the refund plus interest. I appealed the interest demanded but they pointed out my mistake on the T1 like that was all that mattered. I paid what they asked without taking it any further. I was out the interest cost and the time I spent dealing with the matter.

The software I have used is "TaxFreeway for Mac". I can work with the software like I did with my own spreadsheet tax calculations and see how different choices affect the tax owing. I download the tax software to my computer. I only pay when I want to print or file. I pay on the TaxFreeway website and then get the key to efile and print or create PDF files of the various forms as I want. I have done this twice and do not want to go back to creating my own tax spreadsheet every year. I also like that there is less paper involved and not having to mail the completed return.

One only has to update, not re-create.
RetirEd