The reason your refund looks bigger on TT is because they haven't included the income from your hardship withdrawal yet. They are completely ignoring the fact that last year you elected to spread your tax burden over 3 years.. Once they have the form available then you will input the 1/3 portion of your hardship withdrawal and your refund will go down by whatever the tax you owe on that 1/3 amount. I knew right away after completing everything else in TT that I wasn't going to get a $12k refund. So I went to the FreeTax version and input all my info (manually because they don't link with W2 or 1099 providers unfortunately). My refund then made more sense. I even removed the withdrawal amount from FreeTax just to check, and the refund went up to the exact amount TT was showing, which is wrong! That's part of what frustrated me about TT. It didn't give any indication that I needed to wait to file until they had the 8915F, they would have let me proceed with submitting an inaccurate return and risk having to pay penalties and pay back the refund later on. At first I just assumed they pulled all the hardship withdrawal info from 2020 and I was ready to file, but the refund was too large so I poked around and figured the form was missing.
