Is this the place to report it? If so, I'll try again. IRS publication 915 states that U.S. citizens who reside in Canada, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Romania and the UK are exempt from U.S. taxation on their Social Security benefits. The Turbo Tax instructions for people in this situation are to simply not report their benefits on line 6a of Form 1040. This is NOT what the IRS instructs us to do in publication 915. It says to report the benefits on line 6a and put a zero into line 6b. But the only way to do this in TurboTax is to override line 6b, which means I can't e-file. Or I could follow TurboTax's instructions and risk getting flagged by the IRS for not reporting my benefits. Furthermore, if people in this situation follow TurboTax's instructions and fail to report their benefits, there is the potential for that to affect their foreign tax credit calculations on Form 1116. This could all be solved with one interview question asking whether the customer is in this situation, and zeroing out line 6b if they are. Thank you for listening. I'd really like to see this fixed, because it's going to force me to mail in my return this year, or find some other software that handles my taxes correctly.
