@aboutreadytoleave wrote:
Does anyone know if intuit fixed this issue for the 2021 filing? I haven't purchased my tax software yet (I cancelled the auto-purchase option last year). I'm thinking about trying a competitor if this isn't fixed.
I'm repeating a post I made on this thread in April last year, but it is worth repeating.
You almost certainly do not need to download brokerage accounts into TurboTax and if you don't need to you don't want too.
This is because the TurboTax download insists on downloading all your brokerage transactions then adding them to your tax return. In my 2020 tax return I ended up with 17 extra pages of tax return as a result of this.. This is on a tax return with 41 pages which includes a Schedule C and the sale of a rental property. The extra, spurious, pages are form 8949 for transactions which were then summed on line 1b and 8b of Schedule D instead of 1a and 8a; see the "Note:" at the start of parts 1 and 2 of 8949.
Yeah, maybe you don't want to enter the figures yourself because you might make a typo, but then having to install the work-round for the no-paste-the-password problem, i.e. autohotkey and trying to remember how to use it again (since we only use it once a year) is a lot more work than just getting someone else to double check the number entries, or doing it yourself several times.
What is more, what happens if you get a modified 1099-B? This is normal with Schwab and TD Ameritrade. Well, you need to send in a modified tax return and you have to mail that. So you have to find the modified line in the original 8949, correct it, then work out exactly which sheets of paper to print out and return, plus how to explain that. If you didn't send those unnecessary forms in in the first place all you have to do is take just one line off the corrected 1099-B (the total at the end) and enter that in just one place.
Someone complained last year about wash sales, but Schwab seems to get wash sales right (see my previous answer, search for "toenails".) How does TurboTax help with wash sales? Well, not a lot I think - Schwab has already corrected the basis, but if you did a wash by selling in one account and buying within 31 days in another IRC you have to do all that work yourself; manually correcting individual lines on 8949 because so far as I know TurboTax does not identify wash sales between accounts (does it even identify them within an account?) If you want a wash sale to transfer shares between accounts without a tax consequence (which you can only do anyway if you hold losers) you are going to have to do some work yourself.
