The secret to dealing with disasters with new tax software is keeping the prior year's product available. That has been the approach of Thomson Reuters which appears to have been unscathed by the kinds of tax software problems experienced this year by CCH's ATX, TRx, and TaxWorks, all of which had severe issues with their rewritten 2012 products. And that does not include Intuit, whose products had to be fixed in Minnesota, or H&R Block which had issues with health credits.

In a season that has had more than its share of problems with tax software, many problems have been fixed. For example, the state of Minnesota now says that its residents to use Intuit tax applications to prepare and file their taxes. And for TaxWorks, whose rewrite of its application for the 2012 tax year had been extremely troubled, the worst appears to be behind it.

Intuit says it is gaining share at the expense of retail stores as the company reported returns for the tax season from January 30 through March 16. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said for the period, sales of TurboTax Online Units were up 29 percent over the prior year with total TurboTax federal units up 26 percent for the period.