TurboTax Amendment Showing Incorrect Tax Due Before Changes — Why?
Dear all,
I’m looking for help understanding an issue while amending my 2025 tax return in TurboTax.
My original return shows a $3,978 refund.
However, I realized I forgot to include a 1099-B for stock sales (long-term), totaling about $3,000 in capital gains. Based on this, I would still expect to receive a reduced refund after amending — not owe taxes.
Here are the exact steps I followed:
- How do I amend my return? → Start an amendment
- Why are you amending? → Adding or updating a tax form → My form isn’t listed
- TurboTax states: “We’re going to change the refund monitor to $0 to show the difference between your original and amended return.”
- I land on “Here’s the info for your amended federal return”
- I go to:
Wages & Income → Stocks, Cryptocurrency, Mutual Funds, Bonds → Edit
At this point, before I even add anything:
- The top-left numbers suddenly change to:
Federal due: $1,370
CA due: $540
This is very confusing because:
- I haven’t added my missing 1099-B yet
- I expected the refund monitor to show $0 initially (as TurboTax explained)
- Instead, it immediately shows that I owe money, and I don’t understand how these numbers are calculated
I then proceeded to enter my 1099-B (~$3k capital gain), and at the end TurboTax still shows that I owe these amounts, which doesn’t seem correct given my original refund.
I’ve been stuck on this for a while and can’t figure out what’s happening.
This is a link to a quick screen recording of the process I followed for clarity.
Questions:
- Why does TurboTax show a tax due immediately when starting an amendment?
- What do these “Federal due” and “CA due” numbers represent at that stage?
- Are these real amounts owed, or just interim calculations?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.