Turbo Tax uses Google Captcha when trying to import information from financial institutions.
While filing taxes, on several occasions I had to just give up and try again after several hours because the Captcha won't let me pass through and after several attempts Turbo Tax will throw an error - to come back later.
It's not that hard if your taxes are simple (standard deduction, maybe some capital gains). Keep in mind the filing companies have an incentive to make the process complicated.
I don't think the filing companies are actively making the forms harder to fill out by hand, but the problem is that the IRS has no incentive to minimize the time it takes to file taxes.
Actually, big accounting firms and tax automation companies spend a lot of money lobbying congress to keep the tax code complicated. It would save everyone a lot of time and money if the IRS would just tell us what we owe - they already know the answer, it's not like they just blindly accept whatever we say.
If it's a CPA that's not on their own, there's a good chance they're using something vertical market instead - Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Reuters, not sure what others.
Interesting, I wonder if this is something TurboTax itself is doing or if it's something the banks are going and TurboTax is making you bypass it in order to scrape it.
Not really sure, it was shown after the credentials for the financial institution were entered.
However, it was shown for each financial institution. So it is possible that the financial institutions (or the API provider) were doing it, though it is equally likely that turbo tax just has a bad implementation. Because TT can make an assumption that I'm a human, I wonder if there is a regulatory requirement or the API provider is doing that.
While filing taxes, on several occasions I had to just give up and try again after several hours because the Captcha won't let me pass through and after several attempts Turbo Tax will throw an error - to come back later.
It was literally a Nightmare