Something extremely strange happened in TT Online. I'm a web developer so I'm pretty sure I'm seeing this right.
- In May I used TT online to file my 2019 taxes. I have the PDF output from that.
- In real life, my business accountant noticed in the PDF that my return for 2019 showed $0 mortgage interest deduction on Schedule A.
- I logged into TurboTax and found the Amend return action for 2019.
- Somehow (a glitch I think) I found myself back inside the main UI, as if I hadn't filed my 2019 taxes yet. I thought this was odd at the time, as the word "amend" didn't appear anywhere.
- But it was helpful, actually, because the user interface was familiar. I pretty quickly found that I had entered my 1098 mortgage interest info, but I had mistakenly said the loan was unsecured. Thus the interest was calculated as not deductible. (I have major issues with TT not pointing out the inconsistency of this answer compared to prior years!! But that's not the point of this story.)
- I changed the answer to "Yes, it's secured by property" and clicked Continue.
- As expected, the refund/owe tracker in the upper left changed in my favor by a lot for both federal and state – just like it would have if I had entered it correctly back in April.
- At this point I had no idea what to do – I was deep in the middle of the full tax-prep process – so I clicked out of deductions ("wrap up deductions" or similar) and clicked ahead in the navigation to "Review Federal."
- (At this point I'm not sure exactly what happened. It definitely showed a summary screen, bragging about all the checks it was going to do to ensure my best refund. I'm not sure I clicked anything else.)
- Suddenly, disorientingly, I found myself back where I started – the main entry point for viewing returns, amending returns, etc.
So I started the amend process over again, but this time it did what it's supposed to do. EXCEPT...
It now has as a "starting point" the "fixed" return that I changed above. So the owe/refund tracker at the top of the screen indicates that I've already gotten the mortgage interest deduction that I came in to get.
- Glitch #1: As I enter the amendment flow, it says that it's going to zero out the owe/refund tracker at the top of the screen. It zeroes out the federal, but the state number jacks up to
- I attempt to tell TT that I'm here to change my form 1098. But It already has the "Yes, secured" answer so it's not a change. It just congratulates me that I got the deduction.
The happy ending... after writing this whole thing, I went back and tried several more times and it magically started working. I saw the federal refund number I was expecting, with $0 for state. It the took me to state, where the right number populated easily.
My theory: I have absolutely no explanation for how I got into my original 2019 return in the first place. But the amendment flow could have "fixed itself" if there is a batch process that runs every 15 or 30 mins (not in real time) that fixes inconsistent data and the like.
