@JoeDeveloper Well---Congress says that it is a credit and they wrote and passed the law. Some people received the 3rd EIP payment in 2021 because Congress wanted those checks to go out in a hurry. So they use information from previous tax returns and hustled those checks out starting in mid-March of 2021. You should have received letter 6475 showing how much was sent to you. If the tax return they used to send the money was a joint return then they divided up the amount sent and put half the amount on letters to each spouse---each spouse received a letter with half the amount for himself/herself and half the amount that was issued for the dependents.
What you may not have realized is that when you started to prepare your 2021 return, the software "gave" you the credit again because TT does not automatically know if you received that money last year. So the "refund monitor" showed you a big refund. Later when you entered letter 6475 the software had to reconcile that big refund with the amount you already received. You were not taxed on the stimulus. It was not taken away from you. You just cannot get it twice.
The software handles the child tax credit in the same way. It starts out showing you the full CTC, but when you enter the advance payments received between July and December, the amount you can get is reconciled with the half you already received.
So.....if you owe tax it is for some other reason.. ..like not having enough withheld from your paychecks.
**Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to offer the most correct information possible. The poster disclaims any legal responsibility for the accuracy of the information that is contained in this post.**
