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Level 2
February 3, 2020
Question

Turbotax Business: Estates form 1041 and two form K1 generation bugs

  • February 3, 2020
  • 7 replies
  • 48 views

In 2019, I used TurboTax Business 2018 to begin the process of winding down my deceased parent's estate.  In 2020, I purchased TurboTax Business 2019 to complete the process.  The TT 2019 installation transferred information from the TT 2018 filing, and correctly recognized it as a decedent's Estate.  But it failed to generate form K-1 for the beneficiaries.  There were no K-1s in the final report for filing, and when I clicked the button to generate K-1s, it declined to do so and told me that I needed to provide the names of shareholders (or something like that).  It clearly seems to be confused because form 1041 is used for both partnerships and Estates, the former has shareholders, the latter has beneficiaries.  I had provided the names (and other details) of the beneficiaries.

 

This is potentially a big deal, because there are a lot of people like myself who rely on TT to help us sort out unfamiliar tax situations.  An executor is responsible to provide K-1s to beneficiaries, and anyone who fails to do that could be fined.  TT doesn't even give an error message, so anyone acting as executor won't necessarily know that the program is not doing something that its supposed to do.

 

I ran the process a second time, declining to transfer from the 2018 return and opting to manually enter that information on my own.  Then it generated the K-1s, but it left out important information, which apparently is the subject of yet another TT K-1 bug, described here: https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/business-taxes/discussion/estate-1041-k-1-box-11c/01/641846#M25333

 

Hey Intuit: you need to fix this, or people will start talking about how they missed out on a huge tax break because their executor used TurboTax to generate their K1 forms.

7 replies

Level 15
February 3, 2020

@javaengineer wrote:

It clearly seems to be confused because form 1041 is used for both partnerships and Estates, the former has shareholders, the latter has beneficiaries.


I will report this (again) but, as an aside, Form 1041 is used by trusts and estates, not partnerships (which generally report on Form 1065).

 

However, there appears to be an issue with some transferred 1065 returns dropping partners from 2018 to 2019 so it begs the question as to whether the programming glitch (or other error) is related to transferred 1041s as well.

Level 2
February 4, 2020

Thank you for indicating that someone will at least be told about this problem.

LindaB1993
Level 7
February 4, 2020

Please update TurboTax Business to insure accurate reporting of the Form 1041.  

In the case of a death, the executor must file a Tax Return for Estates and Trusts (Form 1041) for a domestic estate that has:

  • Gross income of $600 or more for the tax year, or
  • A beneficiary who is a non-resident alien

 

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