I live in Washington State. There is a state sales tax rate of 6.5% and each locality has an additional rate on top of the state wide rate. When I used the irs tax calculator it averaged a number of local zip codes and gave me an average local rate of 2.6753. So for the total tax rate in Turbo tax I used 9.1753. This works fine and dandy for the basic sales tax calculation, however, I am also doing a major remodel and have purchased a bunch of building supplies for which I had to pay sales tax. When I add those items in turbotax it asks for the total cost including tax, the sales tax and the sales tax rate. the tax rate on any one of those purchases varied because it depended on which locality in which I purchased the materials. When I hit done, the program comes back with a response that says you cannot include these items because the tax rate is not the same as your base tax rate.
I know the IRS instructions say only include items where the tax rate for the purchase was the same as the general sales tax rate. This does not seem rational to me since the tax rate on any major purchase will never match the general tax rate since I used an average rate. I also tried putting in a specific rate for the general rate that matched the tax rate where I made the purchase and it still calculated a different amount of tax than the one I paid and said they did not match so I could not include that item.
I cannot help but think that I am either not entering the data correctly or I am not understanding how this works.
