I resolved my issue and am reporting the solution here. There does appear to be a bug in Turbotax but there is an easy solution, at least in my case.
I will begin by explaining my problem more fully than in my original post. I am preparing a tax return for a Trust that received dividend income that was partly Section 199A dividends. 20 percent of Section 199A dividends should be deducted from income, subject to some limitations. In my case, the trust distributed a portion of income to a beneficiary, which requires that a portion of the Section 199A dividends be passed to the beneficiary and the reminder contribute to the Trust’s QBI deduction.
My problem was that Turbotax behaved as if the Trust had no Section 199A dividends, so the QBI deduction line of form 1041 was empty, my list of forms did not include a QBI worksheet or a form 8995, and Turbotax cheerfully reported that I had no QBI deduction when I clicked on “QBI deduction” under the Other tab in Step by Step. But Turbotax did generate a "Qualified Business Income Pass-through Entity Reporting Statement A" that correctly showed the portion of 199A dividends that the beneficiary received.
I spent over an hour sharing my computer screen with Turbotax support and they could not figure out the problem. The support person did show me how to open a form 8995 and include it my forms list so I could make manual entries. I was led to believe I could do that, but today I discovered that while I could manually make entries in form 8995 and the 1041, Turbotax acted as if my Form 8995 did not exist when tried to print forms. I inferred that a form 8995 would not be sent to the IRS if I e-filed despite being in my list of forms, and that would of course cause problems.
I was about to give up and do my taxes manually when I got the idea to search for and open the form: “QBI deduction summary: Qualified Business Income Deduction Summary" using the same procedure Turbotax support showed for opening the Form 8995. When I opened that form, it appeared in my list of forms correctly filled out, and form 8995 appeared, also correctly filled out.
I will also note that it appears that it is at least sometimes not possible to reverse selections made in Turbotax. Once I figured out what I wanted to do, I started over, which required that I re-enter a lot of data. I’ve resolved in the future to always save the data file after all the raw information in entered and before any selections are made, and keep it as a new starting point if I should ever need it.
This is my first year with Turbotax. It has not impressed me. Unfortunately continuing to do paper returns is now not tenable as the risk of IRS errors processing my paper returns causing me huge headaches has become too great.
