Like many people, Chuck Bradford put his tax returns off until nearly the last minute again this year. But he left a little time at the end to make sure his return looked right — and when Bradford looked, he didn’t like what he saw.

He prepared his return using TurboTax software, and when Bradford compared his 2024 results to last year’s filing, he saw fewer tax deductions. So Bradford went back through his return and saw a box checked that indicated he wanted to take the standard tax deduction, even if itemized tax deductions were higher.

Bradford said he hadn’t checked the box and couldn’t imagine why anyone would, so he unchecked it, itemized his Oregon tax deductions and lowered his tax bill.

“I checked my return by hand and fixed this error before filing my taxes, or else it would have cost me $700 more in Oregon tax,” said Bradford, a retiree who lives near Banks.

The same problem cropped up for other Oregonians, potentially costing them hundreds of dollars in missed tax refunds. Oregonians affected by TurboTax’s mistake can still get their full refund by filing an amended return with itemized state deductions.

But TurboTax’s parent company hasn’t publicly commented on the issue and many filers may be unaware the software made a mistake on their tax return.

The Oregon Department of Revenue first became aware of the problem at the beginning of the month when an employee ran across it while preparing taxes for a family member. The state immediately notified Intuit, the Silicon Valley company that owns TurboTax.

Intuit initially said it couldn’t replicate the error but then last week, after fresh inquiries from the state and The Oregonian/OregonLive, the company acknowledged the problem.

“There is indeed an issue in this area,” an Intuit employee wrote to the Department of Revenue on Thursday. The company said it is “still triaging the bug at this time” and will update the state when it has a fix.

Intuit didn’t respond to inquiries from The Oregonian about what it is doing to address the problem, notify customers and help them file amended returns.

The tax code is complicated and it’s not uncommon for issues to crop up in tax preparation software, according to Megan Denison, Personal Tax and Compliance Division administrator for the Oregon Department of Revenue.

“I would say that every year we will find something that’s not quite right, usually due to a tax law change or something like that,” Denison said. She said software companies are usually responsive when the state alerts them to a problem.

There’s no way for the state to determine how many people might be affected by TurboTax’s issues with itemizing deductions this year, according to Denison said.

“If (taxpayers) don’t itemize, we don’t get the information of the deductions they might have taken,” she said. “It’s a we-don’t-know-what-we-don’t-know situation.”

Interplay between federal and state deductions got more complicated after Congress overhauled taxes in 2018, substantially increasing the size of the standard federal tax deduction.

That change increased the number of people who take the standard deduction rather than itemize tax-deductible expenses like charitable contributions, mortgage interest payments and some medical expenses. For most people, that means a smaller federal tax bill.

Oregon taxpayers, though, may still get an advantage by itemizing deductions on their state return. That’s where TurboTax was giving bad advice in some cases.

Whatever tools people use to file their taxes, Denison advises Oregonians to compare their latest return with the prior year’s. If there are fewer deductions, or a considerably higher or lower tax refund, she said that could indicate something has gone wrong.

Finding issues by making comparisons with past years might be more difficult this year, Denison said, because Oregon is paying out a record kicker tax rebate. Many people are already getting bigger refunds than they expected, even though there isn’t anything wrong with their returns.

In Bradford’s case, he said it made sense to itemize his state return because of medical expenses eligible for state tax deductions. He found that TurboTax’s issue with Oregon returns cropped up in March in the software provider’s own community forums when other people ran into the same error.

However, Bradford said he was frustrated that he couldn’t alert the company directly so it could fix the problem faster.

“It just seems weird to me that you have a software company that doesn’t have a very clear way,” he said. “I want to report the bug and be a good citizen.”