Intuit Screws Their Customers Again “Critical Notice – IRS Change to 1099 Form.”

Oh dear, it appears we have an unhappy camper as Elia Freedman writes:   I received an email from the Quickbooks team last week under the title “Critical Notice – IRS Change to 1099 Form.” It starts out well enough, explaining to me that the IRS had made a change to their forms:

Urgent Service Notice
Dear Elia Freedman,

The IRS has changed the 1099-MISC form for Tax Season 2013. As a result, if you print 1099s from your current version of QuickBooks, the new forms will not be correctly aligned. To solve this issue, two options are available:

Two? Okay. I figured they were going to make sure I updated my 2013 version of Quickbooks so it could be used to pay taxes for the 2013 year. Hmmm. This isn’t going to go well.

OPTION 1: Complete the 1099-MISC forms by hand and submit them to the IRS. The IRS will accept handwritten forms. Please seehttp://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1099gi.pdf, section G for IRS guidelines and details.

Oh, boy. This definitely isn’t going the way I expected, or the way that every other company on the planet would handle this. I should have expected this as Intuit is, well, Intuit. If that’s option 1, what could option 2 be?

OPTION 2: Upgrade to QuickBooks Pro 2014. Upgrading will save you time by allowing you to print the new 1099 forms directly from QuickBooks with no alignment issues. We realize upgrading might require some extra effort. To make things a little easier, we’re offering 20% off QuickBooks Pro 2014 plus free shipping through January 3, 2014.

You are f’ing kidding me? This is what you offer me? Pay to fix a bug in your software? It’s not like I’m using even a two year old product here. I am literally using the version of Quickbooks for the year I wish to pay taxes. Sure, they’ve come out with a new version in the last couple of months, like they do every year that has no changes in it, except, apparently, it now conforms to IRS Form 1099.

I have rarely met a company I hate as much as Intuit. [1] They once told me, 15 years ago, when I was polite enough to call to report a bug, that there were no bugs in Quickbooks. The balls these guys have.

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[1] They have some awesome people working for them, though, which makes this even sadder to me.