Tax Year Prior to 2020: Lost My Return

[xmasbaby0]

@DannyDiNardo No one can call you from this user forum.   We do not have access to any of your information.   This is a public web site that can be seen by anyone, so your personal information is protected.   If you want to talk to customer support for help you have to initiate that support request:

To call TurboTax customer support

https://ttlc.intuit.com/questions/1899263-what-is-the-turbotax-phone-number

Customer support is available from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time Monday-Friday.

[DannyDiNardo]

Same reply that everybody else gets when asking for the Customer Support telephone number.  Another link that sends me to more links.  Nowhere is there a telephone number indicated, as far as I can tell.

[DannyDiNardo]

Sorry, the links do not provide any support for the problem of the Intuit software DELETING user TAX DATA.

Nor is there a telephone number to contact to get real answers.

This public forum should be informed as to how well Intuit supports their TurboTax product.  Even if I can't get support or advice here for the software issue, at least I am being counted among the other (hundreds, thousands?) users who have experienced the same.

As of today, it appears that I will need to re-add all of my 2020 tax return data in order to file and Amendment precipitated by inaccuracies in the TurboTax software.

[DoninGA]

@DannyDiNardo 

When using the TurboTax support website when support is OPEN you will get a toll free phone number and a Support Incident number - https://support.turbotax.intuit.com/contact/

As shown in these screenshot examples -

[DannyDiNardo]

Thank you DoninGA.  That is helpful.

I will defer further TT engagement until I can contact somebody at Intuit.

[DannyDiNardo]

The TurboTax software had me pay $1040 between the IRS and CA Franchise Tax Board.  I wrote the checks, trusting in the software.

I just finished the manual calculations. When I subtract the 401(k) HSA contributions that were supposed to be deferred for the purposes of calculating federal taxable income, I see that I should have been receiving a total refund of $870 between IRS and FTB.  That's a big discrepancy, worth $1910 net to my family's budget.

I could have paid a tax attorney $1000 to file my returns and still come out ahead of where TurboTax put me.

[VolvoGirl]

Were you an employee and got a W2?  You don't enter 401K contributions.   401K (But not ROTH 401K) come out of your checks pretax and have already been deducted from the wages in box 1 and you can't deduct it again.  See box 1 should be less than boxes 3&5.

You only enter it from your W2 box 12.  

[DannyDiNardo]

I apologize if I misstated the case, or confused 401(k) with HSA.

I meant to say that my HSA contributions which are supposed to be deferred were instead included in my taxable income.  I know the HSA data was entered correctly.  The software even spit out the proper 8889 form.  And it forwarded that amount ON TOP OF of the miscalculated federal taxable income to calculate my state taxable income.

[Johnnyboy00]

Has anyone actually resolved the issue of missing tax data? I am missing return data for back to 2017 and loath to have to recreate all of those returns.

[NoCouth]

    This may help for future years (for those who download TT or install from CDs... by the way, I'll only ever buy the CD from now on, since Amaz*n has started removing the download links just months after purchasing newest TT version!! <angry face>). 

     I never save my .tax20XX files in the "default" /TurboTax directory - I only save the downloaded TT exe files there.  Instead, I create an entirely new directory in Documents simply called TAXES and within that, I create a directory for each tax year.  That's where I save my TT .tax20xx files, and all other data, including PDFs of TT Help files (found by right-clicking on virtually any box on the FORMS section & clicking on the "about ____" option).  

    Another thing I've noticed:  When working on a tax file, and you click "save," it saves it to your computer with a tilde (i.e., ~) in front.  If you then click File Exit, TT asks you if you want to save your file.  DO IT.  I used to not save it at that question, thinking "I JUST did this," but alas, I believe now that TT saves the file withOUT the tilde when you answer that question with a "Yes."  It also doesn't seem to remove the tilde files, which is a GOOD THING.  Those files act as a backup to your saved file.

[Ies]

I don't think the data is lost.  It was moved somewhere by the update.