People Are Logging On to TurboTax Just to Explain Why They Can't Pay Their Taxes

Happy Tax Day, people. It is an ugly day, one spent scrutinizing the too-small amount of money we are making and the too-large amount the government is taking away. For the happy some, it means a small refund will be coming in the mail, but it's generally an unpleasant moment made no less unpleasant by the fact that we must hear the Beatles' 'Tax Man' blare from every tinny supermarket and department store speaker system in earshot. And right now, the saddest place on the internet is TurboTax's community discussion forums.

We file our taxes online now, obviously—TurboTax is more or less the new face of taxation. It's how we engage in the process now; we barely see the actual forms, we don't think much abou the IRS; we just keep clicking Next. I just finished my annual cage-match to the death with TurboTax last night; as a freelancer with 1099s and a Schedule C and piles more, it is a nightmare of epic bureaucratic proportions that consumes all too much of my time. But I took some solace in the fact that my own nightmare was nothing compared to many others, those who had taken to using the TurboTax community forums to vent their frustrations at not just the program, or the government, but their lives in general.

TurboTax's Community page is designed to help users answer questions without having to wait hours on the phone or online to reach a customer service rep—which I unfortunately was forced to do this year. So, users post a question, and fellow filers can upvote it, 'follow' the thread, or comment on it, in the interest of improving the chances that you'll get a qualified rep to accurately answer your question.

The 'Most Popular' question on the forum (yes, even questions about tax forms must now be ranked by popularity) for instance, is: "I answered all the questions correctly from my 1099-R form but it wont accept the info." This question has 493 upvotes—or people who have the same question. This seemed to be a software glitch that was fixed; it seemed to resolve itself after the upswelling of irked users.

The next 20 questions or so are along those lines. But the 22nd or so most upvoted "question" is a post entitled 'I lost my job and needed the money to take care of my children and pay the bills until I found another job.' from user acarroll33.

92 people clicked 'Me too' and 111 filers are following that thread. There are dozens of comments underneath it echoing the same sentiment. Why are so many people logging on to TurboTax to lament that they cannot pay their taxes? There is no solicitation for tax forms or filing advice; they are simply blunt statements, fleeting stabs at absolution, maybe, or just unfiltered venting. Maybe they're conflating the IRS with TurboTax, and doing the equivalent of leaving a 'sorry,' note on the windshield of a car they just backed up into.

"UNEMPLOYED NEED TO PAYBILLS" a user called jmschoonver writes.

User 808its took the time to elaborate: "I took the money out because I had to pay bills and had  to support 4 grandchildren,I had to pay for food, clothes, and school necessities. I had to pay for sport fees  uniforms and accessories. I had to pay for transportation and some of the medical bills when I took the toddler or child to the emergency room, because the mother  could not be found and the father was in and out of jail. so i signed the emergency forms of responsible party."

It goes on like this, though many have actual tax-related questions.

It is still brutal.

If you keep clicking around, before long, you kind of get overwhelmed by the depressing sense that the TurboTax Community forums are an exceedingly bleak reflection of American offline life in 2013.

Out-of-work people showing up to the forums to lament that they cannot pay their taxes is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here are some other threads I stumbled upon.

All brutal stuff, all-caps and hastily punctuated reminders that the fallout from recession—which has been "over" for years now, remember—still has the working class reeling. It churns your gut to see such unfiltered desperation on pages intended for the vanilla innocuousness of tax prep.

The 'Dependents' section, meanwhile is probably the most depressing irrespective of our particular economic moment.

There are obviously hundreds more. Hundreds many more laments about unemployment, questions about out-of-work sons and daughters, dead husbands and wives, anxieties about too-high taxes. There are probably too few outlets where the reality of our economic moment is displayed, so raw and truthfully—it isn't easy to read through these discussion boards, on the new stand-in for the IRS no less, but it's worth remembering how brutal it is out there.