We're not talking about "netting wins and losses" as in taking all the wins and all the losses from the year and netting them to come up with a single number for gambling winnings.
What we're talking about is the safe harbor method that the IRS proposed a few years back (Internal Revenue Bulletin: 2015-12; Notice 2015-21), which referenced the case of Shollenberger v. Commissioner (2009; also other cases), in which the IRS recommends subtracting your wagers from your payouts PER SESSION (one calendar day at one venue on one type of game) to determine whether you have a gain or a loss FOR THAT SESSION, and then reporting gains on Form 1040 and losses on Schedule A.
I'm getting REALLY sick and tired of the contradictory answers I've been getting about this topic and the general lack of familiarity with this method among the "Tax Experts" working for TurboTax. It has been causing me a lot of trouble and caused me to miss the filing deadline for lack of reliable information, despite my paying a few hundred dollars for the "expert" support.
Here, we finally got an answer from one of the ones who knows about this (MaryK1), and it needed just a little bit of extra clarification, but instead we got another "expert" jumping in and contradicting her, and confounding everyone's attempts to make sense of this.
NOT HELPFUL.
You guys need to brush up on the latest information about this topic, specifically the IRS bulletin I mentioned and its proposed safe harbor method.
Lots of people gamble, and TurboTax needs to crack down on the confusion about how to report it properly. They need to research this more and put a definitive answer in their literature, and make sure that their "experts" know all about how it works.
