There are competing factors in my tax return. R&D tax credit limited by AMT within Form 3800. TurboTax used the Standard Deduction since it a larger number then the Itemized Deduction. When I forced the program to use the smaller Itemized Deduction, the total tax went down with the change in the AMT and increased R&D tax credit. With a variation of Itemized Deductions, , there is a minimum tax with the right value of Itemized Deductions. Since one cannot arbitrarily inflate Itemized Deductions, the obvious answer is to use a smaller Standard Deduction by override to achieve the minimum tax. So the question is will the IRS complain about using a number smaller than the Standard Decoction?
