It is a year later and I am disappointed to see that TurboTax has still not addressed this issue for the new tax year. The logic for the algorithm is so simple that it amazes me that this significant company wouldn’t make the effort to protect its users from losing significantly from a poorly designed optimizer. 

Bump.

Dear Turbotax. The only thing the Charitable Donations Optimizer has done for the past ten years for me is increase the amount of tax we have to pay. I agree with the original poster. Turbotax is fantastic mostly, but this is tool needs to be deleted entirely if it can't solve this most basic of problems.

1) In Alberta, the first $200 of donation gets a SIXTY PERCENT deduction. So with two spouses, basically the entire optimization algorithm, if you aren't carrying forward because you used up all your credits, is: Lower income spouse claims $200. Higher income spouse claims the rest, unless they are literally paying zero tax already.

2) As soon as I click Optimize, only to find this problem hasn't been fixed in over a decade, I now have to go return to the donations section in order to fix it. What a waste of time. Is this what I get for upgrading to premier?

Guys... what the heck? I have two words for you: C'mon...

At the end of the process, I also get a "Tax Saving Opportunity". This seems to make sense except in Alberta. It would be great if the optimizing and opportunity stuff in Turbotax could please be enhanced to handle the provincial exceptions.

(grubbbee): Both you and your spouse or common-law partner have claimed amounts for donations. It may be beneficial for one person to claim all of the donations. Consider allowing all the donations to be claimed on the higher income spouse or common-law partner's return.

Thank you for your feedback—we appreciate it and will send this to our appropriate team.

Thank you for choosing TurboTax

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!

@rab135 We understand your concern, and we appreciate you bringing this to our attention again. We will forward your feedback to our development team, who will look into this. 

Yes, please fix this. I have used TurboTax for years, and this is the one issue that makes me question continuing. It is so much work to override this.

Okay, here’s some good news on this front. I have, all these years, stayed with TurboTax because I felt these folks were the experts. My thinking was that if TurboTax couldn’t deal with this problem all these years, how could we expect the little guys to do it. But this year, after paying for and using this year’s TurboTax and being disappointed that they still haven’t fixed it, I decided to go the extra mile and try the free software provided by another supplier. To my surprise and delight that free software handled my donations perfectly without external prompting from me. The free program saved me the $1,350 I would have lost if I had trusted TurboTax’s Donations Optimizer. 

@rab135 Thank you for your feedback. As previously mentioned by TurboTaxAniqua, our development team is now aware and will be looking into this issue as soon as possible.