For years, I have used TurboTax (and before that, QuickTax) to do my taxes. For years now, I have been asking Intuit to do something about its faulty Charitable Donations Optimizer which simply doesn't work for those of us with large donation receipts. Worse, it fails to inform users that they stood to lose thousands of dollars of lost taxes due to its failure to correctly optimize the data given to it, Again, this year, I purchased the 2025 version in hopes that they might finally have fixed it. They have not. Nor is there adequate warning that if users trust the Optimizer, they could lose thousands of dollars by missing perfectly allowable deductions. The algorithm to fix this problem is very, very simple. This year, using the Optimizer, TurboTax had me owing $1,700 in taxes. By making some simple high/low manual calculations to adjust the way my charitable donations are handled, I was able to reduce that to $349 owing. About $1,350 saved!
