Deleted deductions

I accidentally deleted deduction information from 2018  ... thinking I did not need it for 2019 since I planned to take std deduction rather than itemize. However, I discover I must itemize for state return. Now I must recover the 2018 details I have deleted. Is there anyway I can repopulate those fields without then painful exercise of rekeying all that demographic information again?  (Of course I realize I must provide the variable dollar amounts that apply for 2019, but it would be nice to avoid reentering all the descriptive info for about 25 organizations such as my church and other medical/charitable groups.

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MinhT1
Employee Tax Expert

Deductions & credits

Unfortunately, if you have deleted the entries, there is no way to repopulate the form.

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Deductions & credits

You should provide some guidance/warning to TurboTax users concerning using the std deduction for federal and defaulting to the same for state w/o checking into matters at their state. For example, the std deduction for a married couple filing jointly (fedl)  is $24,400 + $1300 each (27,000); and in the State of Alabama, the std deduction for a married couple filing jointly is $4,000. 

So if that couple had $20,000 in deductible expenses, and chose to take std deduction on federal return by simply skipping all the deductions and leaving them blank .... by default, they will be adding an additional $16,000 taxable income to their state return ($20,000 - $4,000).

In other words. although in this example TT accurately credits $27,000 as the standard deduction on the federal return ... one might be expecting it to do the same on the state return but it is limited to the respective state revenue law.

BOTTOM LINE: I STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU CAUTION FOLKS TO BEWARE BEFORE THEY DELETE THE DEMOGRAPHIC DETAILS ABOUT THEIR CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS AND OTHER DEDUCTIBLE ITEMS!!

This is serious! 

 

VictoriaD75
Employee Tax Expert

Deductions & credits

State itemized deductions do not correspond directly with Federal. For example, having $30,000 in Federal itemized deductions does not mean you will have the same for your state. You need to refer to specific state laws for additional information.

 

You should enter all deductions in the TurboTax software, even if you are not going to itemized on your Federal return. TurboTax will calculate the standard versus itemized deductions for each return, Federal versus state, and apply the best outcome for the taxpayer.

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