Critical Diagnostics: Underpayment Penalty Interest Rates Missing

Technology can't do everything, and there are many things it can't do in the accounting profession.  I had said in my last post that the accounting profession was often lagging behind in technology because we are just never the creative and the forward looking type.  Sometimes, I wonder if it's because our training and our profession require us to look back so much that we are over time losing the ability to look forward.  This is why our software just never quite work efficiently or effectively as it is supposed to.  This has to do with the people who took part in designing it and testing it (we the accountants).

I had started using Intuit Tax Online since I started my own practice.  My main practice area is litigation and forensic work. But I do taxes in between my litigation projects.  Yes, I can do taxes, and I am very good at it because I had worked all over the map of public accounting in various firms. I had excelled in quite a number of tax seasons.  I love doing taxes.  The Big 4 once told me I had to specialize and I wasn't supposed to do more than auditing a specific industry.  This is why  I didn't like to work for the Big 4, they love to pigeon-hole people and it's just too limiting and boring! Why can't a CPA love more than one thing?  After all, we didn't go to school to study only taxes or to study only auditing.  We didn't take the exam on just one subject area either.  

Anyway, with my small volume of tax returns that I am currently doing for passion and leisure, I feel that Intuit Tax Online can be the perfect software for me.  But like all software I have been using, there are limitations and inefficiencies.  One of them is the critical diagnostics that pops up to tell you that the interest rates for underpayment penalty for your state is missing, yet, it doesn't tell you how to resolve it.  I can't believe at this day and age,  a tax software still can't come up with a more helpful and problem solving diagnostics mechanism.  

This is not a big deal if you are a veteran tax accountant like I once was, it took me a couple minutes to fix it and make the diagnostic go away.  Because I am used to dealing with all kinds of inefficient tax software, I knew right away I just had to go to the right input screen to input the state interest rates "manually".  

Click on the image to enlarge.

I'm a fast typist but I still hate doing mindless data entry like this. Can any software developer explain to me why the interest rates can't be automatically provided and updated by the software?  For those of you CPAs who need to input the rates for your California returns, you can click here for the rate table.