X-SciTech

Tax Time and Technology

By David Hancock

March 2, 2007 / 3:34 PM EST / CBS News

(AP / CBS)

Hi all. My name is David Hancock, I'm a home page editor for CBSNews.com. I thought I would post a link to a piece by CBSNews.com's technology analyst Larry Magid, who writes on the benefits and perils of using online and in-the-box tax preparation software.

His full article can be read here.

Video:
Online Tax Returns

And here's an audio slide show of his piece.

I thought I would mention that I use Turbo Tax online mainly because it allows me to import dividend and interest information from my online stock portfolio. I just select my online broker from a pulldown menu and provide my password (!!!!!) and it imports that year's tax data.

That said, it's not as easy as it's supposed to be because the software then asks you questions about the data it has just imported, some of which I have no idea how to answer. Which sort of defeats the purpose of having it automatically imported to the places where it's supposed to go.