My wife and I are married filing separately. She is itemizing, so I must also. Each of us, working on separate returns, eventually came to a screen on the Federal section that said "Your itemized deductions of $xxxx are less than the standard deduction of zero dollars." Of course the standard deduction is $12,000, not zero. This matters because for both of us the itemized deductions turned out to be less than $12,000, so we probably will switch to both taking that. But why does Turbotax give us that crazy message?
