I believe TurboTax is wrong in how it calculates the value for Item 2 (Maximum Value of All Deposit Accounts) in Part I of Form 8938 Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets.
The IRS instructions for this item state to "Report the total maximum value of these deposit accounts." This would seem to mean "what's the most money one had in all foreign deposit accounts, combined, at any point during the year."
TurboTax calculates this answer by adding the maximum values of the individual Part V accounts. But this is not necessarily correct.
Let's say I have two accounts, A and B. Assume neither draws interest, the exchange rate is fixed, and I make no withdrawals or additions other than the transfer I note here.At the start of the tax year, account A has $500,000 and account B has $5,000. Mid-year I transfer funds so that account A now has $5,000 and account B has $500,000. Individually I list the maximum on each account as $500,000, because that's what each had at one point in time. TurboTax then calculates the Part I Item 2 value as $1,000,000. But in fact the maximum I had at any point, across all accounts, was only $505,000 - this is the value that should go into Part I Item 2. I've tried over-riding this figure, but TurboTax doesn't like this. This has been an issue for me several years in a row.
