"The company is currently unable to provide adequate support for its enormous customer base," asserted the Class Action Reporter of Princeton, N.J.

Intuit did not respond to a SmartPros request for comment.

The newsletter noted that tens of thousands of small businesses in the United States depend upon QuickBooks to process payroll and compute the related federal and state taxes, generally on a weekly or biweekly basis. Intuit has been withdrawing support of older versions of QuickBooks forcing customers to purchase and utilize the company's new payroll systems, the newsletter said.

"Under the most favorable assumptions," said the newsletter, "Intuit is unable to provide customer support for prompt migration to the new payroll system, threatening the small business user's viability. More serious fundamental flaws in the new products might, of course, be the cause of the difficulties."

The new payroll system was "forced on some customers within the last few weeks," said the newsletter. It requires the user to go online to process payroll.

QuickBooks now requires regular downloaded updates from Intuit and will not process payroll without a connection.

Error messages upon connection indicate a phone number to call for Product Support. As of July 5, the recording said the company was too busy to deal with the call and then disconnected the caller. On July 6, the message gave a fix for some other error and a Web site address for further information. Messages left at the Web site were not answered. On July 10, another help line, different from the one recommended, advised the caller that the wait for service is "more than 60 minutes."

-- SmartPros News Staff

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