Those tax preparation programs vs my calculator

Our Canada Revenue Agency has an approved list of providers of the software we can use to file our tax returns over the Internet, and some seem to work better than others. I've tried three different ones, and I'm not terribly impressed by any of them.

A couple are freebies entirely or if your total income is below a certain amount, and others cost between sixteen and twenty dollars to deliver your completed tax return to the Revenue Agency. An envelope and a stamp are still a lot cheaper.

We're being encouraged this year to file electronically, and Revenue Canada tells us that two-thirds of us are already doing that. Maybe so, but the electronic system seems to me to be a lot more convenient for the folks at Revenue than it is for me. The blurbs about it say we can do our taxes in as little as ten minutes, but that hasn't been my experience at all. By the time you get all your information ready, and learn how to use the program, you've already spent a lot more than ten minutes on it. And then it starts asking you questions, and you have to put the answers into it. It says it does all the work for you, and the problem there is that I immediately start wondering if it really has done this or that or the other, and got a correct result. I think I'm better off doing my taxes the way I've always done them - with my trusty calculator and the government's forms on the table, where I can read the instructions, and fill in the blanks, and not wonder if something was missed.