Thanks for the tip. I've looked at the Form 4797 and can confirm two issues:
(1) It's populating the section for property held 1 year or less. That just seems like a flat out error since the software quite clearly confirms the date acquired (which it inherits from the date put in service) and the date of sale which was entered. These are obviously many years apart. It doesn't ask me to confirm how long the property has been held, and should be figuring that out from the other inputs. There's nothing else I can do in the GUI to influence this.
(2) It's not populating the depreciation recapture or the cost. In the actual form, the field is "cost or other basis, plus improvements and expense of sale". On the user screens, it has the cost in one place (populated correctly on-screen), accumulated depreciation (also correctly populated) and the sales expense in another place (under the asset sales price). I infer it should be adding these things together, but it's only pulling in the sales expense.
Once I fudge the sales expense to include the cost, then the high tax amount calculated looks broadly in line with what I would expect if it were indeed a short term capital gain. The GUI nonetheless still tells me there is no gain or loss.
I appreciate it's difficult to investigate an issue without thorough documentation or a proper walk through of what I'm doing. (I've worked in support too.) FWIW, I'm not doing much. I tried to keep the return as empty as possible to mock up the sale without any other income. However, I did import from my prior return so it could pull in my basic info and the depreciation history. I deleted all other prior income sources before plugging the sale data in. It's always possible some unanticipated crumb of data somewhere is tripping up the code.
At this stage, I was really just looking for feedback from the user community if others had also hit the same issue right off the bat, and had any existing support experiences, workarounds, tickets etc to share.
