State tax filing

@Reebs

I have checked with the State of Minnesota Department of Revenue, and the issue is murky.

On the one hand, generally the State has to explicitly enable conformance with changes in federal tax law, and while there are a number of bills currently in the legislature, none of them have passed yet (for example, the legislation to enable $10,200 of unemployment to be nontaxable to match the federal law has not passed yet).

On the other hand, as you say, the MN M1SA instructions clearly state that you should go to IRS Pub 526 for the rules on what's deductible (and how much), and the 100% language is now in Pub 526.

Throw into the mix that MANY of the changes in 2020 in Congress are to adjustments to federal AGI. MN M1NC which reports on conformity (or lack thereof) with federal law states baldly: "Minnesota has not adopted the federal law changes enacted after December 31, 2018, that affect feder..."

But on the third hand(?), charitable contributions are part of Itemized Deductions, which are generally after adjusted gross income and before taxable income. So the fact that enabling legislation enabling conformance has not passed yet is perhaps irrelevant to the charitable contribution limit issue.

The upshot was that the DOR representative said, "follow the [state] instructions".

At those point, it is highly unlikely that TurboTax will change the Minnesota software in time for you to file, so since you have the Deluxe desktop software, if you want to go ahead and use the 100% limit in Minnesota, you can override it on form M1SA, line 18, by doing a right-mouse click on that numeric field and entering the value that you want (it was $180,000 in the test I was able to open, but I am not sure that reflects the returns I was unable to open). I was able to make this override and it flowed through to the M1.

Just document what you did and why, in case Minnesota ever writes you a letter about this.