Depreciation method switching from 5yr-200DB Federal to 7yr-150DB for California??

[pidgeotto101]

Hi tax experts,

I am running a farm business and I am depreciating a quad-bike / ATV. When I select Farm Machinery / Equipment (E2), Turbotax selects 200DB over 5.0 years for Federal. Sure, that's fine.

What's SUPER weird is that when I go to my California state return, the depreciation method changes completely. The ATV is depreciated over 7 years using 150DB. This seems like really odd behavior from Turbotax, especially since I thought 7 year properties should default to 200DB. Two questions here:

1. Should I really have 200DB in Federal and 150DB for California - is this expected?
2. Should I depreciate my ATV over 5 years in Federal and over 7 years in California - is this even valid?

[pidgeotto101]

Asking this in context of filing advice, not necessarily trying to claim I found a bug in Turbotax. I should be able to use forms mode to get everything to match, but just checking: would ya'll depreciate with 200DB, 5-yr on Federal and then switch to 150DB 7-yr on California as Turbotax suggests? Or would it be safe to switch everything to 200DB 7-yr for both Federal and CA?

[AnnetteB6]

It would take a significant amount of research to justify and show you why there is a difference between the Federal depreciation and the California depreciation of the same asset.  However, it is known that there are a number of instances where the two depreciation systems do not match.  Often, the Federal laws would change, but California did not conform to the change.  

The best advice for you would be to leave the depreciation on both returns the way that TurboTax has calculated it.  There is most likely a good reason for doing it this way.