There are two places where you can decline deferral of se tax in the software:
To delete or edit the election to defer your self-employment taxes, do the following in TurboTax:
- Open your return
- If you open to the "Hi, let's keep working on your taxes!" screen, click Pick up where you left off.
- Click Federal in the left pane
- Click Deductions and Credits in the banner at the top
- On the Your Tax Breaks page, scroll down until you come to Tax relief related to Covid-19
- Click Revisit next to Self-employment tax deferral
- When you're asked Do you want more time to pay self-employment taxes?, answer No
Self-employed taxpayers are allowed to pay 50% of Social Security tax on net earnings from self-employment for the period March 27, 2020 through December 31, 2020.
Another method:
If you go to Tax Tools, then to Tools and then to Federal Review at the top right of the screen, it should open up "Some of your self-employment taxes may be eligible for deferral".
At this point, you can select skip unless you previously selected Continue and entered information in. If so, you will have to continue instead of skip at that point to remove that information.
When you get to the question, "Tell us how much you'd like to defer", you need to enter 0. If you leave it blank, the software defaults to the full amount to be deferred. If you want $0 deferred, you must enter 0 in that box. Then, it will reset to 0 se tax being deferred.
The opportunity to defer se tax on a return was put in place by the CARES ACT, along with the option of employers deferral of depositing the employer portion of payroll taxes until later.
