TurboTax Full Service Bad, 0/10 would not recommend.

I decided to use TurboTax Full Service this year due to some slight complexities in my taxes. In theory, this service is supposed to provide “expert help” to make filing easier. In reality, it’s an endurance test to see how many customer service calls it takes before you give up on getting your taxes done correctly. (Spoiler: Nearly 10. Hours wasted? 3.5. Sanity level? bad.)

I scheduled a call with my tax expert, who I will refer to as A, tested my mic and speakers, and showed up ready to go. Except A could not hear me. There was no built-in way for me to communicate this. So, like any reasonable person, A simply hung up on me. I immediately messaged them, letting them know I could hear them and explaining my tax situation in writing. TurboTax guarantees responses within 48 hours, so naturally, they never responded. Instead, they just… completed my return incorrectly, giving me an extra $10,000 in taxes because they didn’t read my messages.

You would think it would be an easy fix—a quick call to customer service, an easy reassignment? Instead, the next several days became a labyrinth of phone calls, contradictory information, and being placed on hold so often I started hearing hold music in my sleep.

After my first failed attempt at human interaction, I tried to switch experts. A Turbotax support agent promised that this would take 5-10 minutes. So I waited until the next morning - no change. Called again - they said, “Oh, it will actually take 24-48 hours.”

48 hours later? Still no change. I called again. This time, they informed me that since A had already “completed” my return (again, incorrectly), a lead would have to approve my reassignment. Ok, fine. I waited some more, and still nothing.

An actually helpful agent figured out what was going wrong—my request to switch experts had been input incorrectly. This agent also gave me a discount code for 20% (which looking back... should've been more). I finally got a new expert, B, who was competent, responsive, and actually knew what they were doing. Great, I can finally be done.

Enter: the surprise fees. Where my service originally cost about $100, TurboTax now wanted $400+. I contacted support yet again, and this time, the agent answered from what sounded like a very loud living room with a TV blaring in the background. I explained my issue. She said “hold on one second,” left, and never came back. I waited for several minutes, listening to what was possibly an episode of Judge Judy, before I just… hung up. Then I got four consecutive calls back. At this point, I had reached my customer service limit and chose blissful ignorance instead.

B finally completed my return. But when I reviewed it, I noticed it was exactly the same numbers as when A had originally screwed it up. There was something preventing the correct numbers from displaying. B had to manually refresh the system, which took an extra hour. This was becoming a full-time job.

Finally, I was ready to pay and file. I entered the discount code from Actually Helpful Agent at checkout… and nothing happened. The price didn't change. I tried again. Still nothing. And there was no way to remove the discount code once entered. So I had to log out and log back in, try again—same problem. This meant I had to call customer service yet again, where this new agent was skeptical, condescending, and somehow even less helpful than the previous ones.

This led to another round of being put on hold, literally ghosting me during the call, and 51 minutes lost on this one issue alone. Eventually, B had to call me back again just to manually issue a new code that actually worked.

After 202 minutes of phone calls (3.5 hours of my life I’ll never get back) and two weeks later, I finally got my taxes filed. TurboTax’s whole selling point is that it’s supposed to make tax filing easier. Instead, I ended up in loops of miscommunication, incompetency, and a bug ridden platform. Next year, I’ll be doing literally anything else—hiring a CPA, using free tax usa, giving it to a 5 year old to fill out. I hope my experience can offer you some insight into using Turbotax Full Service and Turbotax in general, and help you decide if you want to complete your tax return with some or no brain cells left.